The hen with the strange tuft of feathers on her neck has used up another of her nine lives, or however many lives it is that chickens have. I went out this morning to let them out of the hen house into their run, and found her waiting in the garden beside the run. We try hard to make sure that all of the chickens are safely back inside their pen before shutting the run pop hole in the evening, but it is quite difficult to be sure they're all there when they're all the same colour, and keep going in and out of the house while you're counting. Any stragglers have a second chance to be let in when one of us goes to shut the door of the hen house for the night, but the one with the funny neck evidently didn't present herself last night. Fortunately for her, the fox didn't come calling this time.
As I said, we try to look after them, but it is up to them as well to show some survival instincts. Those that don't learn to behave sensibly don't last. We had one pair of Marans who were both taken within weeks of arriving, because they were determined to forage along the side of the wood in spite of our best efforts to direct them back into the main body of the garden. The hen with the strange tuft is the most prone to wander of the present lot, and this was the second night she's spent in the open, but so far she has led a charmed life.
The cats, meanwhile, have all decided that they like the pouches of food formulated specially for geriatric cats. Senior, the manufacturers call them. We got some as an experiment for the big anxious tabby, because he was becoming so thin, and always so hungry, and then made himself sick eating too much, and we thought the special geriatric food might be more easily digestible. Digestible or not, now they all want it, and since they are all technically Senior it is difficult to say they shouldn't have it.
Lovely food it may be, at least from a cat's perspective, but I should like to meet whoever designed the pouches. Or at least, not so much meet them as hear them explain for five minutes why they thought that packaging design was a good idea, while simultaneously massaging cat food into the skin of their hands. When I rip the top off the pouch, half the time it doesn't come away cleanly, and I am left with a flap dangling from the top of the pouch and getting in the way, and I have yet to discover the art of squeezing the contents out without getting blobs of cat food on my fingers. As annoying food packaging goes it is right up there with the cartons of yogurt whose foil tops refuse to peel off, until they come away with a jerk firing a spot of yogurt with unerring accuracy at the middle of your shirt front.
I went to see the bees after lunch, who seemed happy enough. They have reached the point in the year where whatever swarming catastrophes were going to happen, have happened, and as the weather has been quite reasonable for foraging none of the colonies are too near starvation, so beyond making sure that they are still queen-right and keeping an eye out for signs of disease, there is not a lot to do. I was rather taken aback that just as I'd got the roof off the first hive, a tractor came and started doing something just over the hedge in the lettuce field, but they ignored it. Bees are said not to be very keen on the vibrations made by some engines, and I've read horror stories of farm workers leaving tractors idling, and coming back to find them covered in bees, but I've never had any complaints or comments from the lettuce farm that my bees were bothering anybody. I do try not to do inspections when there are pickers in the field, though, just in case I put them in a bad mood and they decide to take it out on an innocent passing Lithuanian.
No comments:
Post a Comment