So I have these bad chickens…..

I had all the poultry closed up in a pen with ridiculously high sides. They have food,  water, and i bring them a bucket of scraps and things out of the garden every day.

But it wasn’t enough.

Three of the hens grew their wing feathers back recently and “flew the coop” so to speak,  and were out doing horrible, horrible, horrible things like scratching up my garden, pooping all over the milking area, attacking my stored sweet potatoes, and raking all the mulch away from my roses and fruit trees.

I love the idea of free-range poultry, but it’s just so hard to keep them from ravaging the countryside.

The three of them would circle around the chicken pen in the morning, and scavange the rye and oats i just sowed in the pasture right before the last rain. So annoying!

One is a speckled brown hen,  one is a black hen with white earlobes, and one is from the batch of Easter Eggers I had gotten a few years ago, and she has a little bob haircut that makes her look like a smug secretary,  or one of those office ladies that enjoys denying people things.

One morning my helper Andrew and I chased the black one for half an hour until she took shelter in a pile of logs and hunkered down where we couldn’t reach her. I tried setting up an empty dog kennel with a dish of chicken food right in their usual path,  but they were repelled by it and immediately stopped going that way in the mornings.

I finally bribed Clo with ice cream if she could catch them. Right away she got a dog kennel out, and set it up to prop the door open with a stick and baited it with corn and cat food (these chickens *adore* cat food. I’m always chasing them off of it).

In literally seconds, the chickens were circling it!

This child is a genius at catching chickens!

At one point the trap even caught one of the cats. (We let him out right away)

Before five minutes had passed, one was caught and its feathers clipped.  Clo temporarily renamed the remaining two Black Barta and Shauna Haircut. The next morning Black Barta was apprehended following a long morning scratch in my garden!

Shauna Haircut is still out smugly damaging things, but we are resetting the trap this morning. Wish us luck!