Abstract: When hanging from a conveyor line, cleaned eviscerated, whole poultry is stiff and in a "rigor mortis" type condition. This condition makes it very difficult to compress the stretched-out, stiff bird into a compact, plumb-appearing shape so that it can be readily placed into a bag for further packaging. Disclosed herein is a method and apparatus in which a cam actuated tray picks up the bird while it is hanging from shackles, and pushes the bird towards its legs so that the legs are forcibly flexed and the stiffened condition is overcome. Once this initial flexing takes place the legs can easily be repositioned either manually or on most automatic loading equipment.