It's been all about poultry lately. Just over a week ago, I collected Christmas Dinner and his/her five brothers and sisters (Thanksgiving Dinner, New Year's Dinner, Easter Dinner - and so on, you get the idea!) from Boussac Market. We've always had Dindes Grises in the past (Bronze turkeys) but this year only Blanches were available. They're not quite as pretty but they're identical in every other respect. They have the same nice turkey nature and no sense of fear at all.

In fact, they just don't have any sense. We were grooming Oscar the llama in readiness for a trek yesterday, and the turkeys kept wandering over to stand right next to his feet. Now llamas don't especially like being groomed, and fidget a lot. It's down to Oscar's amazingly gentle nature (which he shares with all his fellow camelids) that the turkeys didn't get stomped on. Then the turkeys got lost. We like our poultry to free range but the turkeys are taking it to extremes. The chickens and ducks range widely but generally never beyond certain limits, we've noticed. And they tend to stick together. Not the turkeys. They head off in one direction and just keep going. And then at a certain point they get fed up with each other and go it alone. It took us a couple of hours yesterday to locate the lads in our large field of waist-high barley. They have been temporarily confined to quarters in one of the stables until we can make the largest llama field turkey proof and keep them in that.

A couple of weeks ago we came across an abandoned wild duck's nest of rapidly cooling eggs. There it was, was just plonked down in the middle of the grassy bank by our top lake, with not even the slightest attempt to hide it. We put some leaves on top of the eggs while we kept a discreet watch to see if mum would come back. But she didn't, so what to do? Both our bantams had gone broody so we decided we'd take half the duck eggs and put them under Leopard and Puma (named by the children, in case you wondered!). And about a week later, we were delighted to see two proud mothers strutting around with three baby ducklings each. We've called them the bantlings. We've lost one, but the remaining five are doing very well. Worried that our cats are a threat (although they are actually scared of our chickens), we've been feeding the felines to the point of bursting so we're hoping that's enough to keep the bantlings safe. The photo shows Leopard and her babies. (The mother duck never came back to her nest.)

Finally my three digging chickens sadly met their match. They took to wandering into next door's field. We brought them back the first time, and they stuck closer to home for the next week or so. But off they went again. Their Eglu stayed empty that night so next morning Ruadhri and I went off on a find-and-retrieve mission. But all we found were a lot of white feathers. Somebody else got to them first. I shall miss my digging chickens, but at least until I get round to filling them in, I have their legacy of large holes in the lawn to remember them by.