A Springtime synopsis, colony collapse, cars and cubs, not necessarily in that order
So, my dear readers it is way past time for a bit of a catch up, I've been remiss for many reasons, all, if I could be bothered to explain them to you, would be both valid and understandable so just take my word for it ok?
Anyway, pull up a chair, open a bottle and let's run through the news from the barn.
We've sad news for my bee-keeping followers, it's been a horrible winter and a worse spring for the little honey monsters but they seemed to have coped until the recent false spring which triggered a colony collapse, despite my best efforts to supplement their foraging with sugar syrup and my desperate attempts to deliver 5000 failed attempts at resuscitation.
I've now cleaned the hives and burned all the existing frames, (and many, many tiny corpses) and have built new frames and moved the hives to a new location where they sit awaiting the delivery of two new colonies, one from my local chum Ian and one from a breeder in Gloucestershire. Let's hope for a bee-friendly summer.
Tennyson assured us that springtime triggers a young mans fancy toward love, mine, sadly, tends more to thinking about fixing the Land Rover. I've tried everything to prevent the constant overheating problem, well, everything except the solution prescribed by my friend (and ex-Land Rover project manager) Keith.
He advised replacing the radiator, but I, of course, being very wise, tried everything else, several times in many cases. Finally I bit the bullet, launched myself into the steamy bazaar of Land Rover spare parts one finds on eBay and sourced a "very similar to" from China by way of Dunstable.
The radiator sat in a box for a month as I manfully prevaricated but finally, spurred by the faint glimmers of sunshine through the trees I embarked on a couple of hours of sustained wriggling, spattering, hose coupling, draining, clipping, flushing, binning and bracing and the old girl is now running sweet as a nut and we're roaring about the farm on the first day of summer (official). I've also found that, as you can see in the photo, lowering the windscreen can triple the number of slow-reflexed flies trapped in my welcoming teeth and eyes.
The chickens and I, well, enjoyed isn't the right word but we've built a healthy loathing for our cunning near neighbours over a series of fox-related adventures recently.
We've repelled incursions, thwarted tunnels and as the girls snooze in snug if odiferous safety I've passed many an evening, shotgunned up, and wrapped around a glass or two, waiting for Brer Fox to slink into the designated combat zone.
Fortunate timing and a German-made fox-trap have promoted a couple of predators to vulpine heaven but I suspect that the German fox may be a good bit smaller than his Surrey cousin. Looking at the imagery from the infra-red camera it seems that our enormous UK based Wonder-Füchse are looking at the trap and thinking, "ooh dear, that looks a bit snug."
So the trap has been most effective at delivering square meals to the young cubs who disturb our repose nightly with their merry chorus of yipping and yapping.
Frankly they are too damn cute at the moment for me to do the sensible thing and dispatch them to foxy-purgatory. Six times now I've had to release a snarling but dewy eyed little bundle of grey cuteness. Foolish I admit but what can I do? as they get rangier and mangier I'll rescind my cub-friendly policy.
The mantra of 'build a better mousetrap' seems to be appropriate here so project big-fox-trap was launched last week.
I've been converting a large dog cage (for transporting pooches to vet and show) into a state of the art fox-box. A weekend with angle-grinder, cable-ties, bike gear cables and a 250 piece Meccano set (thanks again eBay) has resulted in the production of a home-made varmint trap which now sits in the wood awaiting its first not-so-lucky visitor.
So that's you all caught up dear reader. I'm penning this on the second day of sunshine this year, really penning it too, sitting in the sun with paper and pen, how terribly retro.
As the unfamiliar yellow orb in the sky beats down on my milky-white extremities and bronzes them to a livid summer pink I wish you all well.
It's a countryside dilemma for me, I'm by inclination uncomfortable with the taking of life, (obviously I'd make an exception for folk who drive in the middle lane of the motorway) but I do enjoy a bit of shooting, the taste of game, I believe that as a cook I should be prepared to eat what I kill, and kill what I eat ( this works surprisingly well for pheasant and partridge shoots where I rarely manage to hit more than a couple of birds on a good day). But I did go through a vegetarian/Buddhist phase in my twenties, (yes really) being at one with all life and I still feel a little uncomfortable taking a life be it vermin, (rabbit, rat, squirrel, TV presenter, that sort of thing) or game bird, I can do it, I do, but there's a certain undeniable discomfort.
On the other hand, over the past three years or so, I and many of my friends and family have enjoyed the superb eggs produced by my chickens. However as is often the way the local vulpine population have equally, on occasion, enjoyed my chickens. I've invested heavily in replacement chickens, wire-netting, bird-netting, infra-red camera, cement, fenceposts, stones, blood, sweat and tears, I've done fox repelling, fox proofing, fox scaring and since our local vixen has discovered that she can bite and wriggle her way through chicken wire I've spent many joyful evenings cold, wet and irritable hiding in the woods with a twelve-bore on the off-chance.
After startling the fox a week or so ago with her jaws on one of my birds, a very close call, pure chance and a lucky escape for the black hen, I spent an hour or so chatting to some chaps in Germany (good practice of my very minimal German language skills, (basically Würden Sie bitte Englisch sprechen) and I selected and ordered a fox trap.
Inevitably once Paypal had taken my €uros and my new German chums had dispatched the item I happened to glance out of the window toward the chicken run as I was off to bed and spotted the tell tale reflection of fox eyes in the darkness. I knew she'd be well away by the time I was booted and and armed but ever the optimist, grabbed wellies and weapon and headed out. Madam fox had, for once, miscalculated and as I approached, Nemesis in a ski-jacket, she was still trying to wriggle through the wire. She'd jumped in from the top of the fence through the bird netting but escaping that way was too much of a leap for her. Bad day for Mrs Fox and I dispatched her as quickly and painlessly as possible.
Inevitably more foxes have appeared at the Barn, they're territorial and if you remove one, the gap gets filled, the occasional night time yipping continues unabated but the new intake have not yet worked out the vixenish methods for coop entry, I'm sure it's just a matter of time. The trap has arrived from Germany and is set up and baited (had a tin of pilchards sitting in the larder for way too long) but recent video capture suggest to me that caution prevails for the moment and the fox I've seen on the video below looks too damn wary and frankly too damn big to get in the trap.
We shall see.
I felt a little uncomfortable taking out Mrs Fox, after all, she was just doing what a fox does, but she has taken the lives of eight of my birds over the years so I think it was about her time, I'd spent a lot of effort making it as hard as I could for her and she persisted.
Chicken update, an inspirational tale of remorse, retrenchment and rebirth
Sadly our resident vixen chose to celebrate the Jubilee with a daring daytime raid on the chicken run. Within an hour she'd dug into the run, captured and executed our four surviving fowl and carted the corpses off to feed her den of mewling cubs. I was, it's fair to say, pretty grumpy, particularly as I'd spent a week of post prandial evenings lurking around in the rain, full of wine and shotgun primed, ready to dissuade with extreme prejudice the malicious vulpine.
It wasn't to be, the moment the sun came out and we headed off to the pub to toast Good Queen Liz, she (the fox, not the royal) swooped like a swoopy thing and carried off the girls.
So, what to do, well, with an empty run for the first time I took the opportunity to execute a through disinfection and mouse frightening regime, chuck a load of grass seed down, give the land a month of recovery and set about a fox-proofing programme. Step one was trenching, digging a foot-and-a-half-deep,foot-wide trench around the perimeter of the pen, that's about 50 metres of ditch, and the wooded location makes it impractical to get a digger in so that was a very painful afternoon with shovel and spade for myself and our chum Nigel. To be honest Nigel's obsessive attention to detail delivered a very precise trench with vertical sides and neatly finished edges, my half looked considerably less polished but was dug and filled with scalpings before Nigel had finished stage 1 of his earthworm re-settlement programme. In the spirit of teamwork I sat and drank beer until he'd caught up.
Scalpings are golf-ball-sized lumps of flint and granite, delivered to me as 1 cubic meter bags (4 of them) and then distributed to the trench, with shovel and wheelbarrow, then thumped with a cast-iron weight to compact and compress them. Sadly Nigel never recovered from the emotional trauma of my cavalier approach to ditch digging so this was a solo exercise. Which took about a week.... Well I do have real work to do as well.
Final stage was to lay chicken wire stapled to the base of the fence stretching over the trench and about 1/2 a metre into the surrounding countryside. Back breaking work stapling the stuff and then pegging the edges with 100 aluminium tent pegs around the edges. There's an Ebay camping shop that must think I'm really careless pegging out my tent.
So after a month of trauma, travail, trial and trench I set off to my chicken dealer in leafy Leatherhead. Chicken dealers work like crack cocaine vendors, luring you in but knowing once you're hooked you'll keep coming back, each time, a little poorer, a little more realistic, a bit more resigned to the inevitable, a little better prepared, better informed and sharing new anecdotes about bloody foxes.
Here they are then, three new girls at the Barn, I try maintain my pragmatic objectivity and insist on calling them the grey one, the red one and the white one but even so they're already showing their own characters and attitudes. We've had eggs from the white for a week and the first from the grey yesterday, still half-size eggs but it's a good sign, despite a new life which thus far, (it's been a great summer hasn't it?) has been pretty much completely underwater they do seem to be settling in.
And fingers crossed, no cunning incursions from Fox force five (pulp fiction reference for the tarantino fans amongst you).
... an aimless wander through the dusty and moth-eaten corridors of a once beautiful mind, alternating between grumpy optimism and cheerful misanthropy...
Ramblings from the dusty and neglected corridors of a once beautiful mind, alternating 'tween cheerful misanthropy and grumpy optimism, enjoy, or enjoy not, as you wish ...
We've sad news for my bee-keeping followers, it's been a horrible winter and a worse spring for the little honey monsters but they seemed to have coped until the recent false spring which triggered a colony collapse, despite my best efforts to supplement their foraging with sugar syrup and my desperate attempts to deliver 5000 failed attempts at resuscitation.
Fortunate timing and a German-made fox-trap have promoted a couple of predators to vulpine heaven but I suspect that the German fox may be a good bit smaller than his Surrey cousin. Looking at the imagery from the infra-red camera it seems that our enormous UK based Wonder-Füchse are looking at the trap and thinking, "ooh dear, that looks a bit snug."
