Yesterday, Kali and I trekked across the hill to our neighbors' home to inspect their roosters. Coming from 99.958 % of the population of this country, the above sentence would certainly be attributed to AutoCorrect. Coming from me, there is no real surprise here.
The cockerels in question are the offspring of some of my own chickens...one of last summer's matings in the Shenandoah project. I hadn't seen these chickens since last July when they were eggs, I believe, or at least since they were very small. They are not small anymore. The pullets have just begun to lay green-tinted eggs and the cockerels are large, vigorous, strong, alert birds with good evasion instincts and quick reactions.
I know this because I had to catch them. In order to select a good breeder, there is no substitute for getting your hands on the bird. In this case, easier said than done! This is actually a good thing for this line of chickens, since I'm targeting them to an open-country free-range niche--these birds must be able to sense danger and avoid it. They sensed me as danger immediately and avoid me they did. The moment I began closing in on them they knew exactly what was going on and bolted for cover. Lacking cover, they chose the next best option which was to keep moving, bouncing off of every surface of their coop, including the full-height ceiling. Who'd have thought an eight pound cockerel could do that? When I did get my hands on any of them, they proved very strong and much slipperier than such an angular creature seems like it ought to be.
In the end, I was victorious, and went home happy with my new breeding male. He has white feet (a minus...I'd have preferred yellow or green) but his feather color is a nice assemblage of golds, reds and browns, he has a neat enough comb, a massive appearance with a high, black tail--the feathers edged in gold, and most impressively of all, his frame is deep and broad and long, with substantial meat on those rangy bones. He is perky and athletic; your average hawk is going to have to think twice before making an attempt at this guy!
Upon returning home I had planned to weigh him before releasing him into the coop with the hens I want to breed him to, but a few seconds after I had done so, I realized I'd forgotten that step. No matter, I thought, I'll just pop up to the shed for the scale, then come back and nab him again for weighing.
Did I mention this guy was fast, strong, and oddly slippery? Quicker than I could perceive the motions, he had eluded my grasp and squirted out the door beside my leg. The next thing I did was something I've never done before in my memory: I accidentally and spontaneously uttered the expletive that crassly describes what I would have had to dive onto if I had been quick enough in my reactions to have any chance at preventing this avian athlete's escape. I did this because I knew what was coming. I knew what the next half hour or so of my life was going to be like, because I've chased and caught many chickens, and none have put up more of a challenge than this guy had earlier, plus he didn't know me from a chimpanzee and was expressly not oriented to our farm as his home. That's three strikes, and I was, I knew, "out" of luck.
I looked up for a moment from my position on all fours on the manure-spangled turf and watched as my new prize rooster jogged briskly off across the yard. I took a breath, arose, and gave chase.
It surely would have been excellent entertainment to watch the out-of-shape pony-tail guy sprinting around his yard trying to corner the wily brown rooster...against the house, the garden fence, in a brush pile, I tried it all. I even tried opening the garage door and cleverly slipping the wireless door closer in my coat pocket so that I could chase him into the garage and then smugly stand there and push the magic button. No luck. This guy wouldn't let me within twenty feet of him, unless he was making a break for it, and he could sense when he was being cornered way before any chicken I've ever chased. I pursued him all the way around our house at least once, and I have no idea how many times we crisscrossed our six-acre homestead: through the garlic patch, across the potato and onion patch, around the garden a few times...it was beginning to feel hopeless; I thought I had perhaps met my match. One time I thought I had lost him when he disappeared into the autumn olive thicket. I walked out into the open, thinking I'd just have to wait and see what would happen when I saw him slinking (slinking!) over into our neighbor's yard. Did I mention this guy is smart? 'Ah,' I thought, 'but I am smarter!,' as I remembered that I own a fish landing net!
At first it seemed that it wouldn't help much, as he wouldn't let me close enough even for that. But I had a hunch that if I could chase him into the nook between the in-law quarters and our main house, perhaps he could be forced to take to the air to escape, in which situation his ability to change course quickly would be compromised and I might swipe the net over him and be done with this circus. To my delight, I managed to chase him into the perfect position; for once he didn't sense the trap from a distance of forty feet and dash for the gap with that ground-covering stride of his. I raised the net and slowly advanced. Suddenly he put the situation together and launched into the air, flying fast and aiming for escape through the ten-foot gap between my right shoulder and our side porch post. This was the moment of truth: all those hours of honing my eye-hand coordination and snap judgment at the ping-pong table were either going to pay off or not. In one languageless instant I lunged into the empty space. Almost in slow motion, and mostly in my peripheral vision, I saw the flapping rooster shooting through the air and the net rising to meet his trajectory perfectly; felt the pole jerk with the heft of the bird slamming into the nylon mesh bag; felt the first blush of relief begin to relax my sweat-beaded brow.
And then the net broke.
Onlookers would have observed a stunned pony-tail guy holding a useless aluminum net handle while a large, panting, befuddled rooster kicked his way out of a decapitated fish net and loped off down the hill.
For her part, Janelle joined this story by glancing out from the living room through the door glass just in time to see me lunge through the field of view, then disappear. Understandably, she came to the door to inquire as to what was going on. I think I said something intelligent like, "The net broke. I had him, but he got away. The rooster." This didn't help much. She didn't yet know about the rooster, you see, much less the net. Her best theory up to that point to explain the behavior she had observed through the window had been that I was, for some reason, taking the goats for some kind of walk. It's an interesting life, folks, that we live here at Tangly Woods. That it would have even occurred to her to think I might be lunging around behind the goats in the middle of a Friday afternoon is, I think, indicative.
Gratefully, I accepted her offer of help in rounding up the recalcitrant rooster. In the end, I think he just wore out before I did. Flying is, truthfully, a hard thing for a chicken to do. With Janelle blocking his escape route (fortunately he didn't realize that if he had run towards Janelle she probably would have turned on her heels and fled) I was able to pin him against the wire mesh of the garden fence, and it was over. I sat, slumped, on the ground by the fence while he and I both caught our breath for a few minutes. I knew I was ready to get up and move on with my day when I started laughing.
Before returning him safely to his coop, I did (you better believe it) weigh him. 7 pounds 12 ounces. At seven months old. He's going to be a big chicken, all right. I look forward to seeing and handling his offspring (if I can catch them) next winter.
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