A sad day on the farm

• Tweet

It’s been a sad old day on the farm.

I’m afraid nasty Mr Fox has paid us a visit again.

He obviously did not heed my last letter to him.

As regular readers of my blog will know, our five bantam chickens would not go in the coop. It was amusing how they perched in the trees all night and even survived severe gales.

The down side to tree perching though is that they tend to make their way down to the ground at the first sight of daylight.

At the moment, it can be as early as 5am.

On Tuesday morning, the dogs were going mad at about 5.30am. I was getting up for work so I went out to see what was wrong. Usually they do bark a lot at cats. I couldn’t see anything so I just carried on with my day.

It was only when Hubster said this morning that he hadn’t seen the bantams that I groaned and put two and two together.

One of our horsey ladies also admitted she had seen feathers up the fields.

I know it is a fact of farm life.

Animals die.

My ex battery hens, the silkies and Orpingtons live on the regular coop so they get put a way every night and we only let them out at 7am.

The bantams were really flighty birds though. I honestly don’t know how they got caught.

The saddest thing about this whole episode is poor, poor, St Cookie.

She is missing feared dead.

She went through the horror of being nearly pecked to death, had her neck rung because her injuries were that bad, came back from the dead, recovered and was really enjoying life.

All until Mr Fox came and showed us that St Cookie may have cheated death before but he was going to make sure she didn’t cheat death again.

The silver lining is that the broody bantam is still sitting on her eggs in the little barn so we still have one.

I’m just so sad about St Cookie.

This is when I think I’m too soft for this farmer’s wife business.