As Clear as Gin

The big pond falls as clear and bright as gin.

At this time of year, our big pond falls as clear as gin. We guess it is too cold for the algae and there is none of the heavy rain which washes in as surface run-off through the grass and turns us all muddy.

Chivers on a fence post.

I am looking down into it several times a day at the moment, wondering when we will see the first frog spawn, but not really expecting any yet for the rather grim reason that I have not seen any road-kill frogs in the lane yet. I generally see those first as the frogs start to move about, well before I see any swirling in the night-time depths.

Ducks will quickly find any wet, low, puddly
bits in your grass and dibble them to a mush.

The water is clear enough too, to see that there are no invertebrates active and no newts have yet woken from hibernation. Hardly surprising when the pond is frozen most mornings, even if only with very thin ice. It can't be long now, at mid February.

Still keeping me waiting. No goose eggs yet.

Talking of mid February, I am still waiting for that first goose egg. In all previous years, at least one goose has started laying in November and we have had eggs all through winter from then.

Now bonded into a solid threesome. The turkeys.

This year, none, and when I asked various goose-keeper friends they were amazed at my November and said that they normally work to Valentine's Day, Feb 14th for their first egg. I sat back to wait patiently. Well, Valentine's Day is also now come and gone and we are still egg-less. As with so many livestock things, patience is the answer. Mother Nature delivers at her own pace. Same applies to my 'other' three ewes at the moment, none of whom are showing any keen-ness do drop their lambs into a snow drift. We can hardly blame them.

Who's a pretty boy then?

When the two new turkeys arrived, none of them wanted to know any other turkey. Worse than that, readers will know from my previous post that the two new, darker birds had been seen fighting for a short while and I assumed they might both be males. A week later, it has all gone quiet, the fighting is stopped and the three have bonded into a nice little group who wander around together at the foraging. The smaller dark bird no longer looks to me like a cock (Tom or Stag). He/she is on the right in my pic of 3 above and you can see that (her) face is way less developed than the middle bird.

A group of this week's Shedders gather around the 'mystery
guest'. On the right is my Syrian chess opponent.

I wrote of the 'Shed' in a recent post, and I don't want to be boring you on the subject, but I have to tell you about this week's meeting just because it was so much fun. In theory, nothing was planned - we were looking at a relaxing evening of chat, chess, draughts and popular local card game of "25" with which I am not familiar. I need to learn it's complicated rules but have not yet had a chance.

Tête a têtes starting to show their colour and nod their heads. 

In practice, the Chair slotted in a "Mystery Guest" at short notice to intrigue us and entertain us. That turned out to be a very well known local music and show-biz type who has in her life got involved in all manner of music and dancing. She currently plays side-drum in the local town 'Drum and Reed' marching band and teaches drumming, tin-whistling, trad (Irish) dance plus set dances and line dancing (Yeee hah!). She is one fit lady and kept all the lads gripped for over an hour with a whirlwind session of basic drumming (got quite noisy, that bit!), whistling and dancing.

Just for fun and the cuteness, these 10 piglets are new-born here
and belong to the sister-sow of "our Mum-pig". 

The Shed group has also attracted some of the Syrian lads currently housed in town in a bankrupted Hotel, as refugees in the Emergency Reception and Orientation Centre (EROC). These are really nice, friendly guys and their thing at the Shed, in the absence of much spoken English for the chatting, is chess.

I sat down with them this week with my coffee and watched the game for a while, but was then quickly invited to come play. I'd not played chess since I was a student - maybe 40 years ago but hey, in for a penny. I played the guy on the right in this picture who I think, is called Nazul (I will check). It was quickly apparent that he was a bit good and had me quickly nailed down into a defensive game and then killed within about 20 minutes, 3 times. One of his group told me that "In Syria, he is Number 1". He might have been joking but I could believe it. He only admitted to having been a "businessman" who played a lot of chess in evenings when he was travelling about.

Brilliant evening altogether. 

This Little Piggy...

The huge bulk of Iris alongside the five
tiny new-borns

Nice progress in the 2017 piggy project. I hear today from breeder, Adrian, that Iris has done her thing and given birth to 5 lovely plump piglets. Pigs are born tiny - about the size of a guinea pig and cannot be sexed just yet but they all look so cute and baby-ish that we don't mind. Obviously, no-one is relaxing just yet - they are also very vulnerable at this age to all manner of  harm and ailments but we are happy that they are now on the road to weaning and we wish them 8 weeks of drinking loads of Mum's milk, staying warm and safe and not getting into harm's way.

Only hours old here. 

As to sex, with only 5 in the litter we, and Sue and Rob would be lucky to come out with our preferred 2-females-each result but if we get boys this year then we'd be happy with that. Adrian gets all his non-breeder boars castrated anyway so no danger of any brother/sister shenanigans or of the elusive and frequently doubted but much feared boar-taint in the meat. Adrian has said we can come and visit in a couple of weeks when first time Mum Iris will have got over her stresses and the gang have started exploring beyond the birth nest. We will then, all being well, be able to collect our piglets at the end of April, 8 weeks old and weaned.

Some first primroses at our eastern boundary.

Progress too in the task of introducing young birds to their adult equivalent. We were going to do chicken-poults into the main 'grown up' coop at the same time as the young ducks met the 'parent birds' and all got herded in there together. It didn't go well and we relented on the poults for now, while the new 5-duck group has a few evenings to get into the routine. Once the ducks are cool and calm, we will call in the removal men for the poults. Then I can put 2 rabbit runs back into dry store.

The scarlet elf-cup fungi are much bigger than usual this year
- see biro for scale. I wonder if all the rain is responsible. 

Nothing else to report except an archery failure - we all made a complete Horlicks of organising our session on Sunday and failed spectacularly to shoot at all. I'd had a busy morning and after looking into the computer first thing and finding no notice of the meeting, I hadn't got back in. I was fully expecting the usual "Start at 13:45" post and made sure I was ready accordingly, racing through the jobs in order to be able to leave here at 13:30. I had to nip down for milk for a neighbour who is currently without transport, walk the dogs and scurry over to Sligo to collect an offered bucket of frog spawn (of which more later).

Doris's tree starts to fill the log store.  

Our roofer-guy turned up at that stage to replace the jackdaw pots but I left him to it while I snatched a lunchtime sandwich. At that point my mobile phone battery also died. Liz, meanwhile had generously knocked up a batch of fruit scones for the archers. If I'd wait around till 13:27 I could take them, still cooling, in a Tupperware box, along with butter and jam. I was just packing those and my bow and arrows into the car when another visitor showed up but he mainly wanted Liz, so I was free to shout a welcome in passing as I leapt into the car.

Much-travelled scones.

So when I arrived at The Hub, I was surprised to find the place choc-a-block with boxers and their cars, parents etc. All the Hub carparks were full and all the surrounding roads and neighbouring hard-standing too. There were track-suited boxing club logo'd lads everywhere, even practise sparring in the corridors, so that you had to creep by carefully and hope that they were fairly accurate with the flying fists. Obviously, there was some sort of tournament on. Our hall and bits were all locked up, dark and abandoned and there was not a single archer to be seen. I waited around for a while but in the end, decided that there must have been some kind of cancellation post on Facebook, which I had not seen and, phoneless, I could not call anyone to check. So I bailed and took my lovely scones back home.

We had seen enough mud trailed into
the house. All the dogs got their 'skirts'
leg 'feathering' shaved off and a good
bath. Poppea is Not Happy here. 

The story, I am told, went like this. There had, in fact been a post, telling us the start time of 2pm by which time the coach had turned up and one other guy arrived at 3 minutes past 2. But the owner of the Hub who was supposed to leave us the key had gone off with it in his pocket, hence all locked up and dark. The hapless archers who did show also had to admit defeat and they left at half past 2 promising to get it together more successfully next week. An all round dog's breakfast. At least I got the scones. I hope the boxers had a successful time beating the cr*p out of each other.

Our cheating, import Sligo frog spawn

The frog spawn? The best eco-advice is that all this business of bringing frog spawn home to your new pond to 'help' is BAD. You are meant to leave your new pond alone to go through a NATURAL succession, gradually building up an eco system by species of plant through what arrives naturally.

No sneaking off to your garden centre and buying water lilies and aquatics for that 'instant gratification' make-over effect. The reasons for this are partly about moving disease and undesirable (invasive) species about but more importantly about giving the slower natural colonisers their share of the cake. Their 15 minutes of fame. If you 'leapfrog' (ooops pun) over these simpler species and fast-forward to the bigger herbivores, carnivores and more complex plants the early-adopters never get a chance to do their thing.

We have had the pond now for 4 years and we have seen a few frogs come and go and even (last year) got a few small clumps of spawn laid in naturally, but all the taddies were eaten by the water-beetles, dragon fly nymphs and even chickens and we have never seen a population start to build. In theory we are happy to have our newts and we know that newts, too, will eat tadpoles, but it would still be nice to have a patch of thick vegetation where frogs would thrive. I was offered some spawn from Sligo where the water-filled tractor-rut in which the spawn had been laid, was being drained, so I reckon we were OK breaking the rules this time. We are 'rescuing' this spawn, re-homing it to keep it safe. Forgive us.  

The Five Freedoms....one too many?

Nugget likes a good dig - is she "expressing normal behaviour"?

The "Five Freedoms"; these are what high-welfare livestock management are supposed to be all about. My first small-holding 'bible', the Haynes "Smallholding Manual" by Liz Shankland phrases it quite well. "Being a responsible owner means granting your animals the Five Freedoms (she says) - a list of basic rights originally drawn up by the Farm Animal Welfare Council in the UK but now internationally accepted"

A Sussex Ponte goes broody hidden away behind the trailer
tail board. Normal behaviour?

The Five Freedoms are as follows:-

1. Freedom from hunger and thirst
2. Freedom from discomfort
3. Freedom from pain, injury and disease
4. Freedom to express normal behaviour
5. Freedom from fear and distress

Nobody would argue with any of them (well nobody I'd respect), they are all good, laudable aims and we should all work them as a bare minimum.

A Sussex and a 'Mini-buff' queue up to lay
an egg between the 'Royal Potti' chemical loo,
 the tools and an old galv bucket in the tool shed.

My header comment comes from the fact that in this 'mad house' it is the fourth which sometimes has me smiling. You know that old pub-bar sign "You don't have to be mad to work here, but it helps". My lot would have you cracking up with their "normal behaviour". Pigs, I am OK with. Like most animals they are actually social so you can only buy them now in pairs (at least) not singly and you let them romp around together, play together, bed down in a heap in the straw next to one another and so on. Rabbits too, are sociable in the wild, so you should not really have a hutch with just the one and we have tried to keep pairs, Ginny and Padfoot were in one corner, and the giants, Goldie and her daughter Nugget were kept as companions.

At last the purple sprouting broccoli is ready to start cropping.

Ask anyone what 'normal behaviour' is for rabbits and they would likely either go down the 'bawdy' route or mention digging burrows. Padfoot (now sadly no longer with us) started a lovely burrow within the run where the beehive is and we could see that it was not going to be an escape route under the wire (it was angled inwards) so we have let them carry on and they had a nice little bolt hole down there where they could escape the weather (and maybe the fox) and into which you often see Ginny dragging mouthfuls of the new hay which I bed down their hutch with. Every now and then she seems to dig a bit more soil out and produces a scree of fine soil crumbs at the entrance.

Eggs of all colours. Even the 8-9 year old Marans is back in lay
(bottom right) and her chum Min the Hin (Guinea Fowl) is adding
her contribution (bottom left).

Our younger giant rabbit, Nugget, is another digger but these ladies are in the move-able runs on the grass, so there is a risk of escapes. The urge to dig seems to take her whenever we move the run to near a tree or a fence post, as if it might be an urge to dig a burrow into between tree roots as in all the best Beatrix Potter stories. This actually suits us at the moment because she digs till her nose hits the post and then stops having failed to escape, and the bit of 'lawn' she is excavating is due to be turned soon into a garden bed, so we don't even mind the holes. 

Polly is due any day now. 

However, these two ladies are getting a new run this year, slotted in between our yard wall and the sheep fence. This piece of ground is very lumpy-bumpy having had some of the rubbish soil and grass from the yard hoyed over the wall into it by the mini digger when the yard was being cleared. It should provide an interesting environment for the bunnies and plenty of places for Nugget to harmlessly burrow. Plenty of grass to eat too. I will need to build them a 'bedroom' where they can go hide or get out of the weather. More on that when it is happening. As to the 'bawdy' side of bunny behaviour, we have stopped breeding rabbits now, at least for the moment but Charlotte down the road may have designs on borrowing the giants for such nefarious purposes. Ginny is way too old now to be bred with, she must be 7-8 years old now. 

One of our original "Lovely Girls", a Sussex Ponte.

Meanwhile the chooks have decided that normal behaviour for them is to completely ignore my neat, clean, straw-bedded, purpose built nest boxes in the bespoke coop in the nice safe concrete out-building. Oh No. They are all going to wander around and find all manner of other places to lay eggs and, in one case now, to go broody. We have eggs appearing in the tool shed (Tígín) slotted down between our old chemical toilet and some pick axes, or balanced on a paint pot nearby. One is laying in the 'baby Buffs' house, two are dropping them in a nice shaped dent in the straw inside the pig ark (that will have to stop when the pigs arrive, or the eggs and probably chickens too will find themselves eaten by the porkers). Then a few days back Liz went hunting for a tool in my wheelie-box which is wedged into the goose end of the barn behind the old trailer tail-board and spotted a pile of rather old dirty eggs and, a few inches away, one of the Sussex Ponte hens gone broody sitting on just 2 eggs. We slid 4 more under her and booked her dates on the calendar. She is a first timer despite her age, so no real harm done if she fails. If she hatches any it will be a strange combination of Sussex Ponte x Buff Orp in that clutch.

Frog spawn at 5 days old.

In the pond, the three masses of frog spawn look, to us, to be doing very well. The tiny black 'commas' are bigger each day and can now clearly be seen to have taken on the head-body-tail shape. They wriggle gently in their jelly sacs. That seems to be it for frogs this year and the adults have dispersed again as far as I can tell. We never see them except at night when I occasionally catch one out with the head torch but they are always legging it for the cracks between the stones of the 'beach' and are quickly out of sight. 

Froggy Would a-Wooing Go?

A stunning picture of frogs 'borrowed' from this months entry
for the Irish Wildlife Trust's Facebook photo comp. Sorry but
I do not yet know who the photographer was except that it came
 from a group called "In Touch With The Wild".

It is funny how your childhood memory plays tricks on you. The 'wildlife gardeners' in us look forward to that annual milestone which is the frogs spawning in the local ponds and pray once more that they will adopt our new pond. Last year I tried that trick of importing spawn but was very late and was not successful. This year we are delighted to see that at least 3 frogs have found us 'naturally', presumably males, though I have heard no calling yet and we have no spawn. Also, the snow last night has, presumably put things on hold for now. The first we know of this spring happening is usually (sadly) that we start to see road-kill frogs in the lane and I often find myself be-set by an 'ear-worm' of the childhood song, "Froggy would a-wooing go". In my memory this song had the following lines "..and under his arm he carried a bow, for to shoot at the pretty little doe, among the leaves so green-oh". I was always a bit confused about why froggy should be taking his bow when he went wooing, and also why he'd be aiming at deer but, heh, it's a childhood playground/nursery song; it didn't have to make sense. Liz couldn't help me either as it must be a perculiarly English song and she had no memory of it from her Dublin schooldays.

My snow drops 'in the green' arrive
from England in perfect condition.

Of course, these days you don't need to go bothering your aging Mum or racking your brains for childhood stories - it's all up there on Google, so I nipped in just to check my wording prior to posting it here and making a fool of myself. Silly aul' codger! It turns out that I am remembering it all wrong and that I have conflated the beginning of one song with the rest and the chorus of another.

The 'Froggy' one goes

A frog he would a-wooing go,
Heigh ho! says Rowley,
A frog he would a-wooing go,
Whether his mother would let him or no.
With a rowley, powley, gammon, and spinach,
Heigh ho! says Anthony Rowley.

(the rowley-powley being a suet pudding covered with jam) This goes on for 12 verses or so.

The snowdrops are quickly planted in our bank.

The 'Leaves so green oh' is entirely free of frogs and the bow was actually carried by a gamekeeper whom, you will be pleased to know, does not actually shoot the deer, anyway.

The keeper did a hunting go
Under his cloak he carried a bow
All for to shoot, a merry little doe
Among the leaves so green, oh

Jacky boy
(Master)
Fare thee well
(Very well)

Hey, down, ho, down, derry, derry down
Among the leaves so green, oh

and so on. So now you know. Pud Lady (Hello Mum!) probably knew this anyway.

A little snow overnight and black clouds promise more
this morning

On the bucket of spawn thing I am actually being naughty (and probably illegal) too. You are not meant to relocate any wildlife but more importantly, the modern ecologist's view is in favour of letting succession happen naturally, letting the first invaders who find your new pond have their day and then get ousted (possibly) naturally as later, slower species arrive. When we created new ponds in the King's Wood forest in Kent it was always tempting to 'scenically' plant up immediately with rushes, water lily, marginals and so on, but the Kent Wildlife Trust and BTCV preferred leaving it. That way the environment was always more varied, having 'new ponds' as well as 'old established' ponds, with one group of specialised species surviving briefly in the new untill they were ousted by the 'old pond' species.

Waking up to new snow from the bedroom window.

Similarly, they (BTCV etc) liked the old way of coppicing, where a few men would only cut a small area each year (known as a 'cant'), rotating round every year to other areas, returning after 15-20 years. This way, in a small area of forest you would have tracts of new cut, first year re-growth, 2nd year, 3rd year and so on, and the species which favoured any one age could easily move around following the coppicers. Now it is done with bigger machines (where it's done at all!) and bigger areas are cleared in one year, so the wildlife has to travel bigger distances to find the next suitable patch. Nightjars were always a case in point. They are a ground nesting bird typical of heaths but used to use our newly cleared cants till the re-growth of the chestnut started to over-shadow them. Bluebells are also supposed to do better in a cyclic management system. Chestnut, when mature, is a bit dense for them but coppiced every 20 years it is perfect and you get those lovely years when the bluebells come up just after a coppicing event, to bright open skies and sunshine.

The sheep and the East Field

Well, our snowdrops 'in the green' arrived safely from Wisbech in England. Thank you 'Anchs'. There was no sweating and no bruising, so well done the post office and the packaging, I guess. These were quickly into the ground on a sandy bank under the larch trees just inside our front gate. The crocusses on the front lawn came up well but took rather a hammering from wind, sleet, hail and rain and are all but over, but will live to fight another year. I was reading Anne's blog where she says that she plants both yellow and purple crocus but that only the purple come up the 2nd year. We seem to be doing slightly better, with some yellow making it. We are pleased, too, that neither the geese, nor the sheep touch them. Even in the snow this morning I noticed goose tracks all around and about, but nobody had walked on them. I don't know why this should be. Perhaps the geese are focussed on eating grass and do not bother with areas which are 'not grass'.

Liz reads out her eulogy to Diamond at the dinner in
Bridport (Dorset). Picture by Sian Lewin

You may recall that Liz is currently off in the UK. She is at a meeting of the members of a chat forum she inhabits on the internet. There are 19 of them gathered for a long weekend of foodie eating, social drinking and healthy walks along the beach etc. They happen every year and the gang call the event the AGM and this one, being the first since Diamond died (she was one of the group) was a memorial to her name. Liz had written a short, entertaining eulogy full of Diamond-style quirky humour and in-jokes. Famously (among us anyway) Diamond's final words that anyone heard were when she saw husband John off at the door to give the dog a walk, she asked "could you bring me back some posh cheese?" The Posh Cheese was so amusingly and typically a Diamond thing that it is remembered with affection and so Liz's eulogy ends as follows.

"Good food, good friends and good times were important to (Diamond), so it is wonderful that, thanks to our host, Deborah, we are able to come together over this lovely meal to remember her. Can I ask you to charge your glasses: the toast is, of course, Posh Cheese."

RIP old friend. Never forgotten.

Pig-Slapping your Pastry

Pat a cake Pat a cake, Baker's Man
Bake me a (pork pie) as quick as you can
Pat it and prick it and mark it with ZT210
and into the oven for Heaven knows when!

The slapper head and the impression it makes. 

For those not in the know, your legal, signed up, Ministry-verified pig keeper in this country will generally need to own a piece of kit called a pig-slapper. This is a 2 foot long metal tube with a handle at one end and a plate at the other to which fit 'characters' as individual numbers and letters, set like the print in a printing machine. Each character is (in our case) 30 mm tall and made up of short needles which are used to 'tattoo' your pig herd number into the rump and shoulders of your pigs just before slaughter, so that you can identify your half carcasses as they emerge from the slaughterhouse into the meat plant.

Pig-slapped Pork Pie.

You can see from the first pic that our code is ZT210 so those are the characters I had to get hold of and 'set' into the head, but naturally, they are in there 'backwards' and potentially upside down, so I was looking around for something in which to 'slap' my impression to check that it would read correctly on the pig. Liz was making a pork pie and this generally leads to spare pastry being rolled out into 'pattie' and baked alongside the pie, but to be broken up for the chickens as a treat outside the back door. This led on to us deciding to 'slap' the actual pie crust (gently) - the tattoo plate was clean enough and anyway, the whole lot was to be baked.

Barely visible, slap mark in the golden, egg glazed suet crust.

So there you have it - my slapper works. Unfortunately the code pretty much disappeared in the baking but anyway, it would be fraud (gasp!). The pork in that pie was from Carolyn's Gloucester Old Spots, not from our herd at all. Ours do not exist yet; have not even been born yet!. Actually I am quietly amazed and appalled at this legal requirement to 'slap mark' pigs prior to sending them to slaughter. You keep them as happy as possible for 5 months, loving them and looking after their welfare needs. They come to trust you (hopefully) and think you are a good egg, then just as you are about to send them on their final journey you get this 2 foot long bar with numbers made out of needles at the business end, dip the needles in ink and then smack your pigs hard once on either shoulder (and either rump if you like) to basically tattoo them. It must hurt and surprise them, surely, but you have to do it so you can identify your half carcasses coming out the other end of the meat plant. How can that be 'welfare'? Some say that you do not need to slap them if your slaughterhouse is not insisting but others would argue that unless you slap, the butcher might sneakily substitute your carefully bred and fed pigs for cheaper, mass produced ones.

Blue gets comfy on some tissue boxes on the table.

In the pond department we not only have an 'honest' newt population which we have seen regularly and which arrived by itself, but also two 'scoops' of imported frog spawn. The breeding season had come and gone here and we had been passed over by all the local frogs so we had sent word out. Charlotte was checking her local ditch, well filled with spawn on all previous years, and K-Dub had promised us a bucket from his father's Dublin pond. K-Dub drives a big old yellow works van previously owned by the company I used to work for and sold off at the end of its economic working life. It's very 'tired' at this stage but K-Dub flies about in it OK.

Another good year for the gift daffs from Steak Lady

I was a bit concerned that the spawn, evolved for millions of years to grow and develop in still water and quiet ponds might not survive the rattle and hum of a 2 hour box-van drive across Ireland but late on Friday we received a text message reading a bit like one of those WW2 code messages to the French Resistance "Your spawn is at your gate". Indeed it was, and we hurried down to gather it up and gloop it into the pond where it seemed to be perfectly OK and even hatching, so that we have mini Dublin tadpoles swimming happily away from the landing site. Then Charlotte came through suggesting that if we wanted more, there was some in 'her ditch', so we have nipped down with the bucket and dipped it into the watercress. The Roscommon babies joined the 'Dubs'. It would be interesting to DNA test the emerging young froglets to see who 'won'.

My last New Year's resolution can now be ticked off. I resolved to finish this winter with my log store full. Yesterday in the good, calm sunny weather I dropped the last two weakling, half-dead spruce trees which needed thinning out from our woods, and logged them up. The logs have gone in on top of Bob's hawthorn to refill my log store. Proper job! All the 'sneddings' (twigs and small branches) need dragging out to our bonfire heap in the East Field, but for now we have piled them up. Next time I have access to Bob's tractor, we will get a rope round each pile and drag them out there.

The warm weather and sunshine, tadpoles and newts had us sitting out by the pond and, in Liz's case, thirsty for just something like a lager shandy. Now, we never have lager in the house (in fact we never have anything except the weekly ration of red wine unless it's a special occasion like Christmas or Paddy's night) but rather bizarrely we have in the freezer left over from a guest visit last Summer (no names no pack drill!) some frozen, pretend cocktails. These are totally artificial, like grown up slush-puppy "alchopops", one claiming to be Pina Colada, the other a Berry Daiquiri, but the ingredients lists do not list any known ingredients of either official cocktail (rum, lime, coconut, pineapple etc). What the Hell? They were cold and wet so even though they tasted to us of nothing in particular, we sipped them sitting on our pond side seats.

The blue sky had us suddenly determined that what we needed in this garden was a flowering cherry tree. We have now acquired one of these, going cheap at present (€12.99) at the local supermarket and it has gone in where we can admire it from the kitchen  window and the yard but also from the "Darby and Joan" chairs next to the pond.