Did you ever hear the story . . .

of the lady and her chickens?

Once upon a time there were some box elder bugs . . .


Well, "some" isn't an accurate count . . .

Once upon a time there were A LOT of box elder bugs and they were everywhere. There were so many that they drove the lady kinda crazy . . .

She came up with a plan . . . that included a very innocent looking shop vac . . .



and a bunch of chickens.

You see, the bunch of chickens LOVE to eat the little bugs. It's like candy to them. Such a treat. Since the lady loves her chickens . . . she vacuums up as many bugs that she can find . . . and she spoils those chickens by feeding them the little nuisances . . . I mean bugs. It makes both of them very, very happy . . .

. . . well, happy until she carries the innocent looking shop vac filled with bugs into the chicken pen.

Here is where the story gets a little fuzzy.

The lady claims she just carried the vacuum into the pen . . . but the chickens tell a different story. They squawked and fussed at the sight of that shop vac entering the pen - it was terrifying - and so they went right over the fence . . .



I think I overheard one of those chickens claiming that the lady had the vacuum over her head and was going . . . blllttttllllblttttt . . . as she came into the pen.

I just don't know who to believe . . .

But now there's a problem . . . the chickens are on the wrong side of the fence . . . and the lady ain't too happy anymore . . .

She called in reinforcements . . .

Be vewy, vewy quiet . . . I'm hunting chickens . . .

armed herself with her professional chicken catching tools . . .


and went chicken hunting.

Oh, how I wish I had video . . . to watch 3 grown men (Buff and his dad were in on it too), a grown woman (armed with a laundry basket), and a 10 year old boy get outsmarted by a chicken . . . I bet it would have won me money on AFV.

Unfortunately, I was being shadowed by this guy who turned out to be terrified of cockleburrs. Talk about a chicken . . .



and so I missed a lot of pictures of the chicken running through the woods this way . . .

and this way . . . (I know it's the same way . . . but that's what made her so tricky to catch.)



but in the end . . .

The hunt was successful and everyone is back on the right side of the fence.




The moral of the story . . .

Don't count your chickens . . . before you feed them box elder bugs from a shop vac.