Hey! Those are MY Legs!

2 Calendars from the OSB Facebook groups. Pork on the left and
whole pigs on the right. 

As well as the Village Calendar, which I have already described in this blog, we get involved in a number of others. For the Village one, Liz is the main 'mover and shaker' and my contribution is in the photography and sometimes, collecting the box of printed ones from the printers (DS Signs of Ballaghaderreen, in that case).

Those are my whole legs on the left, being cured for the 'Parma'
style hams and bottom left on the right hand calendar is me
serving this year's pair their Guinness for their 6 month 'Birthday'.
Both these pics have appeared in this blog.

2 others come out of the Facebook groups for the breed of pig we have kept for the last 2 years, being 'Oxford Sandy and Black' or OSB for short. One group is for the pig keepers and breeders, so tends to go in for proud pics of people's lovely healthy pigs or cute piglets. The other is for the meat-production and charcuterie side so attracts the butchers, sausage makers, bakers and chefs. A lot of people are in both groups though I guess there are those who like their pigs as pets and friends and draw a veil over the original purpose of keeping OSBs. I have no problem with that. Each to their own.

All quiet in the Autumn sunshine. Pig Paddock.

I am in both groups and enjoy posting nice pics of our pig activities throughout the year and I was delighted when the lady in charge (Kim Brook) posted that she was assembling these calendars for 2018 and had liked some of my pics. She wanted clearance to use them which, of course, I gave.

Blue has been up on the chicken house roof. 

Both these calendars follow the same format, with not one big picture per month, but little montages of 5 or 6 images. They are very reasonably priced, so I bought one of each and, leafing through them I was delighted to find 3 of my pics, all of which have appeared already in this blog (and in my Facebook feed, of course).

Bobtail with three of her 4 ever-bigger chicks. We love the little
'Mini-Me' on the left, almost certainly a pure-bred Buff Orpington.

My pic of the pair of whole legs being cured for the 'Parma' style ham is there and the one of me crouched down with this year's pigs, serving them their Guinness at 6 months old. Both these are on their respective May page. Then on the December page for the 'meat' calendar is our old chum, Help-X Frenchman, Augustin. That neatly solves any problem we might have finding a small Christmas Present should we need one but shhhhhhh. Secret Santa! He may still be reading this.

This tiny rooster has avoided the cull by charming the Lady
of the House with his lovely iridescent green tail and red cape.
Green and red, so obviously he picked up the name 'Mayo'. 

Not much else going on as we cruise gently in towards Winter. I have already covered that the village drama group have settled on a play (Anyone Could Rob a Bank) which sounds like a real hoot of a hilarious farce. All parts have been cast and all other main jobs handed out. We'll say no more at this stage as I don't want to be stealing anyone's thunder or letting any theatrical cats out of bags.

Horse chestnut buds.

The cull of spare roosters has been parked up for now. We finished the biggest and most troublesome 6 and it has now gone very quiet and calm. The remaining young pretenders are keeping a wise low profile and not challenging our status quo or, indeed, trying to seduce any of the original ladies. If they keep that up, then they can stay for now. No more Death Warrants will be issued.

Always the last to go to bed. The ducks would hang about in the yard waiting for Mr Fox if we let them but they are happy to be shepherded home to the safety of the barn by about 5 pm. Everyone else is away and perched up long since. On that note I will also wish you readers good night too.

A Bunch of Weirdoes

Troughing but in a strange order. 

This season we seem to have accumulated, by chance, an odd bunch of weirdoes for livestock. Friends of the Blog will recall that I was mildly worried about the pigs' lack of enthusiasm for food. Well, they are hungry enough now and wake up and trot out to receive their breakfast or supper and they leave none in the bowl by the next meal but I am amazed by the order in which they take their 'courses'.

Pride sniffs a slice of galia melon

I give these snufflers mainly a commercial pig ration which is a grey/brown pellet looking a bit like the Layers' Pellets, poultry keepers would be familiar with. Worried that this looks just plain boring, I shake the ration up with a handful of flaked barley and throw in on top any cut up fruit I can get really cheap in the supermarket 'reduced' racks. It makes a nice varied meal for them while still giving them all the nutrients they need.

Empress checks out the breakfast potential.

All the pigs I have known or owned so far have taken one look and piled straight into the choicest items first, squabbling over the tomatoes and apple, and only eating the boring old ration when there was nothing else left. Not these two cherubs. They are first at the pig-nuts, shoving the lovely cooked new-potatoes and chunks of melons to the side of their bowl with their snouts the better to avoid accidentally biting the "dessert" course.

Kitchen progress. We pick out some floor tiles.

I have got bored and left by the time they must eat the fruit - it is certainly all gone by the time I return with the next meal but I have never seen more than a tentative exploratory chew on it. Never any enthusiastic schhhhlurrrping and dribbly, juice-leak, chewing like with previous piggies. Ah well, happy enough that they are eating and thriving, I guess. There is no rule that says pigs must eat melon.

These chooks have taken themselves off to 'bed' on this
perch 5 feet off the ground. The rabbit is on the bunny
'Maternity Unit' roof next to them.

Next up on weird-world, those rabbits. Having escaped their apiary pen they are now free range but if you expect them to run for it and end up eaten by Mr Fox somewhere 'out there' then worry not. These guys seem to naturally gravitate towards the house and yard and the out-buildings and prefer the grain thrown down for chickens to the 2.5 acres of good green natural grass and herbs (plus precious flowers and young trees!).

At 'bed time' for chickens as it gets dark, the chooks all take themselves off to their coops and their perching ladders in the out buildings. The rabbits go with them and one even climbs up somehow onto the former rabbit Maternity Unit roof, 4-5 feet off the ground so that he can "perch" alongside the chooks. They get locked in safe from the fox and are always sat just inside the doors when I go to let the birds out in the morning. They chase out to be first at the chicken feed and then go back to being grass-eaters once they've had their fill of breakfast. See? Weirdoes (or should that be "Weirdos"; I guess as it's only a made-up word I can do which ever plural I like).

Egg laid in the laundry pile.

Then there is the chicken who has taken to laying eggs in the 'waiting' laundry pile in the Utility Room. That room has a split door "stable door" style and in summer I generally leave it with the top half hooked open. One rainy day I was in and out of there and left the door fully open and returned to find all 5 of the new hens and their rooster (Herme) sheltering in there from the rain. Not wanting chicken poop on the 'dirty' clothes, I hooshed them out and shut the door and only later found an egg had been laid down in there on an old towel in the corner.

That scary looking Spanish goat cheese in the previous post
was nothing like as alarming inside and proved to be a lovely
strong flavoured crumbly-soft, pale cream coloured (slight pink
tinge) delight. "You know you've had cheese!" said our visitor

Well, it seems that the egg laying bird has now locked onto that site as a GOOD THING and goes back in each day to lay her daily egg even if I have the bottom half of the stable-door closed and she must have to fly up over that to get in. Determined lass, that. I will just have to be careful when sorting through my laundry for the machine - coloured, whites, delicates, woollens, eggs...oops!

The bugle from Charie Moss gets planted into the side of the
driveway. Pick-axe gardening. 

That's it for mad in this post. What else have we been up to? We have started into planting the various goodies from our trip to C Moss Perennials. This has meant getting the pick-axe out again; the bee-friendly plant, bugle (Ajuga reptans) is going in at the side of the drive to do ground-cover but needed a start-hole "drilled" into the compacted gravel there. That should get away nicely.

Waiting for planting. Pick axe at the ready.

This week we play host to the last in the current series of house guests, this one being our most excellent friend John, husband of the late Diane (Diamond, to this blog), who lives in our previous town, Faversham in Kent. If there are guests who are "difficult" and those who are less so, the John is definitely at the 'easy' and 'low maintenance' end of the spectrum.

Gifts from "home" - Micro-brewery beers and some Deep-South
Cajun flavourings from our old favourite world-deli and farm shop
 'Macknades Fine Foods' plus some new Kent gin flavours for Lizzie

Not only does he call to check whether there is anything from home we might be pining for (Gentleman's relish, Marmite etc), he arrives bearing gifts and there is nothing he likes better than a chance to help me in MY garden with the weeding, planting veg and other allotment-type work because he'd be away from his own plot for a whole week. He also loves a craft-beer and would regularly nip round for some of the 'take-away' (Tetra-pack 2 pint style) guest beers from local pub 'The Elephant' when ever we were round to Diane's for supper.

That gives me a chance to indulge here - Ireland is seeing a real flowering of the craft-beer, micro-brewery market and even the standard supermarkets like SuperValu stock a huge range with great long racks of display showing them all off. John and I headed for the SV in Balla-D and came out with 9 different beers to try (not all in one night!).

In the interest of research, you understand. 

I was intrigued to find that they even had a little promo-display for a new supplier, Sligo-based "Lough Gill Brewing Co" who seemed to be doing cans rather than bottles. A fun aspect of this trend is some of the funky funny names they dream up to make the beer more memorable and eye-catching; in the UK we are well used to the Hobgoblins, Old Speckled Hens and 'Waggle Dance'. One of Lough Gill's beers is called "Thieving Bastards" Pale Ale. How could you NOT pick one of those up? Blimey, we nearly have as many different beers in the house as Lizzie has types of gin! Sláinte!

Lazy Bones

One of the luxuries of being (pretty much) retired on account of being made redundant is that the working days are your own. Nobody chases you to clock/swipe in or makes you book holidays out of your measly allowance if you fancy a day off.  I do work round here occasionally, obviously, but I find I am an expert at winding down when a big job is completed and that 'momentous' occasion of a 'finish' comes round.

A gorgeous brawn from the pigs' heads. There were 3 such 'tubs'.
One is gone already and one in the freezer. This one made
 a handsome contribution to breakfast. Not all of it, obviously.

The latest such completion was the pigs - reared, taken on their final journey, brought home and butchered and variously frozen as joints, salted down as whole legs, cooked into dog treats (ears) or some 'scratchings' and even brawn (heads). Finally all tidied away out of sight. That was Tuesday and I have to confess to sitting down at that point and not really achieving much till this afternoon (fencing). Like I said - too good at winding down. Lazy bones.

Horse Chestnut. Needs a good frost to do
proper colour but it is trying.

It is one of the reasons why the veg garden is such a disgrace at the moment; the other being that I am also expert in what I believe the behaviour experts call "displacement activity", doing something else to avoid doing the job you should be doing. Office workers, faced with a big pile of jobs will reach, instead, for the "to do" list pad and spend ages compiling one, even adding jobs they have already completed so that they can enjoy the buzz of ticking one or two off.

Three of the ewes waiting for the ram to arrive next month.

In my case, this spring, every time I looked at the scary forest of docks, creeping buttercup, grasses and plantain which was winning in the veg patch, I then looked to my left at the huge pile of tree 'rounds' from our felled spruces and the hydraulic splitter I had borrowed. Needless to say, the logs got beautifully split and stacked and the weeds were left to grow even taller. There was building too and archery, pulling thistles in the East Field, brush-cutting in the woods or through the docks, the poly tunnel, mowing and so on. No end of ways to avoid that veg patch. When I did feel like weeding, there was always the big raised flower bed. I think that won because it is so much smaller and you could see progress and sense the end of the tunnel.

Big field mushrooms in the East Field

And so it went on; all the nice weeding weather of summer (well, there was SOME at least) came and went and still the veg patch is an embarrassment where I dare not take visitors. We even toyed with the idea at one stage of fencing it round stock-proof and letting the pigs or sheep at it.  But no, I cling to the idea that I will get stuck in one day, in my "little and often" mode (like my digging of the pond - 20 barrows (1 hour) a day across 5 months).

Soldier out for a stroll.

Some of we smallholders use volunteer labour - lads and lasses who sign up for a working 'holiday' through one of the green/organic/ecological organisations and will come and do yay amount of hours per day for you for the price of bed and board. We have a smaller scale version of that happening in spring when a friend from Kent who loves digging, weeding and veg gardening is coming here for a week. Some people whizz round in front of their 'cleaning lady' so she never sees how bad it was. I will be getting stuck into the weeding well before this guy arrives so that I can show him that I "made a start" and didn't wait round till May for him.

Nugget earns a free ranging winter by doing such a good
summer job in the bee hive dept.

Meanwhile, one worker who has definitely completed her assigned task is our one remaining rabbit, Nugget. She has done such a good job keeping the grass short around the bee hives that she has barely a leaf left and so she has earned a free ranging winter. She is very sensible and hangs around the house and buildings and must be good at avoiding Mr Fox (touch wood) because she survived last winter when she escaped by mistake and took ages to recapture. This (free ranging) is good because apart from a chunk of carrot I give her at breakfast just to keep her tame and give me a chance to check on her health (and presence) each day, I do not need to worry about feeding her or keeping her drinker topped up. She also might help with the weeding in the veg patch though I doubt it - she's never down there!

Extreme hedging

Over the last few days we have been "enjoying" the sight of someone else working hard - a local farmer brutalising his hedges with an impressive weapon. No flail-mower for him smashing the small branches in that so familiar way, leaving them shredded and a pale eye-sore. No this machine is a big and very fast-spinning circular saw on an arm that can pivot into every possible position. It slices through big ash trunks up to 5-6 inches thick with a loud "Ker-ANGGGG" and a roar of hard working diesel engine.

A 365 pic of, I think, a chunk of bog-oak but I don't really
know what species of tree it is. 

They use these things on hedges which have got away and grown up into tall rows of ash and sycamore. They slice up the sides to remove width and then buzz through all the tops sending big trunks and branches sliding and toppling down - OK if they fall into the field but requiring some rapid work with a grab to clear them off the road. In fairness these are mainly ash which coppices very well, so the hedges only look brutalised (all be it neat and boxy) round to spring time when they quickly bounce back in a healthy display of small leaves and shoots.

Nice colours from lichen and heather in Cloonargid Bog. 

The hedges don't need doing yearly when you do them this way but I can't help thinking they'd be better done little and often. Perhaps the lads have their own 'to do' lists and a rake of possible displacement activities.

Roamin' in the Gloamin'

Leisler's (lesser noctule) bat. All three of these bat pics
are blagged off the Internet - just Google the species and
click on 'images'.

The young Hubbard poults are now penned in an area out towards our Western boundary and they have a fox proof coop of their own out in their run. This move has resulted in me having to "teach" them to go to bed inside the coop (not under it, you numpties!) and, being youthful, adolescent stop-outs, this is only possible as deepest dusk descends. It is pointless trying to round up 12 chickens and steer them through a dark pop-hole to "safety" before they are good and ready.

Our ever-useful bat detector box. 

So every evening, at that time when it looks much darker outdoors through the windows of a lit room, than it really is if you went out there, I find myself playing "chicken" with Mr Fox. The Hubbards are away from the house and a bit exposed were our brush-tailed chum to come exploring so, as it starts to look dark outside, I soon crack and have to go check on them to see if they might oblige me by going to bed. This has, in turn, led to me spending a lot more time outdoors in the gloaming than has recently been the case and I have rediscovered my fascination for bats.

The local bogs are a blanket of colour -
here is purple loosestrife and meadowsweet
in Currasallagh bog.

In Kent we were very keen on bats and could sit outside on our terrace any summer evening as the sun went down with the bat detector box standing on the table between the glasses of wine. We'd be chatting away till we were inevitably interupted by the patter, squelch, tick and 'raspberry' noises of bats passing over the garden(s) hunting their midges and mozzies.

We had lost the habit here for several reasons. First, dusk is an hour and a half later here in the West of Ireland than it is on the Greenwich Meridian, so we were already starting to think about bed by the time the bats came out. Second, those midges and mozzies - sitting outside in the half light here is not necessarily pleasant or restful. There also seemed to be far fewer bats, so we had several fruitless sits in conditions which would always have 'caught' you a bat or 6 in Kent. Also, in my head the bats we saw all seemed to be Pipistrelles.

These two move in just down the lane

Pips are perfectly good bats and users of bat-boxes like ours know there are "now" 2 species emitting their chirrups and squelches at 2 different frequencies. Normal Pips emit at around 45 kHz, and the 'new' Soprano Pips do their thing at 55 kHz. Obviously both those frequencies are well outside human hearing-range, but the bat box is there to 'Doppler' it all down pro-rata into human-audible noise. Google 'bat detector box' for details - they are around €120

There I was, then, wandering around in the half light whispering sweet lullabyes to a load of unco-operative white chickens when I found mysef being buzzed by a much bigger bat, obviously too big to be a pipistrelle. My brain was raking around the usual suspects like "Greater Horseshoe Bat" (just because it has the word 'greater' in its name) and Dubenton's bat because it happened to be cruising up and down above our big pond. But I had no idea whether we had GHBs in Ireland (we don't) and I was not sure whether you could pin Daubenton's down to species by bat-box frequency (you can't - he is one of the annoying 'mid-range' bats who shout at the same frequency as lots of other bats).

We may get this good at cheese making some day. This
pretend 'Parmesan' is from Sue and Rob

Off to the internet then to consult my 'tame' experts, Kent Wildlife Trust and then blog-regular, our own Mrs Silverwood who has been on ID training courses as part of the Irish bat-survey. I had forgotten that. She suggested Leisler's bat (aka the 'Lesser Noctule') Nyctalus leisleri. This is the biggest Irish bat (I now know) but one with which I have never crossed paths. Now I have and I am sure from my recent research that my bat was a Leisler's. This guy is reasonably easy to 'detect' as he emits at 20-30 kHz with nothing below 20. Naturally, I have been out each night since and not seen 'him' again but, heh, why would you expect co-operative bats when you are trying to guide unco-operative chickens to bed?

Mr Fox is Back

Heaviest Hubbard 'roo' carcass this year - 2.873 kg.

Mr Fox has been around a few more times but has not had any more success hunting our birds and beasts (Touch Wood!). The first of these visits, a few nights back set off the big rabbit 'Goldie' in thumping the ground with her back feet to warn all the rest of the bunnies of danger. She probably did better than the hoped, as she was inside one of the run 'bedrooms', with a plywood floor a couple of inches above ground and a box shape with even a 'sound-hole' - the 'BOOM BOOM' was probably audible for miles! It certainly had all the dogs awake and therefore, pretty soon, ourselves, so we were up and shining torches through windows. The fox was in the middle of the lawn, close to the bunnies, but scarpered.

Funky new apiary gate.

The 2nd time we heard but did not see 'him'. He seemed to us to be working his way down the lane from up by Una's, down towards Bobby's place, and shouting that soft-ended yowly bark every few yards as he slowly made his way. In theory we know that a vixen will make a noise called 'the Vixen Scream', and this bark would be a dog fox but we have since explored the sound clips available on You Tube and apparently both sexes sometimes do both noises, as well as various other play, fight, warning and mating call shouts. We're going with 'dog fox' for now but it makes little odds, either way we wish he'd leave us alone. We hope he is only showing up repeatedly following his keet raid success, hoping we'll re-stock the run for him!

Plentiful greens. I am in a strange position having just
sprinted into shot!

If 2013 was 'Year of Beans' here, then this year is promising to be 'Year of Greens' and I am becoming a bit of a bore with my statements of "Look at this! This is definitely the best xxx I have ever grown!" The beans did so well last year - bumper harvests of French, runners and broads (as well as peas) that we are still working our way through the bags in the freezer, so I decided to grow no runners this year, instead I did runner "Borlotti" beans. These whiz up canes like normal runners but you leave the pods on the bines to ripen, the pods turning dry and papery and the beans drying to lovely patchy colour schemes of purple and white. You store them dry as you would lentils. But it is the greens which have taken me by surprise this year and I have huge forests of ball-head and pointed cabbage, red cabbage, purple sprouting broccoli, Brussels sprouts, black (Tuscan) kale, and calabrese. We are going to be very well off for greens this summer and autumn.

Honeycomb 'drawn' out on our new frames and starting
 to be filled with honey. The dark cells to the right are
 pollen stores.

Hard at work too are the bees. Bizarrely they still refuse to forage in our own garden, but they are off 'out there' somewhere gathering plenty of nectar and pollen and are expanding the colony well into our first 'super' (honey store box). We only do weekly inspections (mindful of the Two Marys insisting that we don't fuss them!) but each time we crack open the lid and peer in, a few more areas of the flat, embossed beeswax "foundation" have been drawn up into the hexagonal tubes everyone knows as "honeycomb".

The girls admiring their new, pristine
honeycomb tubes.

Some of the areas have tubes part filled with nectar. You may know that the bees have to convert this into honey before they cap the cells over with wax as stores. Nectar is quite wet, runny and liquid and contains mainly complex (disaccharide) sugars. The bees have to process it in their 'honey stomachs' using enzymes to 'invert' the sugars into simple sugars (glucose, fructose) and to get the water content down to below 20%, aiming for 17% to stop it fermenting. That is a fascinating subject on its own- the way bees will avoid upward pointing flowers after rain because the nectar will be diluted, and will follow the sun round hunting dried out flowers with more concentrated nectar; but it's probably not for here!

Leeks from 2013 in flower - a feeding
frenzy for bumble bees and wasps less
than 20 feet from the hive. Not a single
honey bee on them!

You may have noticed the picture of our lovely new blue and white wooden gate through to the apiary (= Ginny and Padfoot's run, too). It was a neat piece of recycling. Regular readers will know I built a pig ark recently and this involved cutting two 4 foot radius half-circles out of two 8 by 4 sheets of floor ply, leaving me with 4 off-cuts which seemed too good to throw away.... The gate needed to be roughly 4 foot by 4 foot.

Wasps doing the pollinating here.

Sunday saw us off to one of the local garden centres, Horkan's out towards Castlebar. Generally Ireland doesn't 'do' garden centres to the same degree as the UK, and those that do exist are like the most homogenous, commercial UK ones - just a limited range of varieties of plants that "are popular". There do not seem to be any specialist nurseries so we have to do anything a bit different by going on line, Future Forests for the trees, Johnstown (up near Dublin) for unusual plants, etc. We have started to get into growing things which 'do well round here' (lupins, crocosmia, aquilegia and so on)

A bizarre mobile - chunks of belly pork
salted and now drying in muslin bags
as bacon. 

This time though we were more in search of ideas than specific plants, so we found ourselves taken by things which had attracted a good few bees in the display racks (a nice blue Nepeta was covered in bumble bees) but also at our regular comb through the "sad and lonely" (discount) racks. We always feel sorry for the lost souls you find there, looking like they are near death and we like the challenge of getting them well again (plus the fact that they are one or two Euro!) Several of our now thriving huge plants arrived here in this sorry state, rescued from the Sad and Lonely racks.

Out-Foxed

Hubbard chicks at Day 21

Either our bushy tailed red 'friend' got wind of our evil intentions for him or he's way too cunning and wise to return to the same place the morning after when you might be waiting for him. He has failed to show on the last 2 mornings and the dogs have had neither scent nor sound of him and none of us have seen him. Nor did Mike the Cows who came to check on his cattle with a shot gun (broken) under his arm see anything.

All cleaned up, his fighting days done.
Our current alpha-male, Buffers.

Mike tells me that strolling around at 06:30 is no way to 'get' your fox anyway. You never see the chap, never mind get time to un-break, aim and fire. 'Round here' they would tend to go out as a gun club of a night 'lamping'; using powerful searchlights mounted on 4 x 4 trucks and shooting the yellow reflective pairs of eyes. It is unpopular though and many residents object to the engines and gun shot noise in the fields at night, so the more common method is to set snares (they say 'shnares' here). Mike happily explained this all to me, telling me where I could get good 'shnares' for 'a fiver' and how to set them in the little nip-through holes that Mr Fox uses in the hedgelines; preferably where there is a drop down so that the fox, having caught his neck in your wire, then hangs by his neck on your shnare over the drop with his feet unable to touch the ground. Nice.

Goldie's kittens are now exploring the grass. 

Well, I am sorry, but I am not about to start snaring (or even shnaring) any kind of animal. I do not mind despatching them in a quick and clean way, but the thought of a fox being slowly throttled from 8pm or so when I set the snare, to 6 am when I check them does not sit well with me. I suspect even Mike may be spinning me a yarn about how frequently they use these deadly methods. He has told me on another occasion that he bought his gun (which looks like a good one, though I've no idea really) 8-9 years ago for €2200 and has only fired it about 10 times in that period. Also that unless your cows with calves are well used to the gun noise (and he suggested that very few are) then they get really upset by the noisy intrusion. No over-loaded gibbet of corpses dripping fresh blood there then!

These later quince flowers only got a little wind-burned

So 'our' fox remains at large and seems to be staying away, at least during daylight hours. I did see him today, however, nipping across our lane at 4pm in front of my dog-walk, so we are not complacent and we are being very careful to lock everybody down as early as we can get away with it. We wonder whether he might be able to explain the disappearance of 'Blondie' but he's not coming forward to volunteer his testimony.

'Goz-1' on his hot water bottle before we rigged the heat lamp.

Meanwhile, I left you at the previous post (in a comment, anyway) with our first hatch of a gosling. This should be an exciting and happy time but sometimes these things do not go quite to plan. I had a dream of a little row of a dozen goslings following Mum to the pond for a sunny photo-shoot. Sadly we have only had the one so far (despite Black Feather and her original 12 eggs now being 8 days overdue; of which more in a later post) and that one has been ignored by the Mum and Aunt.

It floats!

We did not see them actually eject it from the nest, but they were definitely not helping it back in, so twice on its 2nd day we had to rescue it and try to return it (which got us soundly hissed at and pecked by the sitters, though they did 'allow' the baby back in to the nest edge but did not draw it back into their warm skirts). The third time it was shivering in a corner, so we rescued it and Liz had the idea of sneaking it under the broody Buff hen. That seemed to work.

Cuckoo Marans 'hin' strolls on the lawn.

We fancied we could see a new contented look come over her face as the unaccustomed warm wriggling form moved under her breast. I sat and watched for half an hour and then all seemed to be well; we left them to get to know one another. Half an hour later though, he was out on his ear again and this time Mrs Buff was not letting him back, and she tried to peck him. Well, now we were out of birdy options, so to cut a long story short he is in the brooder box under a heat lamp and we are trying to hand rear him. Thank you to Anne for the advice on this one - there is plenty to worry about.

Evening, 3 Westie romp in the orchard

If your 'chick crumb' feed is medicated for coccidiosis (many brands are) then it can be lethal to waterfowl. (Ours isn't, luckily). You need to worry about the baby 'imprinting' on you the human, thinking you are parent and then not being able to socialise properly with geese. We seem to have got away with that one - this baby spent the vital first day and a half in the goose house and met both females and George the gander. Today we showed him to George while safe inside his crate and the pair bonded gently through the bars - George seeming to be 'showing' Goz-1 how to pull and eat grass and chuntering at him, Goz-1 trying to touch beaks with 'Dad' through the wire. No-one tried to kill anyone else. It was a touching scene.

The old apple tree almost swamped by the beech and ash.

We are hoping that if more goslings hatch we might be able to sneak him back into the clutch. It can also help to suspend a mop head over the pen so he can sneak under and feel like he is being mothered. Ah well. He is drinking plenty of water and from today (his day 3) taking plenty of food from a tea spoon and from the ground, so there is more hope currently than there was when we rescued the little mite, his pathetic body wracked with spasms of shivering, while still wobbling in that half-co-ordinated way baby birds have who are still too young to have left the nest-bowl yet and should be just flopping around between the unhatched eggs, all warm under their Mum.

Hairpin bend in the apple tree trunk, the 'elbow' leaning
on the big ash. Bottom arrow shows main trunk. 

It's not all worry, mind. We have made a rather nice discovery. An old apple tree dating from TK Max's day, right down on our North border by a collapsed corrugated iron toilet-shed, is in bloom! This tree was first remembered by John Deere Bob is a gnarly old bent and ancient thing. Only about 8 feet 'tall' it actually has a main trunk perhaps 15 feet long but it grows from a bank almost horizontally till it leans an 'elbow' on a big ash tree and turns back droopily to get its branches and foliage almost back into our new pig-patch. This tree was so bent and broken looking that we assumed it was lost in the hedge, 'buried' under beech and ash growth and well over-topped by the black spruce. But today Liz found blossom on it, so we wonder whether it might bear fruit and, even if we can't rescue this tree, we might be able to take a scion and graft it onto a root-stock to save the DNA and the potentially old variety. Perhaps this old fellow has out-foxed its historic, neglectful human keepers?