Beekissed and Brian, wow!!! I had forgotten about the night crawler that I found during the day that day. The comments are great. Brian, your question answered, yes, I was stabbing the ground actually, trying to get out some plantain that was in the wrong place, it was a method that I was trying to see if it worked to loosen the roots. Absolutely, that is what made the nightcrawler surface, makes 100% good sense.
When I am making the borders around my sidewalks, (I like to keep the grass about 3 inches from the sidewalks so I can mow the grass clean to that point), there are hundreds and hundreds of regular worms that surface. I remember one evening last summer, just for the fun of it, I gathered every worm that surfaced there, I had an enormous amount after a couple of hours, it was probably about 1/4 of an ice cream pail. That is a whole lot of worms, and man does it look creepy!!!! This is a common occurrence with the worms and me around the sidewalks. They come bubbling out of the ground so quickly it makes my head swim, and some can squiggle away almost too fast to catch too!!!
Brian, I am going to try your method of the pitchfork in the ground actually, soon.....I will cause vibration on the tines of the fork and see what happens. That sounds pretty cool and would be a neat experiment, I will let you know what happens. We have had lots of rain lately, so the ground will be very soft and the worms not too deep.
When I was gathering the worms that evening last summer, a friend of my Son-in-Law was watching me, thinking I was nuts and proceeded to tell me that when his Father and him used to gather worms for fishing, they would put two rods into the earth and attach an extension cord to them and cause some kind of electrical charge. I am not sure of the method because I wasn't listening very closely, but that was the gist of it. He said the worms poured out of the ground. He said that you had to gather them really, really quickly, because as quickly as they came up, they would head back down. I know how quickly they can go back in the earth, let me tell you!!! Just try and grab one before it is completely out of the ground, it is like a whip, back down within a blink of the eye and there is no way on this good green earth that you can pull it out, it is like that are stuck in the earth like glue!!! Eeeks!!!! How can I ramble on so.....have a beautiful and wonderfullest day, Cindi
Beekissed, I know what you are talking about when watching the robins, they astound me too when they bleep their head to the side, put their beeks into the ground and pull up worms, enthralling and wonderful to watch, they amaze me. How they can gather so many in their mouths when needed is cool too!!! Have the most beautiful, greatest of days, Cindi