December05

Friday, 2nd

Saw something highly unusual this morning after torrential and violent showers: a runner on his own. On investigation it turned out that the Twin had been so intent on preening his feathers after that downpour that he hadn't noticed everybody else going off into the orchard.

When he did notice on looking around after about 5 minutes he made a big racket ................... and all the others came running up to join him. There's authority for you!

Tonight all our youngsters will be 24 weeks old. I had hoped for some eggs, but it hasn't happened and probably won't now until February. Fanny did develop a second "string" of eggs; only 3 of them, though. Oh well, back to buying them - with all that baking I've been doing I've had to.

Sunday, 11th Annie's birthday

I'm getting worse with my entries - preparations for Christmas taking over, that's my excuse.

Nothing much has been happening on the duck front recently. We've had no more hard frosts, and the ducks have been toing and froing between the two ponds they use. One improvement from our point of view has been that they have been going back to their enclosure for food several times a day, thereby relieving us of moving the food trough to their new location.

This morning I was amused to see that the ducks spent some time trying to "crowd" two male pheasants that keep hanging about and nicking their food. They don't dare attack them, they just move in on them en masse as the pheasants make their progress from near the stile towards the garage. Here they are near the bird bath (plus a slightly clearer picture of the 2 pheasants sparring):
Sorry about the poor quality of the photo - I had to take it through the window in case I scared them.

Thursday, 29th

People will be wondering if everything is alright, considering the length of time I've not written. It was all the preparations for Christmas, celebrating it on three whole days and enjoying lots and lots of wonderful presents (even the moles have been particularly generous with the amount of mole hills they've given us, look at this:)

- and resting afterwards! I had intended to post up this photo
of the ducks from just before Christmas and superimpose red and white hats on it as a seasonal greeting to all who read these diaries.
But then I received this lovely card from Caroline Crocker and I thought "best leave it to the experts!"

Yes, everybody and everything is fine, even though we "got the wind up" today when our neighbour Peter came to warn us of renewed fox activity: the cockerel, hatched in summer, and a hen were taken. And there I was blissfully unaware, believing that just the odd fox had come through at night......

The pheasants still come every day, 3 males now and 1 hen. I've given up chasing them away as they just keep coming back. Easy pickings, of course. Our runners still haven't worked out that they could chase these intruders off if they advanced on them as a united front - I've only seen feeble attempts so far.

The weather turned mild after the cold snap I wrote about earlier, but it started to snow the night of Boxing Day and we still have snow on the ground - more is forecast. Our runners are none too happy about it - not keen on snow. It does look pretty, though, doesn't it?
.

The last three days have got a lot colder, too, and the ice on the ponds was rather thick this morning. I foolishly let them out before breaking up the ice, thinking they'd check before flying out. They didn't, and they were skating again - sorry, ducks!

Not much else to report, other than that they appear to have returned to their good habits of going in by themselves at dusk, posting one or two of the drakes at the top of the ramp as guard until we come to let the hatch down. We heard that they gave a bit of trouble to family members who looked after them while we were away in Tadley and Salisbury for 3 days, not wanting to go in, and when they did coming out again 2 or three times and racing around the hut ....... Unfortunately they continued with this bad habit for a few days after our return - paying us back for desertion??

Well, if I don't get back to this diary before the new year here's wishing you all a very, very good one!