One of our ducks is missing................

Roe deer in the orchard at Dundry

 I left Moelfre on a hazy, overcast Thursday morning and drove across Shropshire via Shrewsbury and Bridgnorth to Kidderminster and on to the M5 at Worcester. As I drove further south, the weather began to clear and it was soon a sunny, autumnal day and very warm in the car. I hadn't been in a happy mood for a couple of days and was finding the drive a bit difficult (I often find driving is when I feel at my loneliest) so I randomly chose a CD from the box in the passenger footwell – it turned out to be a copy of a Canned Heat album that my friend JP recorded for me years ago and, after playing it through twice at full volume I felt much better!

It took me about three hours to get to Bristol and my next 'assignment', a farm sit at Dundry. This was my second visit of the year, but a few things had changed – the rabbit had 'shuffled off this mortal coil' on the Sunday before I arrived, which was very sad, because he was quite cute and not very old, but there was a new tortoise added to the collection, who was also quite cute and tiny compared to the 'girls'. I think he may well get hen-pecked (or is it tortoise-pecked?). There were slightly fewer chickens, I was led to believe(!), two extra ducks, making 10 in total, and 7 geese. There were still 42 sheep, after this Spring's little accidental population explosion and, of course, there were the two Labradors and the six cats, so quite a handful to be looking after. Obviously, you need to be very precise about numbers of animals (apart from the chickens that I have never actually counted) as, at the end of the farm sit, you hope to hand back the same number – preferably all still breathing!

I did a hand over with Sally on Thursday afternoon and Friday morning, as they were leaving on Friday afternoon. There were two ram lambs in one of the stables because they had had a late case of fly strike (a euphemism for 'maggot attack') and had some nasty bald patches on their rear ends. We decided that it was better to keep them in for the week where I could easily monitor their progress and, as we had had a huge electrical storm on Thursday evening and it was warm and humid, we thought we'd better get the rest of the sheep into a pen and give them a quick once-over as well, as that was ideal 'fly strike' weather.

We managed to get them all into a pen relatively easily and that's when the fun really began! We wanted to catch one ram lamb who had had a minor fly strike problem, not because we were worried about his health, but because Sally had noticed that he still appeared to have some parts of his anatomy that he should have been without, and therefore needed to be removed to a safe distance from the females of the flock to avoid a repetition of the Spring flock increase! We caught him quite easily and put him in the stable with the other boys and then we thought we'd better check the rest of the ram lambs for 'accoutrements' – there were twelve rams in total and three were already out of the flock, so we were rather dismayed to discover that the majority of the other nine still seemed to be sporting their 'bits'. I hasten to add, that Sally had had a friend in to castrate the lambs, and was composing a rude text message to him as we worked!

Having separated the rams from the ewes, we then thought we'd better check everyone for fly strike and found a couple more with maggots in their fleeces. I won't go into graphic details but, suffice it to say that, left untreated, a sheep with fly strike can be dead in a couple of days – and I certainly didn't want that, so we ploughed on until all 42 sheep had been checked, trimmed and treated where necessary. This led to a late and slightly strained departure for the holiday, but at least we had treated everything and separated the (potential)boys from the girls!

I kept a careful eye on the flock for the next couple of days and by Sunday realised that another of the rams looked as if he had a problem and I would have to take action. Knowing that I had to try and get them into a smaller space so that I could catch him, I lured them into one of the larger chicken runs that opened off the paddock they were in. Once I had them safely inside I constructed a further pen-within-a-pen, using sheep hurdles, and managed to catch all nine of them. I then caught the boy in question and had just started sorting out his rear end when my mobile rang. It was Jeni to say that she was just leaving Wells and would be with me soon, so I told her I couldn't talk for long as I was removing maggots from a sheep's bottom and had got to a rather crucial point! There was a slightly stunned silence from the other end of the phone but, knowing the strange things her mother gets up to, she soon recovered her equilibrium and rang off. Luckily, that was the last of the sheep problems for the week and, as the nights grew colder, the possibility of further attacks grew less and less.

The rest of the animals behaved in a more or less exemplary manner – Samson, the younger Labrador, only escaped twice, and that was only into another paddock that he couldn't get out of (a bit like tunnelling into the cell next door) and Mike, the handyman, soon put paid to that little excursion by blocking up the hole – for a large dog he can get through remarkably small spaces.

However, Fate had one more little joke to play on me before the end of the week: Julie, who lives in a flat at the farm, kindly came out to help me shut up the poultry on the Saturday evening that Geoff and Sally were due back. We'd spent the afternoon creosoting a chicken ark and were looking forward to sharing a bottle of wine and cooking a quiche for Sunday lunch and having some supper. We'd shut up just about all the arks and runs when I went in to feed the ducks and shut them into their house – there were only 9! Julie came in too and we counted them again – 9, and again - 9. I even knew which duck was missing – inevitably, it was one of the new ones, with dark greeny-black plumage and a tufted head. I ran and got a torch and put on my wellies before going back to join Julie who was bashing down the undergrowth in the pen. I waded into the pond and poked about in the undergrowth on the far side but there was no sign of her. By now it was almost dark and we were looking for a virtually black duck in deep and impenetrable undergrowth! In the end we gave up and went inside – I was so upset to have got so near to the end of the farm-sit and then for this to happen, because I knew, that even if she was still alive out there, she wouldn't be by the morning, as the fox makes his/her rounds of the pens every night and anything outside the house would be dinner. After a rather subdued supper, Julie went outside again for a last look around, and came rushing back in to say she'd heard the duck splashing in the pond so, we shot back out armed (footed?) with wellies and a torch and, amazingly, there was the duck waiting to be let back into the duck house! We had no idea where she could have been hiding as the pen is not that big, but we were so relieved that we went inside and cracked open another bottle of wine and then Geoff and Sally came back and we opened another bottle of wine! I finally made it to bed at gone 1.00am!

I stayed on for a couple of days after they got home (mainly to sober up!) and spent one day cutting down a load of brambles, so that I could have a bonfire, and creosoted another two chicken arks, before I left to return to Cheltenham for a few days.