The First Days of June

Golfing Crows and Squint Gets Lost

Cheating the Crows

In January we collected nine rescue hens to join our three remaining birds. It should have been ten, but the guy at the collection point mis-counted, and insisted in a mansplainy kind of way that he was right and I was wrong. When we got them home, we realised that my count had been right.  Am I surprised?

They lay beautiful eggs - of which at the moment we have rather too many. We need to store some and sell some. Usually there are seven or eight eggs a day. Sometimes one of the two old purebred girls lay one.

Lately though, there have been fewer, and we have found shells as far away as the pony field.

This is a sure sign that crows are getting into the coop. They steal the eggs and drop them from height to eat the contents. At one time, we used to find a lot of golf balls. We are a mile or two across the hill from a golf club, and we were at a loss to figure out who was hitting them that far! The crows were stealing them, and dropping them on our field to break them! They were disappointed, and I wonder, since we don’t find them now, if they learned their lesson and can now distinguish a golf ball from an egg?

So now, I do attempt to collect the eggs early if possible, and cheat the crows out of lunch.

Losing Squint

One of the nine birds we collected turned out to have only one eye. All sorts of things happen to them in commercial flocks. I don’t know how long she’d been without her eye, but we called her Squint. I always love an underdog, and feel like it’s a special job to look after one of God’s less perfect progeny. I really do love Squint.

She is quite often left out, as she doesn’t spot the others going in, and I generally pick her up, give her a cuddle, and reunite her with her sisters.

One day last week when I went to shut them up, a good few of them were outside the electric net. I picked up three of the others, and then realised that Faf the cockerel was also out. Happily he relocated the hole and put himself back in, since I think catching him in ten acres might be beyond me! I put the feeder into the coop and took a head count. Twice. One missing, and the missing one was Squint.

I looked everywhere, but the grass is long, and Squint’s problem is that she tends not to turn round. She just keeps going.

I was getting really worried about her, when Neil located her, chilling in a patch of very long grass, as ever, not understanding the problem.

Squint (that’s her good side) with Faf

Water Bucket

The pony’s water comes from a great blue barrel beside her shelter, which fills with rain from the roof.

We were barely a week into being able to walk in her field on the actual surface, rather than knee-deep in horribly sticky mud, by the beginning of June. It was still a bit of a battle, the bucket has to be hefted shoulder height and dipped full.

That day was a long day. When I lifted the bucket clear of the barrel, the handle flew out from its mooring. By some miracle, I did not get soaked, but it was close.

Look Up!

On Tuesday, defeated by the weather app, I gave in after quite a short stay at the field. I really do need to work on making the caravan a good place to work, so that squally showers don’t send me packing.

On arriving despondently back at the barn, I found a letter attached rather precariously with a single inch of Sellotape to the wet gate. It informed me that in two days time, the school was to entertain itself by landing a helicopter on the playing field! That is rather too close for comfort for my animals. We just about had time to formulate an escape plan for the shearling tups, who would basically be caught in the downdraft, but as for the others, I would just have to be there to monitor the situation.

Thursday came, and since the time had been vague, I decamped with my flask and sandwiches. As it turned out, no-one batted an eyelid. The goats, who were nearest, really couldn’t care less, and the pony looked positively bored, as the enormous, noisy contraption hovered over us on landing and again on take off. Animals really are sometimes the giddy limit.