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.

So I also

So I also want to post this today before it completely loses topicality – a photo of Obama giving his inauguration speech, the way we saw it on our lovely new LCD screen. History! The Italian simultaneous translation was pretty poor but we managed to make out some of his actual words beneath the overlay. This in fact was one occasion when the new digital TV's unencrypted BBC World channel would have come into its own, but for some reason the signal quality has gone from dodgy-but-watchable to so-poor-we're-not-even-going-to-show-you-the-picture, so we had to watch what RAI deigned to give us, which was about an hour's worth. Which was just about enough, actually, especially as I had to skip in and out of the kitchen during the speech as I was in the middle of making a lentil shepherd's pie. I bet Michelle Obama doesn't have to do that.

Watching Obama was quite a strange experience. Everything is so right about him that it's almost unreal. He looks like a film star and we felt we were watching a film, especially after we spent last year intensively watching the entire seven seasons of The West Wing – Obama is so photogenic and wish-fulfilling that it was hard not to believe we were watching an unexpected Season 8. Hope Obama lives up to the hype and gives us a happy ending.

The shepherd's pie was good.

I haven’t written

I haven’t written for a while because this is a quiet time of year and the only thing I ever seemed to want to write about has been the weather … So – to get the weather out of the way – in the past two or three weeks we’ve had ice, freezing fog, sleet, rain, fog, sunshine, showers, and yesterday a big windy storm. The snow took ages to melt and has finally done so, leaving our road a soggy, rutted cart-track that non-4WD vehicles have a problem getting up. At least it’s an improvement on the solid ice skid-slope that it was for a few weeks when the temperature hardly went above zero – coming down it was terrifying. It's now bizarrely warm and almost springlike, which as it's only January is one of those cruel tricks that means we shall almost certainly be submerged under a metre snow by the end of tomorrow.

Coming up from the veg patch the other day I noticed that the bird nesting-box that the hornets built their huge nest around seemed to have a large hole in the bottom of it. On closer inspection, I could see that inside the box is – well, a hornets’ nest. It’s full of cells, which I suppose are full of larvae. The hornets must have gnawed (do hornets have teeth?) their way through the wood – and this is proper, 0.5cm-thick wood – and then constructed the inner core of their nest inside the box, and then turned their attention to the outside when they covered it with the layers of beautiful paper. So it was only the outer part that was destroyed in the high winds before Christmas, and I guess we still have a hornet problem.

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?

For two whole days

For two whole days it has been raining solidly, and the world is wet. The valley is a lake. Actual streams are flowing across the field below the veg patch where the sheep were grazing a few weeks ago. The pond has overflowed and the outflow from it has formed another stream running down the gully at the edge of the field. Narrow, fast-flowing torrents are everywhere. Water is everywhere. Within a few minutes of being outside I’m soaked, water runs down my supposedly waterproof trousers into my boots and water drips off my hood and into my eyes and down my neck inside my scarf. The air has turned to water, you breathe in water. The sound of water is everywhere too, the hiss of the rain coming down, the gurgle of the streams that have sprung up, the squelch and splash of my footsteps.

The horse is standing miserably in her field, getting wet. She’s been standing miserably in her field getting wet for 36 hours and she’s very cold now. At lunchtime when I took her hay down she was shivering, which made me worry. Now I take her hay right down and put it in her shelter, which she never goes in because it’s scary; but now this seems ridiculous. She’s freezing to death. I slog back up from the shelter (why did we build it halfway down the field?) and get the piece of rope that’s draped by the gate. Cassie sidles away from me warily but I get the rope round her neck and, surprisingly, she allows herself to be led down the field towards the shelter. We slip and slide together (steep slope) and I hold on to her mane and her neck to stop myself falling over – if she decided to take off now I’d be face down in the mud. But she’s ok and I lead her straight into the shelter, where she promptly wheels around and starts to get agitated. I point out the pile of hay. Mmm, hay, she goes, and starts to munch it, jumping only occasionally when something in the woods startles her. This is really good, actually, as normally she hates her shelter and won’t stand in it at all without getting all neurotic. Now she lets me rub her down with some handfuls of old straw and she does seem calmer.

I go up through the Somme-like field to deal with the rest of the animals. The ducks are in duck heaven and don’t want to go into their pen; I leave them rootling around ecstatically in the puddles. The cats are very unhappy indeed. The dogs come out from their hideaway and start bouncing all over the place. I feed them, then go back to the field to take Cass her feed and a whole load more hay. She’s still standing in her shelter, out of the rain. Who knows if she’ll be brave enough to stay there all night?

Last night down in the field

Last night down in the field just after sunset I saw the current conjunction of Venus and Jupiter, together with the new moon, in the west. Not sure it really comes out well in the photo but it was very beautiful (you can just see Jupiter above Venus to the right, if you squint; well, trust me, it's there!). If we get a clear night I’ll take the telescope out and try to see Jupiter’s moons – the four Galilean moons should be visible. I’ve never seen them and Jupiter is currently so easy to find that it seems silly not to try, even though the telescope still hasn’t been properly aligned. Andromeda is right overhead at the moment so Alessio and I are going to look for the Andromeda Galaxy with binoculars – saw it last summer but the winter skies are better, less hazy. So here’s hoping the cloud clears.

So, weeks have gone by since I last posted and winter is here now. There’s snow on the mountains; down here in the foothills we’ve had a lot of rain, and the horse’s field is a swamp of mud. She loves rolling in it and is back to her winter Mudpuppy incarnation.

The hornets’ nest has been struck by tragedy: recent high winds have damaged it, I think beyond repair. The beautiful sculpted-paper outside was blown off in bits and now the internal cells (like honeycomb) are exposed and gradually being blown away. The hornets themselves seem to have disappeared. This solves our hornet problem, of course, but it’s hard not to feel sad for them. All that work and effort. Life is tough in the jungle!

The veg patch is doing okay but not loving the sub-zero temperatures we had last week (minus 4.5 one night) nor the gales – the cime di rapa (turnip tops) are all bent over and soggy. We sowed broad beans, onions and garlic at the beginning of November (traditionally round here they sow broad beans around the Day of the Dead and All Saints, Oct 31st and Nov 1st) so hopefully those will all just happily while away the winter doing whatever it is they do under the earth and then burst through next spring. The savoy cabbages are thriving, which is good I suppose, though I can’t help viewing all twenty of them with some trepidation. It’s a lot of cabbage.