I’ve been watching the magpies that seem to be very fond of the field just behind the house. Five of them sit in a big circle and the other day two pheasants were included in the circle. What are they doing? The weather is odd, I was ambling around outside the house and the ancient ears clocked a buzzing sound. There were two bumblebees busy feeding on the flowering bushes, seems a bit late, but we haven’t had any frost so I suppose they are the survivors. Chas and I also saw one of the roe deer, we disturbed it snoozing in a bed of bracken and it went off at high speed white tail flashing. The alpacas have moved out of that field so perhaps a takeover was in order.
We’ve been eating road kill in the spirit of frugality. I found a fat rabbit on the lane on Monday that made an excellent casserole and a pheasant yesterday whose breast has gone into the freezer. There are loads of dead pheasants about on the road through the woods but most are too mangled to contemplate.
We’ve been doing alpaca toe nail trimming today as quite a number of them are getting too long post shearing in July. Others are fine so they must grow at different rates. The next job is an ADE run through the whole herd. We prefer to do one thing at a time as otherwise you have too many lists and it all gets very confusing. Must be all those years of sauvignon, the synapses are slow.