After the first thunderstorm of the season (of the year!) the frogs in the marshy field sang their cold little three-chambered hearts out. The weather report issued flood and fire warnings both yesterday, but that was before the storm, when a week of hot weather brought up the grass and dried all of last year's fallen leaves. Today the mud sucks softly at my boots - which J's mom bought me for my birthday last year, and which I've already nearly busted, as they are designed to be very cute and not necessarily to muck an entire barn - and when I let the chickens out they get busily to work finding the earthworms that came up for air.

Before the storm yesterday, we built an egg-mobile for them and set up a few hundred feet of fence. (Couldn't find a good link - the egg-mobile is a portable coop so we can move them about and let them graze.) Then we herded them all into the smallest part of the coop and set to chicken-catching. Chicken-catching involves being faster than the chickens, who are surprisingly fast, and/or sneaking up on the chickens, who are prey animals and therefore pretty sensitive to being snuck up on. Alternately, and especially when you've got the whole flock to choose from, it involves wading into the middle of them, and grabbing. Best is if you can get both legs at once, but one'll do if you can get the other real quick. Once they're upside-down, they mostly go quiet. I can catch and hold about three at once; N. the garden manager can get four or five. They're heavier than you think.

Catching the mean rooster comes about by accident when he flies at your face and you just grab him - feet in one hand and neck in the other. Catching the other rooster is much easier than you expect because it turns out he's a scaredy-rooster and he runs and hides in a corner and is very easy to grab. (I tried to think of another word so that I wouldn't use "grab" three times in a row, but really that's the only word for it. And scroll down a bit to the video on that link up there to see the second rooster do his thing.)