After the rain

After the rain we had some days of beautiful, crisp, clear, bright, cold weather, which could almost make me like winter, or at least make it tolerable. The horse and I went out for some nice wanders and did some dreaming in the sun.

Sadly we lost another duck, right in the middle of the day, to a mystery predator – but we’re not ruling out Maxim. We have four ducks now, of which one is a male, and the other three are all laying, though not all on the same day. Generally we’re getting two or three eggs a day, sometimes only one. We have an egg glut.

On Boxing Day it started to snow and has been snowing intermittently ever since – not very hard, so we’re not snowed in, but it’s not very pleasant out there. The vicious northeast wind that howled round the house for the first day has stopped, at least, but it’s still very cold. The ducks don’t seem to mind it and they hang out round the pond near the veg patch – grubbing around in the mud on the edge but for some reason failing to actually get in the water. It’s unbelievably frustrating to watch them. Give them a plastic washing-up bowl full of water and they leap in and sit there; give them a pond and it freaks them out. What is the matter with ducks?