The duck is sad

The duck is sad. Since the male duck died during the night last week, cause of death unknown but at least it wasn't the usual violent fox event, the female has been all alone and lonely. I hoped she'd make friends with the new hens, but although they seem to cohabit quite peacefully they don't hang out together outside the run. Last time we had a single duck, she became an inseparable companion to the dogs, but this duck doesn't seem keen on doing that either. She and Mr Duck were such a funny and definite couple that although I know it's wrong to attribute human emotions to critters, it's hard not to imagine Mrs as suffering a little now, in her own inscrutable duck way.

Meanwhile the chickens are thriving but are not laying yet. They're very beautiful, and fairly tame. Quite often we find them sitting halfway up the steps to the front door and I'm sure it's only a matter of time before they venture into the house...

I found a tortoise

I found a tortoise whilst out riding the other day. The tortoise was just wandering across the field, headed for the woods. I took it home and phoned the vet to ask about tortoise-keeping, who reacted as if it was a normal occurrence to find a tortoise in the fields, and told me tortoise-keeping was easy, just don't feed it too much lettuce. We left it overnight in the duck house and spent half the next, very hot, day constructing it a state-of-the-art compound with a low wall built of rocks. Apparently tortoises can dig, so we had to bury the base of the rocks so that it couldn't dig its way out. This was hard labour, and I have to admit it was principally carried out by John. I personally made the tortoise a stylish shelter out of an upturned plastic fruit crate though. When we put the tortoise in its new home, it crawled under the shelter and started digging. Feeling smug — no way out there, matey! — I left it some lettuce and various other tempting morsels, and turned to that day's other main project...

... the chickens. The hen house is finally ready and we now have three gorgeous black, ginger-speckled hens. They seem remarkably well adjusted compared to the rest of our animals and, after spending their first day inside the hen house (perhaps just because it's so nice), they now come out and peck around in the run in a satisfyingly chicken-like way. The run is actually the duck run, and we weren't sure how the ducks would react, but in fact they all managed to co-exist quite happily together the first night, so I was confident that all would be well. My main worry remained the tortoise, who didn't want to eat anything but lettuce and alternated between digging in the far corner of its shelter and then sitting there half-buried and catatonic for hours, or roaming round its walled compound like a caged tiger, only slower. But then...

... the ducks failed to come home the second night, and nor did they show up the following morning. We decided that either a fox had got them or they had run away, believing we were replacing them with updated fowl. I felt very sad and guilty, though who'd have thought ducks were capable of such sensitivity? Anyway, yesterday morning the ducks turned up again — on the pond, hidden among the bulrushes. The male came up from the pond to get his feed and basically started behaving normally — and living with the hens — while the female remained in the middle of the pond and refused to come off, even when we brandished a broom at her. That was yesterday. She's still there today. The male calls to her and she replies: but she's not coming off that pond. Isn't she hungry? She's been floating there for at least 24 hours and maybe a lot more. At least she's safe from the fox. Meanwhile...

... the tortoise has escaped. Who knew tortoises were so good at rock-climbing? Inscrutable though it was, it didn't seem happy in captivity and I only hope that this time it makes it all the way to the far side of the field and into the woods, where it can hibernate in peace.

We've had a week of gorgeous weather

We've had a week of gorgeous weather and have finally been able to get on with planting up the veg patch. Thirty tomato plants, three rows of green beans and two of borlotti, 20 lettuces, six courgettes, four patty-pan squashes, eight cucumbers, some aubergines and peppers, and more to come: we still need to plant out the autumn squashes. The broad beans are ready to crop and are doing really well, though only a single pea plant germinated in the two rows we sowed. The garlic and onions we planted at the same time as the broad beans are also doing well. We also have raspberry canes (given as cuttings two years ago by a friend), gooseberry bushes and a whitecurrant bush, all flourishing. It's all looking especially neat this year because John's been asked to take some photographs for a book on growing your own food, so he's been weeding it ferociously.

There's bad news on the ducks: just a day or two after my last post, four of them disappeared in broad daylight, and we later found some feathers and a bit of blood — a fox must have got them, though it's odd that there weren't more signs of an evident massacre. Unfortunately it managed to take four females, leaving us with two males and a female, not a sustainable threesome at all. After a few days of dithering we decided to get rid of the older male, so John summarily despatched it and cremated it on the bonfire! We're now left with a a male/female pair, which is fine and might lead to some ducklings later this summer. In the meantime for our egg supply we'll need to buy some point-of-lay chickens (you can't buy point-of-lay ducks here, as no one keeps ducks for eggs), which is okay by me as I'd wanted some hens anyway, to make a change from duck eggs.

Cassie has now finished moulting and looks lovely and sleek and elegant (as elegant as a stocky little mountain horse can look — but beautiful). I've walked her up a few times to look at Mario's donkey, who brays like crazy and gets very excited, running up and down the fence and practically scrambling over it in his eagerness to say hello; the first time she saw him Cass looked astonished and somewhat alarmed, but now she neighs back to him and then just puts her head down to eat. I don't think she's that impressed with him really. Yesterday I rode her for the first time in ages and apart from some jumpy behaviour because of the wind and a moment of recalcitrance in not wanting to leave the yard, she was pretty good.

The caterpillars are into their third instar but I'll post on that tomorrow.

The ducks are

The ducks are about the only ones having fun in this weather. Yet another cold and rainy day, in one of the coldest and rainiest springs we can remember in all the time we've been here. This photo shows one of the ducks the other day just after she'd laid an egg outside the pen, in the yard. We have five female ducks at the moment and usually we get four or five eggs every morning. This morning I found six. Ducks' capacity for mystery grows ever more profound.

I'm finally starting to

I'm finally starting to get a bit more energy after my long and (for me) unusual bout of illness and ailment. Today was sunny but cold, but in any case I was inside chained to my computer, looking somewhat longingly out at the fields. At 4.30 I went out to take Maxim for his walk before the sun disappeared behind the hills. First time I've been out for ages without my woolly hat! That felt good.

We went along above the vineyard and up the track, where we came upon a small wizened contadino halfway up a tree at the edge of the field. He was pruning, on a ladder in fact, not actually in the tree. I greeted him cautiously because he couldn't see me coming and I didn't want to make him fall off. He answered without mishap and we had a chat about dog-walking and dogs running away and dogs being chained, most of which I followed despite the thick dialect. No idea who this guy is, but he knew me. 

Walking on, it was nice to see the signs of spring — primroses, daffodils, one huge purple crocus, and several other small wizened contadini doing their stuff up trees, in veg patches or with chainsaws. The air rings with the sound of flirting birds and diesel motors. And it still doesn't feel exactly warm, there's still snow in places, reminding us that we're only in the middle of March and it's early to count our chickens, springwise...

Talking of which, the ducks are laying three eggs a day now. Time to make lemon curd.

Three eggs

Three eggs from the ducks this morning — nice, but moving us ever closer to serious egg glut crisis. The two ducklings are fully grown but we still can't tell whether they're male or female. If their tail gets a little curl, that's a sign they're male, but as yet their tails are resolutely straight. Perhaps they're both girls. Six eggs a day would be too many, way too many.

It was a dramatic autumnal morning with the sun breaking through very dark stormclouds and a rain shower falling lightly. In the western sky the full moon was sinking towards the hills and a rainbow hovered over the woods. Everything looked shiny and the colours very intense. I didn't want to come inside.

Ducklings

Ducklings! Three babies. I'm a very proud mamma, and so is the duck.

The mamma duck is still

The mamma duck is still sitting on the eggs as her full-time job, and comes out every morning to quack very loudly until I go out and feed her. No sign of any ducklings yet. I went to look at the nest this morning because Maria told me that if you hold an egg up to the light you can see if it has an embryo inside it and I wanted to try that. Unfortunately the guard-spiders were too much for me and I couldn't steel myself to get close enough to pick up an egg. So we'll just have to wait and see . . .

The duck mysteriously disappeared

The duck mysteriously disappeared overnight and we feared the worst. But it turns out she is broody! She's made a nest at the back of the haybarn and is sitting on six eggs. She staggers out once or twice a day for water and food, and then goes back to sit again. If you go close (which is scary because she has a lot of very large guard-spiders) she starts to get distressed and open her beak and pant, which is a sad spectacle so we leave her alone. Apparently duck eggs take about four weeks to hatch, so we'll see what happens. She's stopped laying now so the meantime we have no eggs ourselves, which is a bit annoying. The young ducks and the male have come to a sort of accommodation and co-exist in relative peace, although when the big duck comes back he rushes over to her and chases the others off.

The veg patch is acting strangely. We have a lot of tomatoes ripening now but not many new ones developing. Loads of cucumbers, which we are attempting to pickle. The courgettes have gone from glut to dearth in just this past week or so and the patty pan squashes aren't producing at all, whereas in previous years by now the sight of another patty pan was enough to make us almost lose the will to live. The green beans are thriving though, and the various lettuces. And it's time to rotovate a new bit and plant up for the autumn – leeks, broccoli, fennel, cabbage.

Still, before doing that I aim to spend at least one day at the lake. Haven't been up there yet this year and feel in need of some time doing nothing except reading, chatting and occasionally turning over so that I tan with perfect evenness.

Just back

Just back from a trip to England, where it was hotter than it was here, apparently. But we seem to have had enough heat combined with rain to allow the veg patch to flourish and the land to be more jungly — and greener — than usual at this time of year. Herbie the new kitten is gradually but systematically wrecking the house, with a brief calm, and in retrospect blissful, interlude while he recovered from being bitten by one of Mario's small dogs.

The baby ducks are about a month old now — not so baby any more — and are being severely harassed by the big male duck. He’s violently aggressive towards them, though it’s clearly a hormonal aggressivity and what he's after is sex, not murder — but the poor things dash about going “peep peep” at the top of their little voices, flapping about and desperately trying to get away from him while he pursues them with single-minded determination. The grown-up female, showing no sisterly solidarity, ignores the whole performance — actually, she’s probably relieved.

We were afraid he was going to harm them if they were shut in together so we’ve been keeping them separate at night, while letting them loose together during the day so they can get used to each other; but the other day Alessio and I were at the market where I bought the ducklings originally, and he persuaded me to stop and ask the guy “what to do about the boy duck”. So I did. And that provided another of those female-English-city-slicker humiliations which are a fundamental part of life here.

“The male,” I explained carefully (bearing in mind there was a child present), “is very aggressive towards the female ducklings.”

Pitying looks and smirks exchanged between duck man and gap-toothed old farmer client hanging round for a chat. Patronizing comments such as “It’s just nature, love” and so on helpfully furnished.

“Yes, I know, but he’s so aggressive, I wasn’t sure if it was, er, normal.”

Overt grins and more patronizing comments along the lines of “Oh, it’s normal all right darlin’.”

“Yes, I know, but I’m afraid he’s going to hurt them.”

Outright laughter and more patronizing comments of the “well, they’ll get used to it, fnaar fnaar” variety, followed, at last, by some advice — to just put them all together and let them get on with it. And by the information that breeders usually keep one male to every eight females, so if we only have four females . . .

I scuttled off, feeling like a willing party to duck rape. Still, it’s a relief to know it’s all only natural.

The ducks played a little duck joke

The ducks played a little duck joke on us last night. We couldn’t find them at dusk to put them away: they’d just disappeared into thin air. For a fox to have come and taken both of them in broad daylight without leaving any trace seemed almost impossible, especially as both the dogs were around and would surely have barked. We looked all round the garden and in the woods, in the barns and outhouses and all sorts of nooks and crannies but no sign of them.

This morning I looked out of the window hopefully, in case they’d arrived back during the night and were pecking away in their run, but no. Thinking sadly how much we really are the kiss of death for ducks, I went out to feed the rest of the animals. When I was getting Cassie’s hay from the barn I heard a little quacky noise, and then the male duck popped up chirpily from behind a bale of hay. He looked at me with a kind of “Yeah? So what?” look. He and the girl duck must have spent the night in a cosy corridor squeezed between the bales and the wall of the barn.

Very funny, ducks.

In reality, they were being very clever: right at the back of where they’d slept, I found an egg. Her first egg since they stopped laying in December, and proof that she has recovered from her recent near-death experience with the fox.

The constant sound

The constant sound of trickling water has been today’s acoustic effect as the snow finally melts away, sloooowly. Not only is it still light(ish) at 6.00pm but it’s also still above freezing, both facts that perk me up considerably. Especially if I pretend I haven’t seen the weather forecast for the rest of the week.

It was so nice and almost-balmy (well, ok, I was still wearing three pairs of socks and my attractive woolly hat) today that I let the ducks out for the first time since the fox catastrophe. The injured female is still bent over and hunched but she’s eating and definitely on the mend; the male is fine. But they’re both still incredibly nervous. They tiptoed out of the pen and wandered about looking somewhat dazed for a few minutes, then seemed to remember what a duck’s life is all about, and went off grubbing in the mud, the female hanging close to the male and making little chirrupping noises which sounded very much like duck joy. When I looked for them ten minutes later, out of the kitchen window, they’d voyaged down to the pond and were splashing about in it like crazy, having a brilliant time. The female spent ages washing and preening – ever since the attack she has been dirty and muddy and rather motheaten-looking because she hasn’t been able to keep herself properly clean. I could see that in the pond today she was just in duck heaven.

When I went to fetch them to put them away she was a different creature – clean and sparkly and white – and she stretched her wings out wide and flapped them (one still trailing somewhat) and then fluffed up all her feathers and shook them. Who can say if a duck’s happy or not, really, but this is an amazing recovery.

Cass shows off this season’s

Cass shows off this season’s must-have accessory, a stylish coat of dried mud.

Yesterday I spent half an hour of very hard work brushing it off her, took her out for a walk and as soon as she hit the grass – down she went. She rolled five times during an hour’s wander, and by the end of it looked as muddy as she had before I brushed her. Only wetter. She frisked about like crazy on the grass too – you could see she hadn’t been out for such a long time. I took her out again today but didn’t bother brushing her first (I’m not stupid), and she was a lot calmer, I even got her trotting circles in the yard. Yay!

Duck is still sad, with her head down, though she's drinking and maybe eating and seems a lot stronger – she walks about (well, staggers really) and stretches her poor damaged wings. But we think she might never be able to lift her head properly, so this will pose a dilemma – she wouldn’t be able to preen and it can’t be very comfortable either – and I don't know if it would be right to keep her like that. She doesn’t seem to be in active pain any more so we’ll continue to see how she goes over the next few days. Maybe as she gets stronger she’ll lift her head. Maybe not.

Lovely dawn sky

Lovely dawn sky this morning, though by the time I’d run inside for my camera the most intense colours had faded. Almost makes it worth getting up before first light. (Almost.)

Yesterday evening I realized that the duck’s beak seemed to be pasted closed by gunk and dried blood, and I wondered if she was even able to drink, let alone eat. So we dipped it in warm salt water and cleaned it up, and that did seem to make a difference. When I gave her back the fresh water she took some sips, and then I put some food in front of her and she truffled into that in quite a starving manner. So that’s a good sign. Her head is still bowed right down though, in a really unnatural and disconcerting way. The male ate and drank yesterday and stretched his wings and tried to flap them, so you can see that although he’s still stiff and achey, he’s on the mend.

I went to the cinema last night (Revolutionary Road: a disappointment), and driving home late, I turned the radio on and caught a just-so-Italian discussion on how to make the perfect pesto.

You assemble your ingredients. Fresh basil. Two cheeses: Parmesan and seasoned pecorino, adjusting the relative quantities depending on how piccante you want your pesto to be. Garlic, which you mash slightly with the back of a spoon. Pine nuts. Oil (extra-virgin olive). Coarse sea salt. And a spoonful or two of the pasta cooking water, for starch.

Your mortar is of course made of marble, and your pestle of olive wood. And you simply mix everything together, crushing and mashing and pounding as required, until you have your pesto.

The two presenters spent a good ten minutes on this, talking with not only real enthusiasm but also deep-seated knowledge (where the best pine nuts come from, what kind of salt), even though I don’t think they were professional foodies. I couldn’t imagine such a discussion taking place on the radio in England, not without some degree of pretension.

Made me want to go and sow my basil seeds.

It’s 5.30 and I’ve just come in

It’s 5.30 and I’ve just come in from feeding the animals – and it's still light outside. What a great feeling that is. The day has been warm with lots of heavy rain showers and the ground is waterlogged, with all the trees dripping, but this evening the sky is somewhat clearer and maybe it’ll be nice tomorrow. The poor horse is soaking wet and covered in mud but she seems happy enough, apart from being bored because I haven’t taken her out for days.

The two remaining ducks are still hanging in there. The male will be fine, I think – he spent yesterday outside (in the run) and today going in and out of the duckhouse, and he’s been drinking and preening and trying to stretch his wings, all of which must be good signs, though he hasn’t eaten anything. The female is still alive but is just sitting in the duckhouse in not very good shape. Her neck droops over so that her beak is pointing downwards and almost touches the ground; I think the fox must have damaged some muscles or tendons in the neck, or maybe she’s just too tired to hold her head up. I think she’s drunk a little water. I’d have thought that if she were going to die, she’d have died by now; yesterday, I saw her keel over on to her side and just lie there, which is really bizarre for a duck and I was certain she was dying, but she didn’t and next time I checked on her she was upright again. So we just keep on waiting.

I wandered down

I wandered down the slope at 7.30 this morning to feed the animals, plate of food-scraps in hand, with the vague sensation that something was wrong but unable to pin it down. As I rounded the corner of the house all became clear. The ducks were silent – normally in the morning they hear me coming and start quacking and burbling excitedly – silence is sinister, and that’s what had stirred the feeling of unease in me.

It was a sight that made my blood run cold and I just stood there for several seconds taking it in. Something had got at the ducks. The roof of the pen had been knocked off and inwards. One of the white ducks, covered in a slick of mud, stood against the fence, her head looking upwards but her eyes blank. The male duck was huddled in a corner. The dark-feathered female was hunched in the middle of the run. They were all still, totally still, with an absolute lack of movement that was frightening. I thought they must all be dead – but the white one was standing up, so how could it be dead? As I moved slowly closer they started to move, the male scrambled in slow motion into the duckhouse, and the white one, too, managed to turn and stagger after him. The dark one was bowed over and I couldn’t see her head, but then she slowly lifted it out from beneath her, and then just as effortfully let it droop back onto the ground between her legs. The other white duck was missing; there was blood in patches on the ground and a few scattered white feathers.

I fetched John and he carried the injured duck away to put it out of its misery. We inspected the remaining two, and the white one had clearly been gripped in the fox’s jaws from behind, her shoulders were bitten and bloody and when we moved her blood dripped out of her beak. But we can’t tell how bad her internal injuries are and it’s possible she’ll survive. The male looks traumatized but physically ok. We’ve left them in the duckhouse to see whether the female gets better or worse during the day, and later we’ll decide whether we need to put her out of her suffering too. We moved the pen and I hosed down the mud and blood. The smell was sickening and is still in my nostrils.

I know they’re just ducks. And this was just a fox getting some ducks. How much more classic a country-life event can you have? But something about the aftermath of that unmalicious violence – the weird stillness of the ducks, the clarity of their trauma, the way the injured one bowed her head and shivered in fits – was really shocking. I’m not a sentimental person but this is horrible.

The coldest temperature

The coldest temperature we’ve yet had this winter was —8ºC a few nights ago. The leftover snow has turned to a crunchy crust and our access road is an ice-slide. The valleys, though, are green (or brown) again. We had some bright, crisp days after New Year and went for a good walk with the dogs, but as I look out of the window I see it’s starting to snow again…

I took the horse out for a walk two or three times to see how she liked the snow – she stared at everything as if it all looked completely new and unexpected (as perhaps it did) but was fairly calm, considering. I took her into the big grass field and she pawed the snowy ground to uncover the grass just like wild ponies do. She also rolled several times in the snow, which made me laugh – it must be like some kind of therapeutic beauty treatment for her!

The ducks don’t mind the cold at all and continue their happy duck existence. They've finally discovered how to get in and out of the pond and have decided they like it: now they spend all day down there, scrabbling about on the edges, following the overflow stream down the side of the field, swimming about in the water, or just hanging out. It’s very nice to see them behaving like, well, ducks with a pond.

I hate to think what the veg patch will look like once we finally wrest it back from the elements. Frozen fennel, broken-stemmed greens, ice-scalded broccoli… Even the cabbages don't look very healthy. The other day we made nettle soup (from nettles we’d frozen in the autumn) and it was delicious. And free.

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?

We have a new duck

We have a new duck. This duck is one of a pair that were won as ducklings at a fair by a schoolfriend of Alessio’s, whose family were able to keep both ducklings over the summer in their small apartment garden, but who don’t have the facilities to keep them over the winter. We agreed to take both ducks, but sadly one of them escaped and was run over on the road (few ducks come to a happy end round here), so in the end we’ve just got the one.

She’s the same age as our other four and is another dark-coloured one. We put her in the pen when she arrived, with the others outside, and after a few minutes of looking at one another through the wire and quacking excitedly, it became clear that they weren’t going to be able to work out how to actually get together, either by means of our ducks going into the pen or the new duck going out. Ducks can never cease to amaze by their sheer dimness. So we lifted her out and plonked her down among the resident ducks, and they made friends pretty much straight away. There was a bit of pecking of the new duck, but nothing major or really vicious. I knew they’d be all right when I checked on them after a couple of hours and they were all looking in the same direction, whereas initially our four would face one way and the new one would face them. They all survived overnight okay and now are inseparable, doing everything and going everywhere together in the way that we’ve come to know and love in ducks.

And with any luck they’ll start laying soon.

We got back late

We got back late from the boy’s birthday party last night, around 9.00pm, when it was nearly dark. I went straight to feed the horse and close the ducks in. The ducks had put themselves to bed in their pen and I closed the door without looking at them very closely – just a group of ducks. It was a bright full moon and the horse was in the same agitated state she’d been in earlier in the afternoon, pacing round her field and snorting manically in the direction of the woods. She wouldn’t come up to the gate so I just left her bucket and put some hay down for her and left her to it.

This morning I got up very early and went down to do the feeding. The ducks were in their house but they tumbled out into their pen when they heard me and I chucked some feed in for them. Let the dogs out of the barn and went down to feed horse. She hadn’t come up to eat her feed or hay overnight, which is very unusual, perhaps unprecedented, so she must have spent the whole night fretting and pacing, poor girlie. I went into the field and she came halfway up to meet me – all covered in dried sweat and still all jumpy though not as bad as yesterday. I stayed around to keep her company, hoping she’d calm down. It was about 7.00 at this point and a cool, autumn-like morning; the sun came up from behind the hills and started to warm me up, and the horse finally gathered the courage to go and eat her hay, although she snorted in horror at the sight of the wheelbarrow, which I’d left by the gate. She definitely still thought there was some scary monster in the woods. And perhaps there was.

I spent a while tidying up the field and then went up to let the ducks out of their pen. Noticed that there was no egg in the duckhouse, but as Big Duck has been laying erratically recently (eggs in the herb bed) I didn’t think much of it. Then I noticed that there were only four ducks – the young ones. Big Duck sometimes shoots out first and whizzes up to the dogs’ area, so I went and checked up there, but she wasn’t in sight. I began to feel very uneasy. My parents had come out to join me by now, and we walked along the track below the house – and discovered a large quantity of giveaway white feathers scattered over the path. A fox must have got her yesterday evening, most likely while we were out – I didn’t count the ducks when I closed them in, just assumed they were all there.

So we have lost Big Duck, and it’s a sad day. It’s the boy’s birthday and we haven’t told him yet as he’ll be upset and it’s not news you want to hear on your birthday. We’re all upset: she was our duck with character (although “personality”, as my mother described it, might be taking it a bit far) and we had a lot of fun watching her hang out with the dogs, take a bath in their drinking bowl, and waddle along after them when they went off to bark at something.

Maybe the horse really did sense something scary in the woods. Ducks come and ducks go, but we will miss Big Duck.