Ronnie Lopes’ passions don’t often merge.

The 59-year-old is a poultry lover, with 70 chickens in his back yard. He also loves entertaining a crowd.

“I sing and I play the drums,” he said. “And no, I don’t sing to my chickens.”

Everything came together for the Petcare owner when he hosted a poultry show in November.

“This was the Master’s Cup Poultry Show in Webster City, Iowa,” said Mr Lopes. “It’s the America’s Cup of poultry. Doctors, lawyers, high schoolteachers, veterinarians compete for a cash prize. These are not just some country bumpkins.”

His role was to keep the crowd informed about the chickens in the show ring, and also entertained.

It was his second time cheerleading the event. When the organisers contacted him to host in 2014 he was a little incredulous.

“They wanted someone who knew chickens, and they wanted a personality,” he said. “I said, ‘Bermuda is always hiring people to come here, and America is actually going to hire a Bermudian to go there?’ They said, ‘Yeah, we want you’. They sent me a plane ticket and paid for my hotel fare.”

He’d met two of the Master’s Cup judges two years earlier, when they were brought here to rank poultry at the Agricultural Exhibition. He’d just been named VIP Entertainer of the Year and he thinks that influenced their decision to hire him.

“I’ve loved chickens my whole life,” said Mr Lopes. “When I was a child I built a chicken coop in this narrow gap between my mom’s laundry room and a set of stairs. When she went to wash her clothes she heard all this crowing. She couldn’t figure out what it was.”

Many people kept a few chickens in the backyard for the eggs in those days, he said.

“There were no feral chickens in Bermuda. If there were any around, people would have eaten them.”

As a teenager his mentor was his Mount St Agnes carpentry teacher, Joe Hall.

“He just happened to be president of the Bermuda Poultry Fancier’s Society,” said Mr Lopes. “His son was in my class. One day we went to his house, and there were all these different breeds of chickens running around. I was like a kid in a candy store.”

When he graduated high school, Mr Hall gave him a trio of white leghorn bantams as a gift.

“He said it’s time I had real chickens,” said Mr Lopes. “Then I started showing them.”

He still raises and shows bantams today. His chickens have won several prizes over the years.

“Do I like to win? Yes. Is it a priority? No,” he said. “I get more excited that I’ve put two birds together and the young ones are really good. I am not ungrateful. I have won the trophies but what do you do with them after awhile? I would tell people don’t be discouraged if you lose. They are your pets. Enjoy them. They are part of your family.”

His chickens all come running when he goes out into his yard.

“They really do recognise you,” he said. “They come around me looking for a treat. When a stranger comes into the yard, or a strange dog or cat, they hang back.”

He said the biggest challenge about raising chickens was doing it in Bermuda’s tight quarters.

“Where are you going to keep them so you aren’t bothering the neighbours?” said Mr Lopes. “Where I live there is woods behind my house with many feral chickens through there. They take the rap for any of mine. But I have the little bantams and they don’t make much noise anyway.”

In 1996, he worked on a project to introduce poultry raising to inmates.

“The government trainee vet, Susann Smith thought of it,” he said. “She asked me to help.

“We went around trapping feral chickens and took them to the Prison Farm. Then we got together a team of people and sorted the good chickens from the bad.”

He was amazed to find exhibition poultry mixed up with the chickens they’d collected.

“Someone had probably shown them in the exhibition or poultry show and then just let them loose, because they didn’t win,” he said.

Some of the chickens they collected were used for cooking classes at Bermuda College, others were made into fertiliser. The inmates raised the remainder. The programme was so successful some of the prisoners won prizes at the Agricultural Exhibition, and there was a steady supply of fresh eggs for Bermuda’s prisons.

Despite that, the project was cancelled after a few years.

“I understand the trophies are still in the visitor reception room at the Prison Farm,” said Mr Lopes.

He’s now considering becoming a poultry judge, himself.

“I didn’t have time before because I was raising children and paying for a house,” said Mr Lopes. “Now my kids are grown, I have the time. But it would require going to shows overseas at least five times a year to gain the necessary experience.”

In the meantime he’s showing his poultry.

He plans to enter about ten of his birds in the Bermuda Poultry Society’s show next month.

“Poultry keeping is just a natural thing,” he said. “The benefits are very therapeutic. After a hard day at work you can just go home and look at them for a couple of minutes and feed them. They give you a little egg to eat and you’re happy.”