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MARQUETTE -- Ben Stanley, the president-elect of the NMU student body, never expected the kind of notoriety he's achieved in the last few days.

The 23-year-old art and design major from Grand Rapids was jailed for a few days on contempt of court charges that all stemmed from letting his chickens run loose in his Marquette neighborhood late last year.

"Chickens-at-large" was the charge.

So what was he doing with chickens in the first place?

"My roommates and I were into growing local," explains Stanley. "We were getting eggs free for almost two years!"

He originally bought two chicks, thinking they would both become egg-laying hens. Wrong. One turned out to be a rooster. He then got two more hens. Wrong again. One was a rooster which you simply don't want in town. "I had to get rid of them because the roosters started crowing," he said. "It can get kind of noisy."

Still, he became attached to all of his livestock. The first two he named "Hen" and "Rooster" which he admits wasn't particularly creative. The second rooster was named "Pillowcase" because he was white and fluffy, and the second hen was "Mrs. Consuelos" because she had "kind of a spicy attitude."

At first Stanley kept the chickens in his bedroom, but that became a problem. "They were smelling up the room," he explained, "and my roommates started complaining, so we built them a coop outside and everything was fine. We were getting a dozen eggs a week."

Not only that, but most of the neighbors liked them. "The kids would come over and play with the chickens," Stanley said, "and one of the neighbors across the street fed them bird seed and everybody got along fine."

Until apparently, one of the chickens ventured a little too far beyond Stanley's house, and a complaint was registered and he was issued a fine for having nuisance chickens.

So what happened after that? Why the contempt of court citation?

"It was all my fault," Stanley explained. "I just forgot about court. I'm a forgetful individual. That's all I can say."

But now he's out of jail, he's paying his fines and everything's returning to normal. "But I miss my chickens," he laments. "They were a lot of fun."

The lesson in all this? "Pay your tickets," he says firmly. "Don't forget."