New girl lamb is outside, we turned One Horn and baby out on Friday. I was worried about her falling in the pond (baby not OH), but she is bounding around and seems firm on her feet. She has white ears and is quite easy to spot even in the rushes. She is very cute.
The three orphaned lambs are out in the big field now, and have been for the last week. They have really put on condition and generally don’t go too far (although I did have to rescue Freckles from across the road). They hear Ian and come running.
We have not let the angoras out again since they tried to climb over the wall, but we have let Evie (aka Baby) our into the field under the assumption that she won’t go too far from the others. This will give her plenty of grass. The fencing is a priority as there is plenty of grass in the big field, but we need to stop them from escaping. This will save us from buying hay, which of course would be useful. We went up to Mikes yesterday to get some hay as we had run out, and had filled the back of the lada with slightly damp hay. Hopefully he’ll get a new delivery soon.
We have experienced the difference between sheep nuts and sheep cake. Sheep nuts are like little pellets, cake is like wine corks. This was a bit of a suprise to our teethless sheep! They have been sucking them I think! Need to keep an eye on what we pick up next time as the sheep cake has been a bit of a trial and we have had to chop the cake up into little bits for Lambey.
No sign of duckings from Amelia which I am sure means that they are not going to hatch. She spent quite a lot of time away from her nest so I wonder if the eggs got cold?
Mother hen no 1 (psycho mummy from last year) has been stood outside the duckling run, gazing in at the ducklings. I wonder if she is looking in at her ‘babies’ or saying to them to wait until they get out and then she will explain quite how she felt about being ‘conned’ into bringing up a load of ducklings and not chicks!
At some stage we are going to have to introduce the gruesome twosome to the chick outside. They were all from the same clutch, however these were the ones where the mother hen was ‘helping’ them out and were removed as eggs and not reintroduced to her. It has got a bit colder now, so we’ll probably wait until it warms up again before taking the chicks outside and letting the mother free.
Off now to muck out the rabbits and the goats. The pygmies tip their water over every day so their stable is a bit of a quagmire, I think the rabbits will be somewhae easier.