Chicken Catching and Pulgas de Andy

Starting at the first of this week, Andy started getting mysterious bites all over his body. As many of us have been attacked by some biting insect, we didn´t really think too much about this. On the second or third day that the bites started showing up, we started to take more notice. The disturbing part about the bites was that they usually started showing up shortly after we woke up--which tended to make us suspect something was biting Andy while he slept. The bizarre part is that I had received none of these bites. Now a highly discussed and laughed about topic in the house is how a couple of us sleep in sleeping sacks or sleeping bags in our beds. I am rather paranoid about protecting myself from some super germs that might have somehow managed to crawl from the mattress and through the sheet and then manage to come into contact with my skin. I know, it is a little extreme and germaphobic, but when Andy showed up with bites in the morning and I wasn´t, he wasn´t laughing at me anymore. In order to really begin to tell when Andy was receiving the bites, we began circling them in marker, so that we could tell the old bites from the new.

The pink circles were day 1 bites, and the orange circles were day 2 bites.

As you can tell, they were biting him mainly on the feet and around his stomach and back. Despite the incessant teasing I had taken for my sleeping sack, that night I returned to the bed and Andy had stripped the bed except the sheet underneath and was sleeping in his sleeping bag. The next day though, no new bites in the morning. He then changed into his work clothes and boots, and within 15 minutes, new bites on his feet and mid-section. The culprit had to be his clothes. He changed and sure enough, no new bites. It seems that somewhere on the farm, Andy had picked up fleas in his clothes (it remains a mystery where he recieved the bites because it literally could be from anywhere on the farm: cows, chickens, dogs, dirt, etc.). We let the clothes sit in the sun for a few days and washed them. Andy is now, happily, flea free.

Another interesting event happened this week, Andy and Michael (a fellow volunteer on the farm) decided to catch, kill and cook a chicken for dinner. We were told we could do this and given four roosters on the farm that would be suitable. I went along strictly to document the process. The men were brave and fearless and chased, at one time or another, each of the four roosters through the chicken coop and into trees, up fences and into small buildings, and a mere forty minutes later they had caught themselves a rooster.

Picture One, the men had just started and they are relying on nothing but their hands to get the roosters. In Picture Two, you can see that Andy feels the needs for some chicken catching tools: a stick and a piece of yellow plastic siding.

The chickens got smart very quickly to what Andy and Michael were trying to do and begin to fly into the trees above their heads and even taking to climbing on the new fence the men had built that very day to keep them in. The chickens stood on the top of the fence and threatened to go AWOL unless the men stopped the chasing shananigans. Finally one jumped from the fence and escaped, and this would lead to its eventual downfall. The men eventually went outside the coop and were able to catch the chicken.

Andy and Michael each killed a chicken, plucked, cleaned and cooked it. A very educational experience.