With some whinnying and prancing from George in the yard, Abe watching more calmly while Poppy did the equine equivalent of covering her baby’s eyes and murmuring ‘don’t look – it’ll be over soon’, manoeuvring between Dancer and the gate and standing facing the other way very determinedly! Rhapsody loaded into the wagon willingly and I packed in two feed bins and a sack of feed tubs, all clearly labelled, while the driver hung a net of hay up to keep her occupied on the long trip across to Skye again.

The Herd have been quiet all day, haven’t set foot outside the yard and show no interest in going out to the field at all. They’ve spent most of their time in the top barn together, just standing quietly and much closer together than usual. Nobody was off their feed, however, so whatever adjustments they’re making, emotionally, it’s not too hard on them.

I shall miss Rhaps, but I certainly won’t miss the thrice-daily juggling of horses, trying to get a slow-moving older horse out of the field past younger, faster-moving and more dominant horses! Last night only worked at all because Rhaps suddenly got tired of being pushed away from the field gate and scooted round to the yard to be let out there for her dinner!

Next week I shall shut the field gate and keep my bunch off the field wile I re-fence; I’m going to give them a ‘sacrifice paddock’ they can turn into a muddy hippo wallow and let the rest rest and regenerate. If I can get some good horse-friendly species-rich seed mix (Emorsgate Seeds do a good one) I’ll over-sow the field with it and let it grow until it’s long enough to stand being grazed again – and until the soil’s drier! I’ll also keep them out of the orchard, level off the ground with compost, then sow a wildflower meadow mix, mulch the trees and let that rest for a while, too.

There’s a young gale blowing in at the moment but I’m hoping the weather will play ball soon so I can start walking Abe and George at least twice a week – one of the best things you can do with any young horse is take them out for walks, first in hand and then on long-reins, get them used to being alone with you, going to new places, seeing new things and gaining confidence in themselves and you in the process.

 

After yesterday’s little adventure bulldozing through the gates, George decided to come help with the mucking out again today…. over the wall.

Admittedly, he’s a fine big lad and the wall just in that spot is only a little higher than his knees (it’s almost belly height on the others!) but I wish he hadn’t! I’ve been half-expecting it since yesterday, though – he’s learned that creative thinking and being big can solve lots of problems! He watched me tip several barrows, then as I was running the barrow up the plank onto the muck heap, I saw a large knee lift… impressively high – and then forward…. and the hoof came over the wall. He can get a very respectable height and reach with a foreleg when he wants – he maybe doesn’t get as high relative to his size as Abe’s Spanish Walk, but then he’s starting from so much higher and with longer legs! I’ve certainly had a hoof pass me at waist-height when I’ve been slow with a feed bucket before now.

I tried a little helpful guidance, ‘Don’t do that, you great hairy lummock!’ and was ignored.

The hoof came carefully down on the outside of the wall. The second leg lifted. I emptied out the barrow and abandoned it on top of the muck heap. The last place I want to be floundering around with George ‘helping’ is on top of a three-foot-deep muck heap.

Actually there’s a lot of places that would be the last ones I’d want to be in with George’s helpful company.

The second hoof was down on terra firma as I leapt off the muck heap, and leg three was rising steadily. A happy expression was fixed on the big ginger face, ears pricked as he stretched his nose out towards the treat bag at my waist. I considered staying around for about a nanosecond but then sanity intervened and I walked away. He wasn’t going back and the sooner he was clear of the wall and in open space, the better!

Hoof four touched down safely and he walked over, cheerfully, so I gave him some nuggets. There’s no mileage whatsoever in telling a horse off for a fait accompli; I rewarded him to coming to me instead, then I ambled over to the barn. He ambled after me, stopped in the doorway, thought about it, walked off, walked back, thought again, considered maybe going down to the car… but then came into the barn. I gave him several big handfuls of nuggets and shut the gate.

Mucking out ceased at that point and electric fencing the wall took over. There’s 5,000 volts waiting for him if he tries that again….

Rhapsody’s stuff is mostly packed – she just needs the last few feed buckets washing and popping in the bin sack, and I need to find a way to label them all securely. Luggage labels leap to mind…. I’ll pick some up later this afternoon.

 

So far, so good – said cautiously!

The car was investigated on Monday and apparently one of the front brakes had seized on. It’s been replaced (at horrendous cost) and the car is now behaving beautifully again.

Mum seems to be settling in at the Croft, though she’s notably not going outside much. She likes looking for the poultry through the lounge window, though, and seeing the horses through the kitchen window, and she has a lovely view from her bedroom across the valley. She’s getting a carer coming in each morning to help her get washed and dressed, which seems to be working alright – as yet I still have to be there to show them where stuff is and so on, but in a few days when they’ve all got used to it, hopefully it’ll be half an hour I can spend happily outside with the critters.

Al is bringing his little flock further out – I spotted them in the yard this morning, though they retreated into the barn again shortly afterwards. They accepted some bread crumbs, though, as I was throwing handfuls around for the other poultry. I was quite interested to note that when Al started doing the caution-danger-to-flock call to his hens, Snowball picked it up a minute later from the other side of the yard and then Charlie sounded off from up by the gates! All three cockerels doing their job as guardians of their ladies nicely – and since I’ve not kept multiple cocks before, I hadn’t known they’d pick up on each other’s warning calls like that. I do wonder how good their hearing is, though – to my dull human ears, the cocks’ danger call sounds remarkably like a hen’s egg-song, but I’m sure they can hear better and get more information out of it that I can. Most birds have much more acute and much faster hearing than ours.

Snowball is still doing his ‘dying velociraptor’ squawks unexpectedly behind people. He doesn’t half make me jump every time, the monkey!

George found a way out of the field this afternoon – at the top of the field, just by the gates to the road, there was a concrete block pillar between the two gates. He’s knocked it down, leaving a gap, so he just bulldozed his way out! I turned round from mucking out when it suddenly went dim and there he was, smiling at me through the barn door! I left him grazing in the yard while I got more mucking out done, then went out with his head collar and a rope. It took him three tries to slow down enough to get the head collar over his ears (too eager to get some training done – he kept walking off before I could get it on him properly!) but eventually he paused long enough and I did some work with him on standing politely (not tugging on my sleeve to point out he’s waited ten seconds and needs more food right NOW please!) and then slung the rope over his neck and walked into the barn. After a moment he walked in after me, then turned around and walked out again. I waited and he walked back in! While I fed him handfuls of nuggets, I just closed the gate and took his head collar back off.

I’m really looking forward to having time to work with him properly! He’s very eager to work with me. Once I get Abe backed and ridden away, it’ll be good to take them out together – ride one, lead one through the forest.

I’ve lashed a scaffolding plank across the gap between the gates, so hopefully he won’t repeat that trick. I can’t shift the pillar he’s knocked down – it’s so heavy I can’t even rock it! I’ll get Michelle to help next time she comes up and we’ll lever it out with fenceposts, see if we can’t get it set up outside the gates so it at least blocks the gap visually.

Gillies the horse transporters called this morning to say they’ve brought the time of the trip forward – Rhapsody will be leaving on Thursday morning. It’s actually good – I think her feed will just stretch to Thursday breakfast, so I can stuff her rugs into the empty feed bins, then stack all her feed tubs in a sturdy bin sack to go with her.

This morning my car (which has some history in the field, though not too recently) decided to throw plans out of gear. I had intended going down to the village, picking up a few more bits and pieces from the other house, grabbing another sack of Hi-fi Lite chaff for the horses, swing round to the chemist, then off with the trailer to collect hay, since we’re down to the last bale again.

We got most of the first bit done, though not the hi-fi lite, and then the car decided to vibrate. Heavily. My first thought was, not a puncture! Turned out it wasn’t a puncture, but anything over 30 and it feels like it’s on an earthquake simulator. We crawled home cautiously at 25.

It’s booked in at the garage for Monday morning at 8 am and I asked for a courtesy car. In the meantime, I had no chaff and only enough hay to last the Herd about three hours!

I phoned Longleys and asked if they could possibly rush a delivery up today. Arthur said he was short-handed, both his lads being off for the weekend, but he’d see if he could round anyone up. Half an hour ago, Brett arrived with the chaff and 8 bales of hay – he’d been out shooting this morning, apparently, and was very pleased with the day’s haul…. a woodcock! His young Labrador Max had flushed it,  Brett had shot it and Max had retrieved it (having only recently learned to retrieve woodcock) – and that made his Saturday a good day, to be improved yet further as they’ll be eating woodcock for their dinner tonight.

I don’t shoot wild birds on the wing – I’m nowhere near a good enough shot – but I know how it feels to be delighted with teamwork between yourself and another species, pleased with your skill in a difficult art (woodcock being notoriously challenging to shoot!) and then to have the satisfaction of eating what you’ve hunted or grown. Nothing wasted, no food miles to speak of, a quick death for a healthy animal and food on the plate at the end of the day – that would be a good day in my book.

For me, having enough feed for the critters for today and tomorrow makes it a good day, too!

 

It’s been a hectic few days!

I spoke with the local small removals firm on Monday morning and they said they’d be round to do the job on Wednesday morning. I also spoke with the audiologist and Mum has an appointment at the beginning of February.

Tuesday went very well, Mum enjoyed her social group day very much and said she’d like to do it again, so I’ve arranged for her to go on Fridays as well!

Of course, since Mum was moving into the Croft on Wednesday, Tuesday wasn’t spent mucking out, it was spent tidying and cleaning at the Croft so everything would fit in! Tuesday afternoon I picked Mum up at 1.50pm for a nurse appointment at 2 (yet another lot of different antibiotics…) and then back to the house in the village to pack!

Wednesday morning I raced round the critters to feed and got to the house in the village just as the movers were appearing round the corner! By ten past nine everything was in the van, then they followed me up to the Croft and by half past everything was unpacked and I was closing the gate behind the van again. We spent the morning unpacking and putting things away, then back to the village for a load of small stuff left off the van (bedding and so on) before going back to the Croft for more unpacking and lunch, then over to the hay farm to collect a trailer load of hay (the horses were complaining of acute starvation) then back to feed the horses. I was out of mixed corn so having fed the horses, I had all the poultry and the local sparrows lining up to look accusingly at me. We nipped down to the village, grabbed some mixed corn from the farm store, then back via the house for a few more things-left-behind and back to feed the poultry just before we lost the light!

Along the way, I also started shifting coal out of the yard and into the coal shed; the coal bloke had left the pallet of coal (one tonne of ovoids) neatly in the yard, waterproofed, but of course that’s inconvenient for filling the coal scuttle so I moved the first 125kg into the shed and recovered the rest. I’ll catch up on it all over the next few days.

This means, of course, that the house is heated and warm again! All the same, I put a hot water bottle in Mum’s bed to make sure it was warm for her, because it does take a few days to really get the heat right through a house when it’s been unheated.

My sister’s arranged transport back to Skye for my elderly guest Rhapsody at the end of the month; Gillies, the biggest horse transporters in Britain, have a lorry going that way so Katrina can get a discounted rate for Rhaps, which makes sense. I’ll put her on the lorry in the morning with some food and they’ll take up to 3 bin-sacks or bins of food and kit along with her, so I can pack most of her stuff up and send it back with her. The rest Katrina can pick up some time. I shall miss the old girl – she’s a lovely sweet horse, very friendly and always calls when she sees me. She’s enjoyed being part of The Herd, too – at home she’s an only horse and they are herd animals. Knowing their place in a group is very reassuring for them – even if that place is at the bottom of the social scale! Rhapsody’s very much a back-row trombonist, though, not a first violinist, so she’s happy being at the end of the herd and everyone’s doormat. She does tell them when they’re pushing her around and everyone understand each other. It’ll be interesting to see how the Herd reacts to her leaving – they may even grieve for her absence.

So, now I have a day to catch my breath and finish the unpacking and sorting. Mum’s filing cabinet had to come (she was very insistent) but before all the paperwork goes back in, I’m going to winnow out all the long-outdated stuff!

 

She’s found her way round to the barn at last!

She’ll be in all the hay nets now! George says she’s not allowed inside yet, though Abe is happy to welcome her in, as is Dancer. I haven’t seen Poppy’s response but I doubt she’ll be hurling a welcome mat in the doorway, somehow!

I’ve been having words with Poppy about her attitude to George – she thinks it’s acceptable to pin him in corners and scowl at him, which I don’t think is acceptable at all! Over the past few days, we’ve progressed from ‘I don’t care, I’m going to wave my hooves in his face anyway!’ through rapid switches of ears-forward-to-human / scowl at George and have now achieved ‘wasn’t me!’ when she catches me catching her scowling at him!

I’ve also been working with Dancer – she has a big day coming up, her first ever visit from a dentist, so I’m getting her used to humans wrapping arms around her head, over her nose, sticking fingers in her mouth (she spits me out!) and feeling things pulling on her head. I don’t expect she’ll need anything doing by way of rasping teeth, at her age, but it’s good to get a check and get her used to the process.

I couldn’t find the Hamburg hen last night but eventually, when I went back with a torch, I spotted her. She’s obviously keenly motivated and a better flyer than the others!

She was back on terra firma with the rest for breakfast.

I need to phone the local removal firm first thing on Monday, get the date booked for shifting Mum up to the Croft now all paint is dry and the curtain is up.

I also need to call the local audiology department – I booked a micro-suction session for Mum last Friday and it turned out the chap who did the job is also an audiologist in Peterhead hospital. He told me to call him on Monday morning and he’d find a space in the appointments list for her! He also fixed one of her hearing aids which had been refusing to work… had I checked the battery compartment, removed what appears to be a felodipine tablet and inserted an actual battery instead…. well, we all laughed about it, anyway.

Jacquie from the Social Care department has found someone to come in and give Mum half an hour each morning to help her get dressed and so on, and Mum’s starting day care at the local very-sheltered-housing place on Tuesday morning. Things are moving at last!

I shall be spending Tuesday mucking out, ready for the dentist on Friday….

It’s one of those things about baby rabbits that every breeder learns – sometimes your idiot rabbit will scatter her litter far and wide, allowing them to chill and the first you know is when you look into the cage and observe the carnage.

This morning Nightshade had done exactly this. 9 baby bunnies, all full term and clearly ready to be born – but 7 lifeless-looking bodies and 2 half-eaten definitely dead corpses.

(I actually blame Al Capone, the new cockerel, and myself for this – when I was unloading the new chooks last night, Al got away from me and danced merrily all over the bunny runs. I think poor Nightshade was scared.)

Anyway, chilled lifeless bodies aren’t dead until they’re warm and dead – which is why small children who fall into cold water are sometimes resuscitated hours later – so I picked up the intact bodies and rushed them into the house and under the grill, carefully laid on a couple of woolly hats rather than a grill pan or metal tray. The definitely-corpses were welcomed for breakfast by the ferrets.

By lunchtime, by then having been warmed very carefully, massaged, ribs repeatedly squeezed and legs worked to stimulate any impulse to life, I had to admit my Schrodinger’s Bunnies were in fact, dead as doornails.

The ferrets welcomed them all for dinner.

Here’s the new chooks, however – Al is the handsome jungle-fowl on the right.

I’m calling him Al Capone because he has a scar on his head. I will, however, be very pedantic about the final ‘e’ in his name…. he’s not bad as a crower, though not as good as Snowball, who is still strutting his stuff proudly as cock-a-doodle-dooer in chief.

The little hen with the gold head on the bottom left is the gold-pencilled hamburg, and very pretty! Next to her is the black silkie-cross, who may be quite a surprise to Charlie and Angel as she’s huge in comparison, and the others are the Aracauna crosses.

To my delight, I got hugs from Poppy and Dancer tonight – a head over each of my shoulders, chins pressed down as they gathered me in against their chests! They may simply have been thanking me for the fresh hay, but it was delightful anyway.

Relative quiet, anyway – it’s still fairly breezy, but not as wild as it was earlier in the week.

I’m delighted all the roofs have stood up to it; the horses have been spending their time either in the horse barn (with the doors shut it’s very quiet and still in there) or in the orchard, lurking amongst the trees.

I’ve noticed quite a difference in George since our energy work the other day – he’s stopped kicking the door for attention when I’m mixing feeds or stuffing hay nets, and he’s being much gentler about letting me know he’s there – no more pick-her-up-by-the-sleeve incidents but quite a few light pokes and nuzzles with the large snout!

I should be getting my next batch of hens (and cockerel) tomorrow – there will be photos and hopefully there won’t be any fights! Charlie is still restricting himself to Angel and Snowball has free rein with the rest of the flock; it’s comical watching him running furiously across the yard in pursuit of a hen he hasn’t leapt on recently! Fingers crossed he gets on okay with the new boy when he arrives tomorrow afternoon.

The spare room is now fully repainted and dry, and the curtain rail will go up tonight (again, fingers crossed!)

One good thing about the wind is it does dry up the wet ground – the horses aren’t sinking nearly as deep in the mud today as they were two days ago!

I happened to be just finishing off a bit of hot buttered bagel when I walked into the feed room yesterday morning and both George and Abe looked extremely interested. At last, the chance to find out what humans eat! I gave them a little bit each, which they both took eagerly…. then Abe reversed, ears stuck out sideways, and spat his morsel on the floor, and George pinned his ears back, spat his mouthful at me (I’m sure it was deliberate!) and shook himself all over!

Whatever humans may eat, horses don’t do cinnamon and raisin bagel with butter, it seems. I’ve never seen a horse react to anything (other than heavy rain!) by shaking himself like that.

I redeemed myself in their eyes by handing over some hay nuggets instead.

Both boys were rather on top of themselves yesterday anyway, since I did some energy healing work with them both; it’s long been known that amputees suffer pain in their amputated limbs that can be alleviated somewhat by energy healing and psychological training, and all geldings, by definition, have had some quite intimate bits of their anatomy amputated. Both George and Abe had energy healing done on their gelding scars yesterday and both reacted very positively – and positively gleefully, in George’s case. He was nearly prancing around the yard most of the day! Abe was more restrained, but then he always is – though he did walk rather wide behind through the morning.

I used to have to do this on a terrier years ago – she’d had her tail docked as a pup and right to the end of her life in her mid-teens, occasionally her lost tail was a problem and needed healing work doing on it.

George was still very full of himself when I got home at about half past ten – he and Rhapsody were hanging around the top gate of the field and since I have to open the yard gate to get the car in, naturally I stopped to talk to them. George decided to do one of his lightning-fast lunges at me (how dare you look past me to another horse??) but instead of opening his mouth and coming at me teeth-first, in his familiar style, he kept his mouth shut. It still knocked me staggering but it wasn’t sharp, it didn’t try to bite and it felt very like being lightly punched in the jaw by a warm suede boxing glove! He also complacently accepted me scratching his tail root, once I was standing up straight again. Winkling Rhapsody out of the field to eat her third meal of the day past George is always a challenge, but I achieved it by talking to him at one end of the field boundary then sprinting up to the other and letting Rhapsody out before George caught up! He was fairly civilised about letting her back into the field afterwards, too, and I only had to ask him to step back twice before he let her through the gate.

Charlie and Angel are now free-ranging like all the other chickens, so their agoraphobia seems to have cleared up nicely. All three silkies now sleep in a heap on the floor of the chicken run and Snowball has been crowing at the moon – it’s as well I don’t have any close neighbours!

 

 

Apparently they’ve been taking lessons of seagulls, though. This was the view through my car windscreen as I got home to feed the critters this afternoon – all four ducks on top of the fence, while a drake is sitting on the ground underneath. The ducks definitely fly better and balance on things better, being half the size!

You can see in these two pix the emerging facial differences – the ducks have a red but smooth patch above the bill, but the drakes are starting to develop various lumps and bumps. By they time they’re full grown they’ll have amazing carunculated red faces – like this one I found on Wikipedia.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/19/Cairina_moschata_momelanotus_head.jpg/2560px-Cairina_moschata_momelanotus_head.jpg

I’ve noticed they’re starting to display to each other – head-bobbing and hissing softly.

Charlie and Angel have been out in the yard foraging! They may even turn into proper free range chickens yet…