It’s been another while since I remembered to post here!

Of my first pair of Muscovy broodies, Little Madam managed to hatch a single duckling. She’s not been a very attentive parent (first time mum) but the duckling has survived regardless and is now a couple of months old and starting to feather up. Black Duck managed to hatch 11 fine sturdy ducklings – and then adopted three Appleyard ducklings the same age on top! She’s rearing them all very well so far and they’re looking sturdy and healthy, now about a month old. The Appleyards have a black dash in the middle of their heads; the Muscovies don’t. The other two broody ducks abandoned their nests long after their hatching dates, so they had infertile eggs or didn’t incubate them well enough. They’re both maiden mums so perhaps next year they’ll do better.

The lambs are now strapping young sheep and live on the lawn, corralled by an electric fence. They react to any window being opened and dash over to stand up against the wall for head-scratches. Gregor managed to lose one of his ear-tags, while Ross has behaved better with his.

The horses have been going through some major changes. Dancer is now fully weaned (finally, at 3 years old!!) so Poppy has embarked on her education as a riding horse – at the age of 14! She’s an intelligent, willing and brave little mare, but woefully ignorant. We’re taking baby steps towards her mastering long-reining; she doesn’t know how to walk forwards without a human leading the way, so I lead her to the gate, then turn her round and steer her with the long-reins as she heads back to Dancer! She does ‘whoa’ on request quite nicely and steers fairly well, though – unlike the other long-rein novice, George!

George has finally ‘clicked’ mentally and taken to his training like the proverbial duck to water. He’s become calm and kindly, even to the point of enjoying cuddles, demanding I scratch behind his ears and spitting my fingers out when he accidentally mistakes them for carrots, he enjoys being groomed and messed with, and he loves wearing his plough harness; the first time very loosely with an old webbing breast collar (which originally belonged to his great-great-grand-mother!):

I chose to sling everything very loosely together like this in case he didn’t take kindly to the idea, so I could whip it off quickly and nothing expensive would get broken. He didn’t turn a hair even when the chains went jangling over his back, so the following day it was his ‘proper’ neck collar, an open-topped American style since he’s got a whopping broad head and is thick through the jowl so it’s hard to turn a collar on his neck behind his head, but it has to go on upside down to get his forehead through! By unstrapping the top, the whole performance is smooth and easy. The slightly dischuffed ears visible below are because Dancer was just behind my left shoulder and George is a teensy bit of a prima donna when he thinks I’m being seduced by any other horse. He’s not bum-high anymore – he’s nicely level and 16.3 (and a half) at both ends, but he was at an angle and Dancer was jogging my elbow with her nose!

Shortly after we started out for a walk around the yard in this, he put his head down to graze (monkey!) and everything started sliding, so I heaved it all back up into place, dragged George off the grass and put his crupper on properly! He didn’t mind that, even.

I’m using a roller to long-rein him in, though – just in case we have any bounces or other undesirable shenanigans while he gets the hang of it that might disarrange his harness; I don’t want to risk him getting any kind of unpleasant surprise while he’s so new to the game. He started out just standing amiably in the yard, perfectly happy to chill all day, but once convinced ‘walk on’ really did mean ‘go!!’ he set off at a grand free-striding pace and it’s as well there’s a gate before he reaches the road! He has terrible brakes and very erratic steering, as yet, but that’s normal. He played that classic young-horse trick of turning around to find out what I thought I was playing at behind him, too, but he’s already figured out that I’d prefer he didn’t and nearly stopped doing it! He’s learning fast and enjoys doing laps of the yard, so it won’t be long before we’re striding around the lanes and tracks together.

I had him in the yard by the mounting block this morning and he stood beautifully for me to pat his very broad back, sling my arms over him and slap his ribs on the other side, even lean over him a bit – no concerns except that his mouthful of carrot might be running out!

Abe’s latest (hopefully ‘last’ as well as ‘latest’!) sarcoid has detached and the small wound has faded to a tiny mark and no palpable scar at all, so he’s back under saddle; his movement is once more free and easy, his appetite has increased and he’s back to stirring up mischief every time he turns around! He’s got the idea of neck-reining, can do turn on the forehand (if I insist!) and can even manage a tiny bit of lateral work; shoulder-out. That’s not bad, considering he’s still only been ridden a few dozen times! He’s ready to hack out now, I think – we’ve done some in-hand walks to explore the forest tracks together and once he’s tried on a few ploys to avoid the effort (‘but I don’t want to’ and ‘I can’t pass that sign!’ spring to mind…) I think he’ll enjoy himself. With luck, the field of oilseed rape behind us, which has been cut and is drying, will soon be picked up and the stubble left a week or two, in which case I’ll ride him up the field side of the wall to the woods, just to avoid the minimal traffic on the lane. It’ll also mean we could try a trot, if the ground’s firm enough – I don’t want to introduce him to trot under saddle on tarmac or rough tracks.

Once he’s steady and hacking properly, I’ll try ponying George alongside… provided George has mastered the concept of brakes by then!

Dancer is feeling slightly upstaged and left out of all this but I’ll think up some in-hand exercises to occupy her teenage mind a bit and then she can join in the carrot-earning schemes.

‘They’ being all the various young critters!

The geese hatched three goslings between them but one didn’t make it more than a few hours, one drowned itself in the water dish over night and the last one is now incredibly well parented, with all four adults taking care of it. Fingers crossed – he/she is now a week old and getting sturdier all the time.

Blackbird the Broody has 8 chicks in a run on the grass – I think two lavender Araucanas, one Welsummer, one Light Sussex, two black Silkies, a mottled black and white Pekin from the bought-in eggs and then, 5 days after they’d all hatched, an egg from one of my little white Silkies hatched in the incubator and Blackbird has accepted that chick, too!

The ducks are still sitting – all of them. It surely can’t be long before the first two nests either hatch or abandon, though the second pair of sitters are quite recent so will be hatching in July at the earliest.

One of my two quack-ducks unfortunately died – I think from the position and injuries that there was a mishap with a horse stepping on her in the night – so I’m just waiting on another 6 Silver Appleyard eggs to go into the incubator, so my lone survivor isn’t an only-quacker through the rest of the year.

One of my older ferrets, Fido, has passed away. He went very quietly and peacefully, attended by his sons Paris and Ulysses and his long-time friend Rambo; ferrets are typically very caring of their fellows when they’re below par and he was always cuddled up with some or all of them in the nest, groomed lovingly and the youngsters stopped playing with him (not with each other) and treated him more gently in his last days.

The lambs have transitioned from four feeds a day down through three to just two now, and spend 12 hours a day out grazing around the place…. except for the stolen minutes they manage in the house! With the hot sunny weather we’ve been having recently I’ve hung a hammock in the front yard so they don’t feel as much temptation to be house-sheep as they did when following me around closely; if I’m in the hammock with a cuppa, they graze or ruminate nearby.

Jack has been castrated and came through with flying colours, endearing himself to the vet staff and healing fast and well. He adores the hammock and enjoys snoozing on me while I’m in it – though it’s too unsteady for a dog when I’m not.

We had a scare yesterday with a fox; I woke at 4am feeling uneasy and the geese were making an unusual sound, a sort of tense low gabble. When I looked out to check on them (they were under the lounge windows) a large fox was standing in the horse walkway with a sort of ‘ooh, now those look edible!’ expression. By the time I’d unlocked the door he was over the fence and poised to pick his meal while the four adults were all grouped around the lone gosling defensively, but ran off hurriedly down the field when I jumped out and yelled, Jack coming out as well. I spent the day arranging secure housing for all the poultry; I’ve cable tied weldmesh to the big heras fencing panel that blocked the barn door during ‘bird flu lockdown’ and then tied two big loops of strong string to it at about face-height, so now I can herd all the poultry into the barn, pull the panel across to block the door and lock it in place with a sturdy plank through the loops, rather like barring a medieval castle gate! It took quite a while to herd everyone in last night but they’re all still alive and well this morning, so it was well worthwhile! I’ll put a couple of trail cams up this morning and if Foxy makes a habit of checking around, I’ll take further steps. Hopefully, since I scared him off hurriedly and he’s not found anything edible, he won’t be too eager to try again… but foxes are clever, resourceful and determined, so he might well have a mental note of the local ‘takeaway’ now and be back another night.

Hopefully, as a result, we’ll get ‘exit, the rats’ pretty sharpish!

My friend Lynn sent me two photos of a Jack Russell terrier on Saturday night and the remark that he needed rehoming urgently. I asked why, of course – but later on thought again and added that provided he had the typical JRT rat-killing instincts I could retrain him out of most anything else with time. Lynn went to see him in the afternoon and messaged to say she really liked him, and that he’d been bought for children who’d lost interest and their mum didn’t have time to look after him, so that was why he needed a new home.

Lockdown fallout, I suspect.

Anyway, Lynn brought him straight to me Sunday afternoon and he moved in without hesitation. He’s already accustomed to lambs in the house, he’s good with cats, he only needed a few sharp words when he considered the chickens, he’s (mostly) good with the whippets and they with him, and he’s an absolute lapdog, just wants to be loved and close to his human.

He arrived labelled ‘Bruno’ but I’m finding that not only does he not seem like a Bruno to me, he actually answers to Jack! So, Jack he is.

He’s quite an unusual colour for a JRT, a rich very dark chocolate tending to black as you go from nose to tail, with white markings (or vice versa). He’s two years old and will be attending the vet next week for castration – one of those (mostly) things I mentioned above being the typical entire dog attitude to anything he can attempt to mate with!

I’ve had terriers before – my first was a JRT with a sixteenth share of Border Terrier ancestry who came from a Hunt kennels in Kent, nearly 30 years ago, and shared my adventures for fifteen years. More recently, I acquired a JRT cross Smooth Fox Terrier just before Wicket arrived in my life, but unfortunately he was the victim of a road accident after a tradesman left the garden gate open one day. Jack’s not nearly as tall as Raccoon or Charlie Fox, both of whom were long-leg terriers; he’s not a dwarf with the stumpy out-of-proportion type legs but a true short-legged JRT, sturdy and fit to run all day. He’s a little skinny, rather short of muscle especially on the back end, but food and exercise will take care of both of those minor quibbles! Being a JRT, he’ll take all the running he can get – unlike the whippets, who are sprinters who need just a short walk each day – so I’ll probably take him out with Abe every morning and again with the whippets in the evenings.

We went out for a walk in the woods together this evening, the two whippets, Jack and I, and he’s a joy to be with. No pulling, though he’s no clue about ‘heel’ (not uncommon amongst terriers anyway!) and he was interested in everything, trotted along just ahead of me happily at a good walking speed, and when we got home, he turned in at the gate without hesitation, waited to be let into the yard, then when I took all the leads and harnesses off, he went straight to the back door with the whippets.

Jack definitely has the JRT work ethic – I lifted the boards that are the access to the crawl space under the house and he was riveted, though it’s too far for him to jump down. I’ll sort out a ladder or something so he can go up and down comfortably by himself and then he can terrorise the rats to his heart’s content!

The only real problem is that it’s very difficult to walk into or out of the house while surrounded by two medium-large dogs, a small dog and two rapidly-growing lambs, all attempting to be between your feet!

I’ve come to the conclusion that Ross and Gregor have, as their middle names, the two words of the title.

They’re growing well, guzzling their milk eagerly at mealtimes, and playing wildly when they’re out with me (and sometimes when they’re in the house, too! I’m getting used to be the ‘castle’ when they play King of the Castle around the lounge…) and I weighed them yesterday morning at 14lbs each, which means they’ve put on a pound and a half since they arrived. I’ve increased their meals to 400ml per feed each, though sometimes they leave a few mouthfuls when they’re full – it’s good they know when they’ve had enough, and the dogs are now looking eagerly to see if there’s any left for them!

Last night they proved they’re now big enough (and clever enough) to scramble over the barrier to their pen in the barn; I put them in for bed, gave them their last bottles of the day, walked away and they followed me back into the house! I put them into their pen in the lounge instead, but the moment I closed the lounge door to go to bed, they erupted with frantic bleats and leaping at the play pen panels instead. I rescued the remains of their water dish, mopped the floor and let them out, then closed the door and went to bed.

They bleated non-stop, leaping on and off the furniture (the thunder of little hooves on a suspended wooden floor is quite loud!) and then the door handle started to rattle. It carried on rattling, more and more determinedly, until I went back, put them into the pen and then left the doors open and went to bed.

That did the trick.

I’ve learned it’s possible to house-train sheep, so I’d better start doing so. I can see these two are going to spend more time in the house than I’d planned…

Play is such an incredibly important part of development for most animals – kittens and puppies pounce on toys and each other to learn how to hunt, ‘horseplay’ is proverbial, and lambs are delightful when they ‘circus’ around a field together as a pack.

Two may not be much of a pack, but Ross and Gregor helped me muck out this morning. At first they just trotted on my heels, learning the way to the muck heap, having fun ‘walking the plank’ that keeps the wheelbarrow from bogging down in the gateway when it’s muddy, and testing the mounting block out. Wild sheep are amazingly agile – and although domestic breeds are somewhat hampered by heavy fleeces, lambs are fearless little daredevils who love climbing, leaping, bucking, prancing and dashing madly! As they got used to where I was going and what I was doing, the lambs enjoyed exploring in the henhouse, chased the ducks into the barn and explored there, ran races around the little circuit from the yard into the lower horse barn, out through the feed room and round to the yard gate to start again!

From my point of view, it’s also good to see them playing because it means they’re happy, feeling full of vim and confidence, healthy and developing their muscles and co-ordination normally.

Abe and I went out for another long walk this morning – his third in four days, he met me at the gate at 6 and shoved his nose into his head collar so eagerly I wasn’t ready and he ended up swinging it nonchalantly over one ear! His hooves are beautifully worn down by the roadwork, so I’ll ask my hoof trimmer to fit him for boots – I don’t want to over-do it and make his hooves sore! It was fascinating to walk next to him with my hand on his back, though – I could feel those back muscles flexing and shifting at every step. Exactly what I want him to do – build up his muscles and be ready to carry me on his back again! He’s getting more confident in strange surroundings, too – less pausing and staring all around to update his mental map and less pausing to poke me with his nose, checking I’m still there and all’s well, and more time sniffing puddles, other horses’ droppings, stealing mouthfuls of grass and striding along enjoying the views!

Nibbles and Hobnob, the ducklings, are out in the barn in a run – they’re feathering up very well and I want to start getting them used to cooler temperatures than my lounge! They’ll be dry and out of draughts, but they won’t get the extra warmth from the stove and central heating.

I’ve also cleared and set up the rest of the front room for Jamie and Emily, which means the puppy pen that was keeping them in their corner is now in the lounge as a day-pen for the lambs. They’re both in it just now, snoozing after all that hard exercise…

…since I had sheep!

Back in the early 1990s we had sheep, a small mixed flock of mostly rare and minority breeds with interesting fleeces, since my mother was a hand spinner. When we left Wales and moved to Scotland, we didn’t get sheep again…

…until this morning, when I picked up a pair of orphan lambs from a nearby smallholder. They’re 2 weeks old, Shetland wethers (castrated males) and, as bottle-fed lambs tend to be, convinced any human must be Mum. They certainly ‘heel’ better than the average dog!

At the moment I’d describe them as ‘grey’ but which of the several specific shades of grey Shetlands come in is still up in the air. They have darker undersides and face, so I’d probably be correct to call them ‘katmoget’. Having previously had a Shetland lamb born black with white face (katmollit) who moulted into a pale silver-grey with panda-faced markings, though, I won’t bet they’ll stay like that! I’ll be interested to see how they turn out after they moult their lamb fleeces next spring.

Ross has more kemp (coarse hairy fibre) on his thighs and britches than Gregor, and he also has a pink ear tag while Gregor has a purple one (they also both have a yellow tag in the other ear). Ear tags are a legal requirement before a sheep can be moved off their farm of birth and I’ll have to go update the Scottish Animal Movement Unit about the move shortly – it has to be notified within 48 hours. This is all down to making sure all meat entering the food chain can be traced at every step of the way and there are no exceptions, even for sheep like these two who will be spending their lives as, more or less, pets, not commercial sheep and not intended for meat. Shetlands are generally quite long-lived as sheep go so I’m hoping these two will be on the Croft for something over a decade to come.

The reason I wanted sheep (apart from liking sheep!) is that internal parasites from horses can’t survive going through a sheep’s gut – nor vice versa – so a few sheep following the horses around the grazing rotation help to control parasite levels without needing to pour toxins down the horses’ throats (or the sheep’s throats, come to that!). Sheep also preferentially graze some plants horses don’t like, helping to prevent the non-horse-palatable species taking over the pasture. That will help maintain a wide range of species in the pasture, which in turn helps support a wider range of insects.

Ross and Gregor aren’t eating much grass yet, of course – they get a bottle of milk each four times a day at this age, which will gradually reduce down to nothing over the next three months or so when they’re weaned and able to support themselves grazing. They’ll need a bit of hay and sheep mix through the winter, but Shetland sheep are hardy, thrifty and only middling-small as sheep go, so they shouldn’t need any more than that. Being wethers, they’ll stay gentle as they mature rather than going on the rampage as adult male hormones kick in, and I don’t have to worry about lambing problems, the complex needs of pregnant sheep, etc. They’ll also give me a couple of super fleeces for hand spinning each year, which I’ll probably ‘roo’ rather than shear; the more primitive breeds of sheep moult their coats unaided every year, and while Shetlands aren’t quite that primitive, they do have a very definite ‘break’ in growth in the spring which means there’s a weak spot in each fibre, so it’s easy and painless to simply take hold of the old fleece and it’ll come away in your hand cleanly, leaving them with a nice short coat to wear into warmer weather. This doesn’t happen with the more-developed commercial breeds of sheep; there you have to shear them, which can be quite traumatic for the sheep and leaves them with tramlines for a few weeks until their fleeces begin to lengthen again, while ‘second cuts’ (short bits that went through the shears twice) are a pain in the neck for hand spinners, who have to pick them out while spinning or get lumps in the yarn!

I want the dogs to be absolutely steady and friendly with the sheep, of course – they know not to chase sheep in fields, naturally, but I always keep them on the lead around sheep regardless because it’s impossible to explain to a panicking sheep that the whippet approaching at 35mph is only interested in the rabbit the other side of them! Ross and Gregor, though, will be around the Croft all the time and I don’t want to have to keep the dogs leashed all the time at home, so I’ve introduced them to each other inside the house already.

Well… that’s one way of putting it. I walked into the house, the lambs tagged along after me, the dogs did astounded double-takes around my legs and the lambs, being innocent and fearless, strolled into the lounge and made themselves at home! Rocket is not sure she approves and takes wide circles around them, Wicket is thrilled and fascinated, and the ducklings are fairly sure they don’t approve of being sniffed at by sheep through the wire! The lambs explored a bit, came out to help me fetch in firewood, had a bottle each in the kitchen, topped it up with a few nibbles of creep feed, then settled on a rug at my feet to nap, while Rocket retreated under a duvet in a bedroom (she’s often in the spare room at the moment, since I keep applying Deep Heat to my gammy knee and she detests the smell!) and Wicket curled up next to me and licked any lamb nose that came close enough.

I wouldn’t trust the dogs unsupervised with the lambs outside yet, but it’s a very good start!

The lambs are in their pen at the back of the feed room now, where they have a snug shavings bed, a rack of hay, a bucket of water and a dish of creep feed, but I’ll bring them at mealtimes so the dogs can carry on getting used to sheep as friends. The lambs drip milk on the floor, anyway, and the dogs like cleaning it up!

Where does the time go?

The winter has brought a lot of challenges but hopefully all is on the up again.

I located another young rabbit to keep Bunny company in late October; unfortunately he died on Halloween; he went very peacefully, just stopped eating and spent the night snuggling in my lap, asking for the occasional stroke, before breathing his last slightly before dawn. Emily Plunkett, a Himalayan pattern dwarf lop, joined the menagerie anyway and is a delight; I’ve just picked up another young dwarf lop – this time a Blue Otter – to keep her company in turn and she and Jamie Bunkin have bonded immediately, now spending all their time together, lying down cuddled up and sharing their food dishes and cabbage leaves.

The ferrets are down to 9 – Holly, Ivy, Iris and Yarrow share a cage with Angus, who’s starting to look somewhat middle-aged (I reckon he’s 8 now – which is a respectable age for a ferret). Rambo, Fido, Paris and Ulysses share another cage happily together, though I’d like to see Rambo putting weight on as he comes out of the rut season – he’s rather skinny, though active and interested in everything.

Hannibal the Gander is very territorial as he has three geese to guard; Lucy and Grey are parading around the lawn enclosure with him while Sally, the Sevastapol cross, is broody on a nest she’s put in the bottom of the pampas grass.

I rehomed one of the young silkie cocks to look after a flock of Buff Orps a few miles away, but received a dozen duck eggs in exchange; they were all fertile but regrettably most died just before hatching. I have two strong ducklings growing at a furious rate in a run in the lounge, taking daily swims in the bath! They’re feathering up well, though, and should be good to go outside in a couple more weeks. I’m fairly sure they’re either Silver Appleyards or a cross between Silver Appleyard and Saxony, from the markings – apparently the breeders put all their ducks in one flock for lockdown so they could be either or both! The ducklings are starting to quack nicely, so I’m fairly sure both are ducks.

The Muscovies are still in the barn in lockdown, since they fly far too well to be loose with the modified Avian Influenza rules currently in force; two of the ducks are broody, two are not and the drakes are still posturing to attract their mates. The ducks look unimpressed to me…

Blackbird, the silkie cross chick I hatched out last year, has gone broody in the henhouse and I’ve put 12 eggs under her; two each of bantam cuckoo Maran, black silkie, bantam light Sussex, black mottled pekin, Welsummer and Lavender Araucana. So far she’s on day 2 of the incubation but seems to be sitting well; I saw her hurriedly stuffing her beak with oats this morning but then she went straight back to the nest.

Sharing the henhouse are the other two mongrel hen chicks from last year, Thrush and Partridge, along with Hamburg (the pencilled Hamburg hen), Charlie and Snowball, the silkie cocks, and the two young silkie hens. The two young cocks (naturally there were 3 cocks and only 2 hens hatched!) live on the lawn with three hens belonging to a friend; I’ve named them Albert and Einstein, though I can’t tell which is which!

The horses are moulting copiously in all directions. It’s been a struggle right through the winter with thrush, with the ground being so wet, but hopefully it’ll start to dry out now and we’ll get on top of it for the summer. George is coming out of his teenage grumpy stage now and beginning to turn into a cuddle monster – though given his history of biting lumps out of me, his recent passion for sucking my fingers is a bit hard on my nerves! He terrified me by choking on his breakfast a couple of weeks ago, needing an emergency vet visit, but by coughing his hooves up (and nearly coughing himself off said hooves in the yard and staggering around wildly!) he managed to clear the obstruction before the vet arrived, merely giving himself a touch of colic in the process. I had him out of the barn and walking around the yard (with pauses to wheeze and cough a bit more) the moment I saw him try to go down for the first roll – I lost a horse to colic before, as a child; he twisted his gut overnight and had to be put down – and by the time the vet actually arrived, George was recovered enough to circle us at a brisk trot at the sight of a needle. We managed to get a dose of Buscopan into him anyway and he had a week’s antibiotics in case he’d managed to aspirate anything, but he’s been in fine, energetic form ever since, thankfully.

Not to be left out, Dancer required a vet visit for lameness this week; her thrush had flared up so I have some paste to apply to her frog twice daily, she’s getting painkillers in her feeds and hopefully we’ll get the better of it smartly.

Poppy, thankfully, is her normal healthy, calm self.

Abe is now 7 and full grown physically and mentally, so this year will be his coming-into-work year. He’s come out of the winter with quite poor muscle tone, so I’m going to walk him in-hand for a couple of weeks before saddling him up again; we began this morning when I got in from work at 6am; a quick go-over with the shedding comb, hooves all up and done, then out for a 5.4km walk at a brisk pace around the woods up the hill. He enjoyed it, ears pricked all the way, with regular pauses to look carefully all around, including behind him on both sides, as he updated his mental map of the area. We’ll do the same route tomorrow in reverse, I’m looking forward to seeing his reaction! Once he’s hardened up his hooves a bit and put some muscle back on his rump and back, I’ll hack him out daily around the woods; there are enough tracks there we can cheerfully do a different route every day for a fortnight.

Once Abe is thoroughly steady in walk and trot around the woods, I’ll see if I can ‘pony’ George off him; lead George from Abe’s back. It take a little bit of explaining to both of them, but if I can, it’ll be invaluable training for George – he strides out so well at walk I have to trot to keep up, and then he starts trotting to keep me company…!

In terms of work, the job I thought I had last year dissolved into nothing, but the same agency contacted me before Christmas to ask if I could drive a minibus… for the same company! I can, as it happens – I even have some prior minibus driving qualifications and experience, as I had to pass a local authority test to get insurance to drive a minibus for Aberdeen University Sailing Club, many years ago! The hours were a bit tough to get used to; I sign in at 4.30am to pick up the first round of workers at 5am, then another load at 5.30am, but then I’m home by 6am and, although occasionally a shift finishes early and I’m called in through the day, usually I then pick up the day shifts going home at 3pm and begin ferrying the back shifts in at 4pm, finishing before 5. That actually works really well in terms of being here with the critters through the daylight hours and although the pay isn’t exciting, it’s enough to cover the bills. Initially I was only asked to work the hectic period between 13th December and New Year, but then when the factory opened up at the beginning of January they asked me to continue, so I do 6 days a week there. Amongst the benefits are free PPE and random PCR Covid tests at company expense! The head of HR mentioned once that the factory only has about 7 vital key workers (out of a few hundred employees!) and they all live in Peterhead and don’t have cars, so they need the minibus! The company does have about half a dozen HGV drivers for collecting tons of shellfish off the boats or ferrying apparently endless amounts of water for recycling in Peterhead, but pulling them off their regular work to drive the minibus disrupts their work schedules. On the whole they’re a good bunch of people to work with and since I’m pretty easy-going about turning up at short notice from time to time, dealing with extra people or the occasional extra run, I think they’re happy to just let the arrangement continue indefinitely – which suits me! I’ve just had to get used to crawling out of my bed at 3.30 in the morning and back in at 8 in the evening… on the other hand, I’ve seen the dawn most days, though it’s getting to be a toss-up as dawn is well on the way by 4am now! I’ve also driven in blizzards, storm-force winds and even (a memorably unpleasant experience) both at once, watched a JCB tow a snowplough out of the drift I needed to get through and been sworn at in Lithuanian, so it’s definitely been a learning experience….

I’ll try and get back to posting regularly, promise.

I’m not sure if I’m in limbo or hovering on the edge of hell, but it’s been a rough time since my last post.

I’m down to one last surviving baby rabbit – neither Catkin nor Fatty Lumpkin, but the one between them, who went by ‘T’other’ for a bit but is now just ‘Bunny’. He (or she?) is now coming up on 7 weeks, lives in the lounge in a big indoor cage and is officially the most expensive rabbit I’ve ever raised – between vet fees, the UVB lamp because I suspected he wasn’t getting enough vitamin D and a mild eye infection requiring antibiotics, he’s up to £250 and counting! His latest exploit has been to jump off the top of the heater plate and damage a hip, resulting in him putting too much weight on his immature front legs so the knees deformed. He’s now splinted on both front legs with vet wrap and cardboard, which has straightened out his legs and enabled him to stand up properly, but he’s quite dis-chuffed about it! The hind leg will just have to wait and do its own thing – he’s moving the leg alright, it just seems to have parted company with the pelvis and he’s too young, his bones too unformed, to have any hope of surgical intervention. Rabbits are also impossible to bandage around the hips! If it is a dislocation it might just reduce itself back into place over time but he’ll cope even if the joint doesn’t re-organise itself – rabbits manage remarkably well as ‘tripods’ even when a hind leg is completely amputated! He has sensation and can move it, and there’s even some strength in it, it’s just not articulated properly in the hip, so there’s no need to consider amputation – time will do what’s needed there and the splints will enable his front joints to straighten out and strengthen up.

The silkie chicks have discovered sweetcorn and as a result they’re learning to jump onto my hand on request – all I have to do is put one hand flat in the cage at about three inches off the floor and hold sweetcorn in the other, just out of reach, and chicks immediately leap onto me to grab the treats. I’m hoping to refine this into a proper ‘hop onto hand and wait’ in time.

Two of the young ferrets have gone off to their new homes – Cassandra and Hecuba – and I’m looking for new homes for Hector, Ulysses, Penelope and Iris, all now nip-trained and ready to fly the nest. I moved the ferrets back out to the barn – their cages were taking up half the lounge and I was spending too much time changing puppy pads, so they’re back outside with deep beds of wood shavings, which is more absorbent and much more fun to dig in anyway – but impossibly messy inside, since they throw shavings all over the place! They have a playpen full of toys and spend a couple of hours a day in that, which means they can all play-fight, wrestle, chase, hide, dig, tunnel and sleep together, then go back to their cages for food and rest. It seems to be suiting them all well.

I’ve picked up another couple of geese – one’s a Sevastapol cross, with a few long curly feathers but not as ridiculously frilly as a pure-bred, and the other is a Greylag – which is confusing. Technically almost all domestic geese are Greylags (Anser anser) but the ones who still have the ancestral colour markings are called Greylags. They’re quite young, about 7 months, and after a slightly tense first 48 hours Hannibal and Lucy have accepted them and they’ve formed a tight-knit little flock together. The Sevastapol is blind in one eye so tends to panic when startled by anything on her right; she also loses track of the others if they go off to her right and needs to yell until they call back and she can track them down.

I’ve been job-hunting since Mum went to the care home and at the end of September I landed a job which was supposed to start at the beginning of October. Only the company have run into a problem importing the equipment required to set up their covid-testing lab for their workers, which I’m supposed to be working in, so I’m sitting twiddling my thumbs and waiting to be told when the induction training and re-arranged start date will actually be….

Definitely limbo. Possibly Bunny’s face says it best – this was just after he’d had his front legs splinted with sections of cardboard loo roll tube cut to wrap around each leg from just above the paw to just below the elbow, so they’d stabilise his little bent knees. He was not thrilled…

I’m down to 5 surviving bunnies and one is trying hard to make it 4 – she’s had two complete respiratory arrests needing resuscitation now, and since she (or he!) seems to feel multiple lives are in order, I’ve named her Catkin. Here’s a video I made tonight of the biggest one, Fatty Lumpkin, hoovering supper down.

How cute are those little feet?

The two ducklings are still fine and growing away nicely. I tried offering some crumb for them but they weren’t interested and they have bulging crops every time I see them, so they’re clearly doing just fine without any extra feed!

The Silkie chicks had an interesting experience on Friday – they all had extremely mucky feet and bottoms, so they’ve been washed! Washing a live chicken, let alone a chick, is not something I’ve ever had to do before, but I’ve had to clean a few quail feet up in the past. Quail hate having their feet soaked and cleaned, but the chicks seemed to enjoy the fuss and even came out hopefully to see if there were more baths on offer the next few times they saw me!

I’ve finally got the electric fence working again – first the old energiser died, then the new one I bought collapsed into bits when I set it up (one of the clips came apart). Harbro exchanged it without hesitation the following day, and then I had to clear the weeds and almost the first stroke of the machete tapped one of the clips and, yep, it came apart.

The wire on that clip is just a spade connector, so I cannibalised the old one for the matching intact clip and got it going again this evening. George looked a bit discontented when he heard it ticking, but Dancer put her tail up and galloped off!

One of the young chickens, Blackbird, is hopping on one leg. I suspect she’s been stepped on by a horse but she won’t let me examine it – I’ll have to catch her by torchlight one evening when she’s gone to roost, since she roosts at a convenient height to be caught!

The 7-week-old quail are laying – just an egg every other day or so, as yet, but it’s a great start. The older ones have finally decided to slow down and I’m only getting 3 or 4 eggs a day from them, so having the new ones coming into lay is good.

I want to make a quick trip to the village tomorrow and pick up a jubilee clip – the ducks think it’s funny to pull the hose off the tap while I’m trying to fill up the horse buckets! I also need another tub of kitten milk for the bunnies, so I’ll get all that organised first thing, then settle down to mucking out for the rest of the day. The henhouse was done yesterday and I want to get the quail cleaned out and re-bedded tomorrow, too.

Having the ferrets in the house is great – but they do need cleaning out twice a day or they get quite stinky! Next spring I hope to build them a permanent secure outdoor home with a good running-around space for them to use all the time, not just an hour twice a day.

A great deal has happened since I last posted – not all good, but also not all bad, either.

For a start, the rabbits who were running around outside have all died, very suddenly and within 48 hours of each other. I suspect they picked up one of the 2 Rabbit Haemorrhagic Viruses that are endemic in the UK now, which can be carried by midges, are exceedingly infectious and almost universally deadly.

Mistletoe had a burrowful of kits in the lawn, however, so I had to dig the little orphans out. I found 8 youngsters in the nest, all still blind and barely crawling – about 8 days old, at a guess. It is horrendously difficult to hand-rear baby rabbits, for various reasons, but I had no choice! I brought them in and started phoning around local vets for a kitten replacement milk, Cimicat, which is the closest commercial replacement for rabbit milk, and for a probiotic called Avipro, which I’ve used before for orphan bunnies and which helps to keep the digestions going properly. I was also able to buy a kitten feeding bottle and some extra-small rubber teats, which make life very much easier and safer for the kits than trying to syringe feed.

It’s always a struggle at first with hand-rearing orphans. They’re accustomed to their mother’s milk and nothing else tastes right, it doesn’t suit their digestions as well and it’s the wrong temperature. There’s no warm furry Mum to nuzzle into, either, just a bare hand and a nasty rubbery thing that pokes at their mouths. For the first few days they lost weight hand over fist and I was just trying to get a single gram of milk into them at each meal, but then they started to catch on and learn to suck the rubber teat.

Baby rabbits have evolved to get a whole day’s nutrition in five minutes. They can suck like vacuum cleaners! They suck so hard they’ll pull the plunger down a syringe and I can feel the pull on my thumb on the end of the kitten bottle. This is great, in that they can suck down a bellyful of milk (about 5-7 grams) in ten seconds or less – but it’s also risky, as they can also suck the milk straight into their lungs. Rabbits have sensitive lungs anyway and filling them with milk almost guarantees either respiratory arrest or aspiration pneumonia, so every cough and sneeze makes me cross my fingers!

I lost one of the kits the first night, which was probably shock at being dug out and moved into the house. I lost another on day 4, just refused to feed and lay curled up and unresponsive. Probably gut stasis, which is always a risk with a bunny – if they get a stomach upset their digestive system just shuts down completely and refuses to start up again. It’s an emergency in an adult rabbit that requires a vet visit and probably a stay in a vet hospital, but in a tiny kit it was just impossible to do anything to help.

The remaining six, however, have started to gain weight again, their eyes are now open and they’re beginning to nibble a little of the dried grass I buy by the sackful for the horses. There is faint light at the end of the tunnel, though they’re far from out of the woods yet! Here they are this morning, lifted out of their between-feeds nest (under one of the chick heater plates, on a towel in a cardboard box) and into their mealtime box, where I’d put the hay. They get a minute to run around in that box and relieve themselves before I pick each one up, weigh them, feed them until they’ve had enough, weigh them again and then pop them back into the between-meals box again. If they’re still hungry they climb out and run around again – if they’re full, they settle under the warmth and snooze until they’ve digested their meal properly.

I also had a hatch of chicks; six white bantam silkie eggs went into the incubator and a stunning six little chicks came out! One failed to thrive and died a couple of days later and one had splayed legs and needed a tiny hobble making to hold his legs in place while his muscles developed properly, but the five chicks are growing strongly and doing fine now.

Making a hobble to fix splayed legs in chicks is fairly standard – you just take a drinking straw and cut it to the right length, then thread a strip of sticking plaster through it and wrap the plaster around each of the chick’s legs to fix it in place. By the time the plaster falls off (about a week) the muscles have strengthened and the joints are able to function correctly, so then you have a perfectly healthy chick again.

The ferrets are all now in the lounge for the winter – I bought another big cage to add to the two big indoor cages I already had, so I have a complete wall of ferrets! Ajax, Rambo, Fido, Paris and Hector are in one cage, Ivy and her babies Helen, Ulysses, Iris and Penelope are in the new cage, and Holly, Yarrow, Cassandra, Hecuba and Angus are in the third cage. They’re all enjoying themselves enormously as they get to come out and run amok all over the lounge every evening while I clean out their cages!

The dogs are thrilled as the ferrets scatter some of their kibble on the floor!

The horses are fine, as are the geese and hens. I had something of a drama with the ducks as Little Madam suddenly appeared with 8 ducklings in tow, but she managed to lose 6 of them within a couple of days by staying out in a rainstorm, so I incarcerated her in the barn for a while. She’s just been liberated again today and I have my fingers crossed for the ducklings!