Littlies everywhere.

The feathered family has taken a significant leap in numbers. We have Violet babysitting one of our neighbour's little chicks. Rosa has a trifecta, one each - a black, ginger and yellow chick. Boots is such a great mum to her four chick, two gingery and two yellowy. Pippi continues to foster the late Ovaltine's baby Little-Bit, although Slick hatched her she soon realised it wasn't her baby so she abandoned her and that's when Pippi was able to redeem herself as a mother. Slick became broody again a few weeks after the abandonment and set up house in the old tackroom after we removed the door and put it on the gypsy shed. This gal really likes big houses, first the gypsy shed and now the tackroom, anything without a door and she's in! Anyway, she's just hatched five, one dozy little one didn't make it but the other four are doing well. Interesting colours, a yellow, a greenish-black, a ginger and a cream coloured one. They're so tiny. She would have had another two but they got stuck in their shells as they were hatching and died. They received a compost bin burial, it is starting to look like a mass grave in there now.


While I was out and about on the farm I also noticed that our resident wild quails have a string of cotton wool sized chicks too. Quails are hilarious, they have a feather dangling in front of their faces and it seems to throw off their ability to run in a straight line, they run, swerving all over the place looking quite intoxicated. The babies run straight and then veer off to follow their wonky parents, it is quite entertaining. How these tiny little bundles survive is a miracle to me, they look so vulnerable but boy are they fast and they cover a lot of ground in a day, they're on the fenceline of the bush at one end of the farm in the morning and by the afternoon they're at the opposite end.

We also have baby bunnies, two of them. They live in amongst the woodpile under the upturned dinghy. They spend a lot of time out nibbling on the driveway and in the Jenny Craig paddock. They mix and mingle with the chooks every day. I can get within a metre of them before they turn and very slowly hop away their little white tails flashing with every hop.

There's a huge, colourful cock pheasant hanging around at the moment, he's quite stunning. I've heard that pheasants are creatures of habit and like take the same route on their journeys, I can't remember where I read it but the theory was proven when I noticed tracks in the grass and stumbled upon a few birds at the same place whilst on my morning walks. I remember years ago when a new motorway was cut through a piece of farmland, on the week that it opened a pheasant was struck and killed and lay on the side of the motorway for weeks. Every night that I was stuck in traffic I would creep past this lifeless little body and feel so sad, such a beautiful creature wasted, killed because of this motorway. I feel ashamed to be a human sometimes, a member of a race that has so much to answer for. So destructive and flippant about this planet and all of it's inhabitants.

I decided to make a purpose built large a-frame maternity unit. The maternity ward is proving to be a bit of a problem with all the little chicks going into a frenzy at feeding time and overprotective mothers pecking anything that isn't their kin. I cut the timber to size, assembled the apexes but before I had a chance to put the retangular base together I was rudely interrupted by the most intense rain shower I've encountered for a long time. It started with a warning of a couple of rain drops and then launched into a full downpour of epic proportions, the icy cold droplets seemed to aim down my butt-crack and neck of my t-shirt, before I knew it I was drenched.