I've been offline for a while but that doesn't mean I haven't been busy! I was busy one day this week and my dad had to feed my birds that evening. He thought he closed the door on my largest group (27 two year olds) but apparently not. It has one of those hook latch things that's supposed to lock when you close the door but it either bounced back out or he didn't close it hard enough in the first place. Needless to say it blew open and out went all 27, we had a break out before but not this bad this was a nightmare. By the time he realized I was in school, by the time school was over he had herded 10 in and several were wondering around. We made a funnel with chain link fence panels and herded in several more but one he flew into a tree, one on top of the tall coop and a few were no where to be seen. The next morning my dad bagged the one of the roof but the other had flown off. My dad felt horrible because it was his fault and he drove around giving out his card to everyone in the neighbor hood which turned out to be a life saver. By the time I came to feed the birds after school three more males had just shown up (the of the ones I got from John on byc here) and a neighbor called about the last missing male from John who we herded back. But by our count we were still missing a male and the hen who had been in the tree. I thought they must have gone far but again I was wrong, someone called my dad that they had seen them about 1/4 mile away through the woods by a local pond. My dad went over but the person had scared them trying to take pictures and they had ran somewhere into the woods. So when I got out of school we scoured the area for them and found them in a bramble by the pond. We edged them out and decided to heard them all the way back instead of risking them flying into the trees. We got them out walking down the street but suddenly they separated the hen flew onto a house a few hundred feet from the coop and the male continued on in the right direction. I went to watch the hen while my dad followed the male. Suddenly she flew of and started sprinting down a hedge row. I chased her and she got confused in a bush I grabbed her out of impulse and covered her head. One down! As I was walking back toward the coop the male came ripping down the same hedge with my dad in tow. Unfortunately he didn't get confused a flew all the way back the to woods (almost 1000 feet) and proceeded to run in a huge circle all the way back to where we first saw them... You can imagine out frustration. Anyway to make a long story short we caught him after another hour of running around the woods. We managed to catch everyone by some miracle. These guys test me at times!
