I’m not responsible – I just found the corpse. My guess is the chickens took exception to nocturnal visitors, as the rat was lying dead and somewhat bludgeoned round the head in the henhouse run this morning. It’s wise not to underestimate the damage done by hen pecking!

… though as the plot for a Whodunnit it’s pretty straightforward. It’s been raining steadily, on and off, so the horses are lounging about the barns devouring hay, rather than being out getting wet and turning the paddocks into mud.

I’m not sure what Dancer’s been up to but she’s acquired small cuts on both knees, one stifle and a hock. I approached her with the iodine spray and managed to get the hock squirted before she walked off looking indignant and refused to come back until I put the spray away again! She’s not lame and appears perfectly cool about life, so I’m not worrying about the cuts too much.

I’ll see if I can get another delivery of hay for early next week. I may have to schedule in two deliveries a month at this time of year – or get one big delivery. Once we have snow I think we’ll probably be up to three lots of hay a month, but I’ll deal with that when we get to it. I don’t want the horses getting hungry – but then again it’s good for them, physiologically and metabolically, to lose weight through the winter, it helps their bodies regulate their various hormones correctly and keep their digestive systems balanced, apparently. Horses, like most animals in seasonal areas, have evolved to put weight on through the summer and then lose it through the winter; at the moment I can’t feel ribs on any of them when I run a hand over their sides, but they don’t have fat pads behind their shoulders – which is about right. I’m not going to rug them up through the winter, just let them get as fluffy as they want (they’re already getting quite furry) and I’m also backing off grooming so they have all the necessary weather-proofing oils in their coats.

They can always come into the barns for shelter when they want, though I will have to find a way to secure the hay box so they can’t do what happened last night, which was someone pushing it across the doorway of the Horse Barn with Abe stuck on the inside of it! I shoved it out of the doorway again and refilled it when I did the bedtime rounds.

The hen with the prolapse is being a bit stubborn about keeping the prolapse in – I keep putting it in, and she then puts it back out again. I think the problem is that there was some pecking damage to the exposed tissue and the scabbing means her innards think there’s excreta there and eject it again. It may be a case of keeping her clean until the damage heals up before everything stays in place properly again…. hopefully. She’s eating and drinking fine, anyway, so I’m just taking it as it comes, washing her backend regularly with hibiscrub and warm water and applying sudocrem as a barrier cream and to keep the exposed tissue soft, preventing it drying out.

I’ve organised transport for Monday, so fingers crossed everything works as planned!

 

 

This morning my car went in for new front tyres – the last lot of tyres were right on the edge of illegally bald, so I opted for winter tyres to replace them.

While the garage were fossicking about under the car, they noticed one of the front springs has broken. The car will be back in the garage on Friday to replace that…

While I’ve been kicking my heels in the village most of the day waiting to get the car back, one of the Three Stooges decided a prolapse would be a good idea. When I got home and noticed it, I grabbed her hurriedly and washed her back end off in warm water with some hibiscrub (disinfectant – always handy because of the horses and dogs) and then gently replaced the prolapsed tissue inside her vent. This took a bit of time before everything stayed in, so then I put her in a big bunny cage by herself; it does look as if the other hens had noticed the nice tender raw flesh but the damage is very minor and I have my fingers crossed, but in the meantime at least I can make sure she doesn’t get eaten alive by her flock-mates!

I’ll see how she’s getting on in the morning; she’ll need to be kept separate from the flock until I’m sure it’s healed and she’ll need to be light-restricted to reduce her egg-laying tendencies until spring to make sure it doesn’t happen again too soon, so she may be living next to the silkies in her own private cage for a while.

Meanwhile, preparations continue for the Big Day (hopefully) – watch for news on Monday next week!

…but not quite the full cock-a-doodle-doo yet.

I’ve just let the horses into the fourth paddock (paddock one or the House Paddock, since it’s closest) so they’re busy stuffing their stomachs and spooking at the woodpile.

This little madam is living in the middle of the feedroom floor. I keep filling in the hole and she keeps digging her way out again.

I saw her pottering around the yard yesterday afternoon and this morning here she was, not ten feet from me in bright sunshine, raiding corn from the goose bucket! The hens can’t steal this corn because of the water – but clever little ratty can dib it up in her hands, as you can see.

I’ve moved the corn to a deeper bucket and topped it up with a lot more water, which should put a stop to this game – though the geese are confused and took a bath in their new feed bucket.

I have nothing personal against this rat (or any other) since she’s just doing what rats do, but I’d rather not be feeding her, having her spoiling feed for other critters, carrying disease (though she looks very healthy herself – lovely glossy brown fur and bright, beady eyes!) or indeed killing the quail or any baby bunnies or chicks I have around come the spring. All the feed is stored in rat-proof bins and I try to keep floors swept and cages secure and clean, but rats are clever, opportunistic and extremely adaptable. In short, they’re just inevitable!

Apparently the chickens aren’t enough to scare madam rat off, but equally I don’t think I have any vulnerable livestock she can attack at the moment. We will be continuing our discussion over her moving out… I may or may not win it, but to be honest even if I move her on or kill her, another will just move in from the farmer’s barn next door, where they’re living in the stored straw bales.

The roads were actually fairly dry and clear this morning, the rivers are dropping and we had a nice run through to Turriff to pick up the new hens – 6 more ex-commercial hybrids. I think they’re from a commercial free-range flock, since they’ve arrived fully-feathered and already quite au fait with foraging and exploring. The 4 resident hens accepted them without a moment’s trouble and they’ve been all over everywhere through the afternoon. I’ve picked up 6 eggs through that time, too – two in the carriers when they arrived, the other 4 in a nest built on top of the straw bale stack.

8 of them returned to the house as twilight was fading into actual darkness, I retrieved another who was ‘helping’ me near the muckheap (I was shifting more logs round, she was picking up any insects I exposed in the process) and I’ve just now found the tenth lurking under the wood in the big dairy shed. She’s been bunged onto a perch in the house and they’re all safe and shut in for the night!

George has now taken his see-human-come-in habit to a new level – the Arabs have been trailing after him so he now sees human and gallops – actually gallops – in before the others spot what’s going on. It’s quite impressive watching him with the pedal to the metal like that! The whole herd were hooning up and down the field the other afternoon and while the Arabs were cantering quite fast, George was flat-out in a proper gallop – but keeping pace with the rest determinedly!

I’m in an extended conversation with Hannibal the gander at the moment – now he lives in the yard, he doesn’t feel there’s room for two big white things that spread their wings, so he’s taken to attacking the car when I open its doors or move it at all…

Amidst scenes of extraordinary chaos and damage due to some of the most intense rain I can remember in my quarter-century living in Aberdeenshire (or, come to that, the quarter-century spent living elsewhere in Britain before that!) the croft stood up to the weather yesterday fairly well.

It had been raining hard and steadily through the night – in fact I left the feed room door open because the geese were looking plaintive about sleeping outside – and the horses were all inside through the night with hay. I did the morning rounds, refilled the hay box, stuffed more hay nets and hung them up, slung a tarp over the bunny runs because they were getting wet with the rain coming through the broken bits of roof in the small dairy, told the silkies off for squaring up to each other (I think the white and the bigger black are both cockerels!) and generally got through the morning routine, then got out the ladder and unblocked a downpipe outside my bedroom that was sporting a tuft of grass. That cured the drip from further up the gutter, of course.

There’s another drip from a gutter at the back outside the office, but the bush under the window there means the ladder angle will have to be much more shallow and I’ll wait until Michelle’s up next to deal with that – I want another pair of hands on the ladder before I go up it at that angle.

I was in the middle of breakfast when the heavens opened. The rain was hammering down like stair-rods for a while, and I went round to check on all the critters again after I’d eaten.

Everyone was inside bar the geese. The hens were in the big dairy shed looking bedraggled and even the geese were shaking themselves off frequently, though they also spotted a new pond and used it for a quick bath.

This was a new pond forming up under my bedroom window and the kitchen window. It was quite deep already – deep enough it had risen above the level of the drain at the front of the kitchen wall, which was clearly overwhelmed by the volume or blocked. It hadn’t been blocked just a few minutes before, but I tried giving it a poke with a stick to check. As far as I could tell it was still not blocked, but I decided I’d get the rods and give it a more thorough poking to be sure.

I went inside and lifted the hatch in the floor by the office to check the crawlspace with a good torch. There was water visible between the various foundation walls, varying between damp patches and puddles at the front but definitely an inch or so pooling at the back, due to the slope of the ground. I don’t like finding water in the foundations of my house and I’m fairly sure it shouldn’t be there – on the other hand, the house has been there nearly a century so it’s clearly capable of withstanding heavy rain.

By now there was a shallow but ten foot wide stream running steadily down the yard from the road, which is higher than the house and land, and a similar sheet of moving water coming off the shed roofs down the other side of the house.

I decided I’d better go and check on Mum and pick up the drain rods from her sheds – the village, obviously, has the advantage of close neighbours to help if anything goes badly wrong, but also it’s lower than the croft and the drains should be more closely monitored by the council. An isolated smallholding miles from anywhere with no close neighbours ranks far lower on their scale of priorities.

I had to go through a water splash a couple of inches deep at the end of my own land, where the boundary stream starts, and made a mental note to look into cutting a small channel across the verge so it can drain better. Half an hour with a spade should improve matters there quite considerably. There’s nothing I can do about the water that was pouring off the Christmas tree plantations lower down, but that formed a far more serious water splash some four inches deep.

The Kuga’s instruction manual says, don’t drive it through water more than two inches deep.

(I’ve always felt this was ridiculous in a car that’s four wheel drive and marketed as a compact SUV).

There was another water splash near the bridge over the river, which was rising rapidly (they mostly do round here – even placid little rivulets are really spate rivers waiting for their chance to show it!) and even the main road was perilously close to the puddles on each side joining up to form a linear lake, with a few places where they did join up. At least going up the hill towards the village meant the water was running and shallow, rather than pooling anywhere, but once on top of the hill I hit another water splash, then a big one where there’s a farm track coming in off higher ground. That was was draining down the road and formed a shallow water splash, then a hub-deep one (steam came up all around the car as I crawled through, so it was touching the engine block) and then a final seriously deep one where the old railway line crosses the road on the edge of the village. That was deep enough a small horsebox ahead of me was over the hubcaps, but it was go through or reverse through the previous splash to reach a turning place, so I took a deep breath, dropped into first gear and crawled steadily through.

On the other side a worried-looking woman in a rangerover was sitting staring at the water, but apparently my example inspired her and she was setting out to cross, visibly white-knuckled on the wheel, as I took another deep breath, this time of relief, and drove up the hill. (Why drive a rangerover other than to never need to worry about water splashes on the road?)

Every manhole cover was bubbling and the drain covers were small fountains. I crossed a final small splash at the end of their road but it was only an inch deep.

All was fine with Mum and Michelle, so I picked up the rods, checked they had enough of everything not to need to walk to the village shop, and headed back to the croft via the Old Deer road – longer but less flood-prone. I did have a couple of water splashes to cross there, but only a few inches of water in each case… one of them drained into a field trough, though, and that had a ring of young bullocks around it, staring with evident fascination at the foot-high fountain gushing up out of their water supply.

The rain had eased by then and when I reached the croft the new pond had disappeared, the drains were all fine and the water level in the crawlspace had dropped to merely damp and a shallow puddle at the back. Nice to know I have free-flowing foundations…

I doled out more hay all round and lit the fire.

Shortly after this social media and the news started producing video and news of bridges washed out, closed, buses stranded and roads closed by the police across the area; the main A98 coast road is closed in Banff where the bridge over the Deveron is flooded (I think by runoff coming down the hill above, not by the river rising – though it has, of course) and the diversion via Turiff then flooded as well! The A90 is closed in several places due to flooding, particularly in Lonmay near Fraserburgh. My ferret house-guests should have been picked up Sunday afternoon but with Gill living the other side of Banff both the A98 and the Aberchirder route cut off we’ve agreed the ferrets are staying here until the roads reopen properly. There’s an entire bridge and a twenty-foot section of road washed away on a back road near King Edward (where the potatoes come from!) and that’s not far from me, and the South Ugie Water has ballooned from its normal three foot deep, ten foot wide size to filling the floodplain above the Abbey of Deer, which is about a hundred metres or so – and it’s running like a racehorse for the middle thirty or forty feet of that, too. Even the little tributary river at the bottom of my road is bank-full and steaming along like the Flying Scotsman! Given all that, a six-inch-deep ten-foot-wide puddle outside the house seems like very little to worry about.

We had an interesting interlude late in the evening – Michelle called me to say what should she do, a Chinese takeaway had just delivered a box full of food and had I ordered it? I hadn’t, of course, so I went over to see if I could help sleuth out where it had come from. There was nothing on the box, nor on any of the packaging and neither of the takeaways I’ve used locally will deliver (they don’t do money over the phone, either, and one only takes cash in person!) so other than phone round the twenty-odd Chinese takeaways within a reasonable distance for deliveries, we were pretty much stuck with four main meals and all the trimmings and sides. Apparently Mum had seen a white car in the road outside and went out in case it was me, though she described it as a low, sleek white car and mine, obviously, is not – but she said she thought I might have been sending her a message and the driver was just parked there, so she went out. It appears her ability to reason is unravelling rapidly since if I need to send a message I text or call Michelle, I don’t recruit strangers to drive there!

We waited an hour and a half, in case the delivery driver reappeared to ask for it all back, then decided it was going to be wasted altogether if we waited any long and set to. Michelle and I ate all we could, then divvied up the remainder.

Naturally, about ten o’clock the delivery driver did indeed turn up and asked for the food back. Failing that, he apparently asked to be paid for it all… we’ll see where it goes. I think the legal position is quite hazy – they should have checked they were delivering to the right place, but then again it could be argued Mum had led them on by approaching them… the worst case is we pay for the food and in the meantime, it’s not being wasted and it’s tasty.

Spring rolls for breakfast….

 

 

This is the term Michelle has coined for the mass of half-rotten wood, chicken wire, wriggly tin, stock fencing and weldmesh that lurks buried in the lawn. Today we set to work on wrestling the brute out of the lawn.

We started with a couple of the 800lb breaking strain cargo straps, which have a nice hook on one end, the spade for leverage and weed clearing, the strimmer and, of course, Those Dratted Hens, who insisted on helping by standing on the bits we were trying to lift, standing where we wanted to stand and darting in to forage as we lifted bits, so we couldn’t put them down and had to stand there waiting! We had a lot of fun as well as putting in enough rope-hauling practice to qualify us for the next tug-of-war team that’s recruiting, and we’ve managed to rip about a third of the thing out of the ground and drag it over to the trash mountain. We’ll do another session tomorrow, weather permitting.

Around this, we’ve got the last of the docks and nettles down flat, nearly finished shaving the tussocks down to their roots, mucked out the henhouse and put down fresh straw, played with the horses (well – I did, anyway. Michelle likes to talk to Abe over the fence and Mum just stands well back and admires from a safe distance), and took a load of scrap metal, broken breeze blocks and plastic to the tip.

I’ve just been turning out my filing cabinet in the office and looked up to see a couple of deer in the wheat field behind the house, grazing on the stubble near the far hedge. I see deer practically daily here, both roe bucks and roe does, but when I lined up one of the spotting scopes on these two, they weren’t roe – they were reds! The first one was fairly young, just three points on his antlers, but the other was a big mature fella, a full ten pointer and very heavy-built. Realistically they’re probably Sika/Red hybrids (they were too far away to tell even through the spotting scope) but since I didn’t know I had reds of any kind that close, it’s a delightful surprise either way.

I must get a decent long-legged tripod for the spotting scope if I’m going to set it up to watch those fields from the office window – the window ledge is too narrow for the little tripod I have at the moment.

Yesterday started out wet and miserable. All the horses were in the barn when I went out and demanded hay; when I let the chickens out they all went into the barn as well and demanded corn! The only critters happy outside were the geese – but then they are waterfowl, when you come down to it, so that’s not surprising.

I spent some time scraping up the muck in the barn with Dancer, which was a good learning experience for her. She is still convinced the world orbits Planet Dancer so finding out that jobs need doing without involving people dancing attendance on her pampered little self is good for trimming her ego down – though it did mean the job took a lot longer than it might! She even tried to eat the shovel handle in order to stop me ignoring her, but that just turned into a lesson on putting ears forward instead of pinning them at me. There isn’t really a downside in anything she does – it all offers opportunities to either encourage her good behaviour or reshape her bad behaviour!

The horses went out after a bit so I took the opportunity to nip across and move the hosepipe from the running overflow that feeds into the goose water bath in the goose paddock – it’s been overflowing from there and making the horse walkway extremely wet and muddy, so as the geese are now bathing in one of the old stone sinks by the henhouse, I put the end of the hose right out in the middle of the north paddock for now – it should, hopefully, reduce the mud in the walkway and the water will have time to drain through the soil undisturbed before reaching anywhere anything walks just now. I will get the plumber out to fix whatever it is that’s overflowing – I still can’t get into the loft to see what it is, as I don’t have a ladder the right length and I can’t do advanced gymnastics to spring athletically through the loft the way Scott the plumber did last time!

As I was just closing the paddock gate again I glanced around to see George just walking back in – in fact, he’d just stopped dead by the holly with a look of delighted surprise on his face, staring at me: Hey, it’s you! You’re there! Wow!

I love that he’s always so thrilled to find me! He even nickered to me. I adopted a tone of delight in return and started talking to him as he came over to find out what I was doing – though since I didn’t have any nuggets on me, I was a little concerned about being stood on while trying to tie the gate shut again. Being able to use some of his various known phrases to ask him to step back or whatever does mean I can manoeuvre out of what used to be potentially quite dangerous corners around George, but I don’t like to ask him to do something without being able to give him the reward he expects – it feels unfair, like asking a tradesman to do a job for nothing. He was very good, though, and only tugged my sleeves a little for attention, accepting scratches in return and pausing when I asked so I could finish tying the knot without his nose being involved in it. We went up to the barn together and I got him some hay and a handful of nuggets after the gate was secure again.

After that it was down to the village to debride the dead skin off Mum’s legs, do my washing and hope the weather changed. It did, eventually, and we managed to get an hour’s work done in the goose paddock in the evening, cutting down docks and unearthing a large chunk of who-knows-what-construction from the grass. All I can say is, I think there’s timber, wriggly tin sheet and chicken involved, it’s got tussocks of grass growing through it and it’s going to take a lot of work with spade and Michelle as well as Mum to dig it all out! Out it will have to come, however, and I’m determined to hoik it out soon, too – I want all the rubbish out of the poultry area in the next week.

There is a reason for this but for now I’m keeping it to myself. It may not happen… or it might. Watch this space!

 

 

Things are getting on top of me and I’m too tired to blog by the end of the day!

Must try harder.

Anyway, it’s been a busy few days. Operation Bunny Switch has been completed and all the buns are now in the Small Dairy Shed safely. Once I catch up on the mucking out I’ll be able to shift the horse feed over to the Big Dairy Shed along with having more storage space for feed and bedding over the winter.

I tried putting the quail in with the silkies to see if I could cut down on the separate feeding places but the two cocks had a fight so they’re separated again.

The silkies are feathering up nicely, though.

I’ve put up a couple of slip rails in the stable shed – one to reinforce the barrier where George eats so he doesn’t crash into it so much, and the other across the doorway of the little end stable space. I need to find some more long planks of the right size to complete that job, but ideally I’ll be able to stop the geese trespassing into the horse area.

This is what the bottom of the yard fence looks like now I’ve tied scaffolding planks up to discourage the geese getting under the horses!

Today started at 4 am since Michelle had a diabetic review appointment (she refers to them as ‘vampire appointments’ since they always involve blood tests!) in Glasgow at 9.15. It was misty and so dark, I couldn’t even see the roofline of the barns against the sky! I’d left the car parked by the gates so I didn’t have to disturb the geese, who like sleeping by the henhouse at the moment, but luckily when I unlock it the safe-home lights come on, so at least I could cross the yard safely by that illumination!

When I got home it was light so I pushed on with a quick breakfast and then into the sheds to feed and muck out. The horses came in as I finished, so I opened the yard gate for George to go through and left the others in their yard. By the time I collected a head collar and went after George he was well into the grass, but he was polite about being interrupted and rammed his head into the head collar with his customary enthusiam!

If ever there was a place for the maxim ‘have expectation but no expectations’ it’s in working with George. He’s always going to be a highly dominant horse and resent being told what to do, but he’s also very cheerful and willing about being asked if he’ll do things – provided you don’t ask too much at once! We did lots of walking in short bursts with rewards for starting and walking with me as well as stopping with me, so he was very happy. I was very happy because he was happy and actually listened to my suggestions – I’m careful to avoid telling him what to do, and I also listen carefully for what he tells me! – but we’re moving towards conversation steadily.

Two horses more different in their attitudes than George and Abe would be hard to find! If I approach George about doing anything, he tends to respond with the horse version of ‘on yer bike! I don’t take orders from you, pipsqueak!’ while Abe invariably just plunges straight into trying to oblige! I leaned on him, over him, put my hands on his back as if about to vault on and jumped up and down, and he merely looked at me with a mildly curious expression – he didn’t tense up or move his feet at all! He lined himself up on the mounting block beautifully too, and we did some liberty work that we’ve not tried before – he’s familiar with me using energy and body language for ‘walk forwards’ and ‘walk backwards’ but I came in from the side this time and kept giving him a very soft verbal ‘right, right, right’ – and he carefully sidestepped to his right for me! Tons of praise and then I tried it on the other side and he did ‘left, left, left’ equally well! He really is about ten minutes from being backed and ridden away.

After the boys being such stars, Dancer was a little monster. She’s hitting adolescence so it was boundary time – but after I’d dodged threatened bum-hitch kicks twice I got right in her face about it, putting a lot of energy into my voice, stamping my feet, body-checking her shoulders and walking into her ribs to force her feet to move away from me, even holding my hands above my head so she couldn’t get superior height on me – though she tried! After about five minutes of this she stopped pinning her ears and coming at me so we finished that with a polite, ear-pricking little filly enjoying lots of nuggets, praise and quiet body language from me! I fetched a head collar for her after that, though, and coaxed her out of the gate end of the barn, leaving a miffed and whinnying Poppy behind! I did keep Dancer within sight of her worried parent, though, and she was very sensitive and obliging walking, halting, backing and standing on both reins. As I was coaxing her back into the barn she yanked her rope out of my hand suddenly and disappeared, but by the time I walked out again she’d stood on her rope and was very glad to see my outstretched hand, coming to me to target my hand for a treat while I rescued her from the malicious fetlock-wrapping tendencies of lead ropes! She went quietly back to her mother after that.

It was back to human activities after that – Mum’s annual blood pressure check, which was fine (I frequently wonder why they both calling her in for hypertension checks, given her blood pressure is invariably within a couple of points of 120 over 80!) followed by lunch, then back to Aberdeen to pick Michelle up off her train, then a dash to Peterhead to Michelle’s bank. HMRC sent her a tax rebate cheque – in her ‘dead’ name! She took the deedpoll for her change of name along and the bank accepted that as proof and banked the cheque for her anyway. Lucky she’s still using the same bank account that she opened before changing her name!

A quick zip to the farm store to get ferret kibble and then check Mum had the makings of dinner, and then back home to feed everyone.

Even then, it wasn’t over! I went out to lock the hens up and there were only three on the perch. I looked inside the stable shed, but she wasn’t in the rafters or tucked behind a feed bin. I checked the nesting den they have behind the muck heap and retrieved an egg – but no hen. Finally I tried the big dairy shed – and she was asleep on top of the straw stack. I retrieved her and put her on the perch in the henhouse safely.

Fingers crossed the weather’s drier and less windy tomorrow so I can bring Mum up to the croft for the day and turn her loose on the docks in the front garden again. If she’s happy there, I can push on with mucking out the sheds…

I’ll leave this post with those ridiculous whippets. They pulled their blankets out of their crate the other day and built a nest in the wood bucket instead…