Chasing Chickens

I made it to Rosscarbery, Co. Cork, and I can tell you that I'm going to have a fun little time here. I got off the bus at the wrong stop (right town, though!) and, appropriately, popped into the local pub for a pint while I waited on my folks to come pick me up in the pouring rain. The bar was your typical scene: 5 people at the bar, 1 was a woman for some diversity, and the bar was named after the bartender, Paschal O'Brien. We started talking about card playing, and they named the game "31." I told them I knew that one. Then one fellow said that cards are played every night of the week here. He rattled 'em off: 31 on Monday, 25 on Tuesday, 21 on Wednesday, strip poker on Thursday...and then everyone laughed, and Pascal noted that I should pay no mind to that guy.

After I shared that story with the French WWOOFers that night, we decided we would play cards in our shared space. Thibeau said something about tours or towers, and I worried he was saying "tarot," but he ended up meaning card tricks (tour de cartes, whew!). So Camille and I spent about an hour trying to guess how he was performing each trick. We might have gotten one right, but I have to tell you the whole thing was quite amusing because we often couldn't understand one another at all.

One of our main tasks on the farm is collecting, cleaning, sorting, counting, and packing eggs. There are two daily collections, and Mary came around to help us with the second one of the day because she was on a schedule to deliver 25 dozen eggs to the supermarket in Clonakilty. Mary is one of the workers on the farm; she works part-time, Tuesday through Saturday from May to December. I like her already. As we approached the henhouse, we discovered more than 10 hens had gotten free from their fenced-in area. There's only one thing to do at that point. It was time to catch those birds.

I don't know if you've ever tried to catch chickens, but it's fairly difficult. Mary attempted to coach us through the process, but it was kind of a free-for-all chase. Camille stood there screaming for a bit, but she soon got used to the craziness. If you run at hens in a certain way, they sometimes mistake you for a rooster and then stop and squat. If that happens, it's easy to grab them and throw them back over the fence. Otherwise, they flap and run and squeeze into small spaces. I learned that through trial and error, if you can believe that. When I caught my first chicken, Mary affirmed me, "Well done! Well done! Nothing ruffles you, Emily. We need more of that attitude around here." Then four hens ran into a polytunnel where the family grows veggies, and those birds soon became the top priority. While chasing chickens, it is amazing how quickly "Here, here, lovey!" turns into "Come back here, you bloody b----!" That's when I knew Mary was a kindred spirit. We caught every last one of those hens. When we exited the tent, we saw that Camille had corned another four birds and was using an effective tail-catching method in her chase. It was all said and done in about 30 minutes. 

I'd now like to give a shout out to Heather's House at Aid for Women, where I used to work as a residential assistant. As part of a larger curriculum there, I watched a great video by Dr. Gary Smalley in which he says that shared exterior crisis bonds people together. And ba da bing ba da boom, chasing chickens bonds people together!

I don't have any photos of the chickens yet, so photos from my walk to the beach will have to do for now. Enjoy!