That’s ol’ Joel, always a hit with the ladies…

When it became clear that catching chickens that didn’t want to be caught was becoming a new part of my job description, I went out and got myself a fishing net.

At the time, it seemed the intelligent thing to do and I congratulated myself on my farsightedness. And in fairness to myself, on balance that net probably has saved me a lot of time and hassle. But do you know what happens when you walk into a chicken house armed with a fishing net?

It’s amazing. It’s like somewhere back in what we’ll laughingly go ahead and call a chicken’s brain, there’s this racial memory of a dreadful antediluvian enemy that attacked their dinosaur forebears using some net-based technique and did truly horrible things to them. I’m guessing aliens. Chickens that could never have possibly seen a fishing net in their entire uneventful lives come completely unglued at the sight of one.

So when I went to get my four Rhode Island Red pullets from Landlady’s chicken house this afternoon, I knew I had that in store. I was not wrong. They can be very difficult to catch when they put their bitsy minds to it. And they do.

So I finally stuffed the four birds into the carrier and drove them back to the lair (sharing the back of the Jeep with Little Bear, which probably really settled their minds on what was coming next.) Having already put Selma in the little portable coop so she could not become a part of this no matter how she tried…

I now proceeded to transfer the newbies to the main coop, closing it up so they can just spend the night there and hopefully chill a bit.

In the morning I’ll open it up and let them into the run, safely separated from Selma by stout hardware cloth. She can squawk at them, but she can’t chase them. Last time they found it easy to get between the fencing and the blocks when they were properly motivated, but this time she should find it more difficult to provide motivation and anyway now they’re three or four times the size they were before. Hopefully things will go more smoothly this time.