Chicken chase

An unusually warm sunny day down here. Mind you I'm not complaining but the sun's intensity was quite miserable against the side of my face while painting the outside patio wall. Soon it will be Summer when the horse-flies, gnats, and mosquitoes will come out to dine on many an irritated person, and the stifling heat will drive the heat hardiest inside to the shade and luxury of air conditioning. The swampy muggies around here get the best of anyone, and our Winter - a cacaphony mix of warm and cold, short and boring, is typically bipolar to the extreme. So while the heat had me sweating today, I was freezing just two days ago. The peas and beets my wife and lovingly planted weeks ago were ready to go in my stylized pots - leftover steel bathtubs that I painted yellow to match the house trim. Taking bags of top soil and mulch from piles that I had tended to since October I mixed the organic humus together in a large wheelbarrow.






Two large trellis were stuck in the back of the planters, and the peas planted in front of them, their future climb. The beets I stuck in front of these as I imagined them to be very decorative once everything fills out, a bonus to their practical value.

The ducks continue to grow each day, but I lost 4 two days ago from an accidental escape, as they ended up in the mauls of my dogs. Six left and I think I've worked out the kinks to their pen, and I always take the time to corral them into a secure coop for the night. Coons, possoms, and owls patrol as I write, the night a time for hunting. The chickens, still a small flock - 3 hens, 1 rooster, roam freely in the backyard on days that I or my wife are off. The beetles, crickets, warms, and doodle bugs probably run for cover when these perfect insect predators come pecking forth from their coop. The rooster, who I've come to call Bubba, crows most of the mornings as a cliche or when I come fussing with a hen or their eggs. He magnificiently looks out for the "girls."

One of the hens, who I named mrs. Trouble today, found an ingenious way to fly up and out of their pen by slipping through a small crack in the poultry wire that had come exposed when I slid the metal roof to the side for more protection from the rain. Additionally, she has been in the habit of roosting towards the early evening away from the "good crowd" who conviently go back into the pen for safety. She roosts deep in the heavy thickets that surround the pen and in the pre-Katrina woods. A cluster of small tree's, blackberry, and devil vine network in and out of the old wood, a nightmare for a big lumbering man animal like myself trying to corral her back to where she will be safe for the night.



Blackberry throns are not pleasant tearing across your arms and face. This is when every farmer must think to himself "chickens are stupid," but this isn't entirely true if you watch these magnificient farm animals. I find that they exhibited a strange earthy intelligence, a sense of awareness of life between death. There nightime coma is a mystery as is the rooster's crow. Mrs. Trouble had me stomping through the thicket around and around the pen trying to steer her to sanctuary, and after fifthteen minutes of madness, yelling, and unhitching my skin from thorns, I had her back in the pen. There they would stay for the next two days. Some bad weather was due to come in on Thursday, adding to the mud that was everywhere.