Delivery

Before

We need some hay for the winter to feed the sheep - the grass doesn't grow well enough in the reduced daylight to sustain them . 
The weather has been   dry here so  people have been making hay. We have a small amount (~90 bales) left over from last year and so it need topping up.
 And we got some delivered

During

After

|Its quite hard work climbing up the bales and stacking it to the roof !

Visitors

Some are unwanted  - a wasp nest in the polycrub

But also a fledgling greenfinch 

Got one !

 A stoat, that is .
And reported to Stoats in Orkney facebook group 

 

The ex-Batts

We get hens from the British Hen Welfare Trust

When we started , it was called the Battery Hen Welfare Trust.  Egg production drops off as hens get older.  In a commercial chicken battery farm,  as soon as production starts to fall off , the setup becomes uneconomic - the hens are cleared out , going to pies, dog and cat food and the like, and another lot are brought in .
The BHWT rehomes hens when the battery  is finished with them .  Some don't survive coming out of the battery.

We've had them for a few days , locking them in a henhouse with food and water so they get used to the new 'home' . And even in this setup they have more space than in a battery.
And today we let them out , so they have their first experience of soil, scratching for food, wind and rain .

Weve got an additional 10 hens.  And some are out exploring

Missing feathers is very common  - crowded together in  a cage , they  still have a 'pecking order' ( where do you think the term came from ? ) . The industry solution to this is to trim the beaks of the hens .

And in a battery , the eggs are laid and then roll down an incline. So the idea nest and stuff like that hasn't developed . So you find eggs laid all over the place

 And to compare , here's one of this lot of Ex-batts  and one we got last year

All to save a few pence on the cost of an egg .

Turkeys' out

Well, poults actually.

They have been growing and now have outgrown the run they have been in and are probably large enough to fend off most predators.

So firstly the existing 2 , Tiger and Lily , need to be moved on , so they have been moved out into the  big field

Which vacates the small area for the poults to be moved in.

And they seem quite happy exploring

The Wall

 We have 2 lots of ducks. The Indian Runner ( 'Jemima Puddleduck' ) ones, who lay -relatively-  more eggs and that we intend to breed from , and the other ones , that we have had for years - the Bugherov ducks. The latter lot are keen to explore and will go to extreme ends for food. This includes hopping over the wall that keep the Indian Runners separate. This could cause us problems when it comes to breeding.

So SOMETHING MUST BE DONE 

So we wondered whether we should get a fence put . But they can squeeze through the regular fencing wire . So the wall needed to be extended

 The excuses
- It's a while since I sent on the drystone walling course
- Im using field stone ( the stuff thats lying around) rather than quarry stone.
- I need to extend the wall and to take it down completely and rebuild would be a lot of work
- ( and im not very practiced at this)

And its an opportunity to sort this out - the wall just pokes out a bit . Not sure why
Perhaps to make it easier to step over ? . Or there is a hidden cache of something  in the wall?

So a couple of days later

 ( and the anomaly was just stones sticking out of the wall -  nothing hidden, no idea why it was like that)

The fist bit of the wall has some dense vegetation growing so I thought that would stop the ducks , so i didn't bother doing that bit.

Silly me

And here's where they were hopping through. 

This should stop them   ( i hope!)