Yesterday Ady and I went down to collect a sack of potatoes from the shop, post a letter and collect the IRCT trailer. It is an old SNH one which they no longer had a use for so donated to the Trust and the IRCT rent out for a fiver a time. We had a stack of 14 pallets all waiting to be brought onto the croft so had decided a fiver was a very good investment rather than carrying them or bringing three or four each time in the Rangerover which doesn’t have a roof rack and the roof is too bulbous to strap things on to. A visit to the village is *never* speedy so we chatted to Development Officer Steve who was over for a board meeting, Fliss who was heading to the boat, Neil who was hungover (Lesley and Baby D are away at the Royal Highland Show) and Jed. Our MP – Ian Blackford was over visiting for a few hours holding a surgery so we went and introduced ourselves, shook his hand and had a brief chat about Rum issues. He seems nice enough, always worth having made proper contact with your MP I think so that should you have occasion to email / ring / write to them they are more likely to put a face to the name.
We went to collect the trailer from Claire’s and brought it back to the fork, swapped it from the Jeep to the Rangerover and loaded it up with pallets. Across the river and up the croft hill, then unloaded into a huge pile ready to use – dismantled for animal pens, used whole to build a woodstore, always useful for quick animal fencing. Excellent to have a good stash of them and as we will be taking up the pallet path around the caravan in order to create a proper footpath we will have even more soon. The great thing about pallets is there is literally no waste as once we have done whatever we can with them any scrap wood is excellent kindling.
We stopped for lunch and then made some more nursery pens. We moved around the three chickens and chicks we already had penned onto fresh areas of grass and then Scarlett checked a broody hen nest and discovered she had started hatching them. Cue a speedy construction of a house, a changeover from small clutches of chicks into smaller pens to free up a bigger one ready to take the new hatchlings. Ady caught the hen, Scarlett put all the chicks (7!) into a box which I carried up the hill and Davies brought the eggs – one pipping (which has hatched today) and 2 more. Some deft moves and we had them all installed – eggs on a bed of the nesting material she’d gathered, chicks in and hen on top all inside a new house inside a new pen.
We then took the trailer back down to the river at the foot of the croft where Ady had filled about 12 bags with gravel from the river a few weeks ago ready to come up for path building. Scarlett had checked on Crispy Duck, our champion broody duck who was hatched here herself and has reared 2 broods previously. She came hurtling down the hill to say that she had started hatching too… We dragged the gravel bags to the trailer and heaved them in then drove back up the hill. While Ady unloaded them Scarlett and I checked on Crispy and took a small pen over with the intention of putting it over her. but the uneven ground and brambles everywhere around her nest meant it was not going to work. Scarlett very quickly adopted a duckling, which had always been her intention. With a big brood (seven in total we realised this morning) Crispy was happy to let one go and Scarlett had been so desperate for a duckling that it is good to have her happy. We decided to leave Crispy overnight as she was hunkered down well in a good hidden spot from crows and ravens and decide what to do with her in the morning.
The others had dinner and watched some dvds. I walked down to the village for an evening with Fliss. It was her birthday several weeks ago and I’d originally offered to take her to Canna for lunch but that had not happened so I had made her a painted glass as a gift and arranged to have an evening with her to drink fizz this week instead. She cooked some pasta, we got through three bottles of fizz, had some proper chats about Rum politics, UK politics, parenting and education, then moved onto gossip and silliness, then did some singing along to youtube videos. At about 130am Joss got up and told us it was time to go to bed now, so I headed back up to the croft. It was a gorgeous night to walk home, a big moon hanging low in the sky. I sang all the way home and both the kids were still up when I got in. We chatted for a bit and then all went to bed around 230am.
Today – Ady went to check on Crispy and discovered she was already down at the river with her six ducklings waiting for food! She followed him up the hill and hung around the nursery pens so we made a spur of the moment decision to evict the three oldest chicks and their mum who are close to grown and pen Crispy and her ducklings instead. She seems ok with that and on the basis that it’s better for her to have a slightly curtailed few weeks to raise her young and have an extra 6 ducks than letting her free range and end up losing them all we are happy with that. The mother of the 3 chicks legged it back to the flock but the chicks hung around looking a bit lost. We have some leg rings on order as we had planned to start ringing each years young from now in an attempt to keep better tabs on the birds, plus we had decided not to release any cock birds into the free range flock but to keep them penned and fatten them as we really don’t want any more boys. We’ve earmarked the fruit cage as the perfect place for that – way bigger than most so called free range birds have, nice and secure, they can eat all the bugs, caterpillars and other crop damaging creatures so a dual purpose keeping of them, they can fatten well on free range findings and higher protein feed and then be chicken meat for us. So as they looked quite lost without their mother who clearly felt she had done her duty and not at all sure what to do with their freedom Ady put them into a pen again.
I packed up food and we headed down to the pier for the Sheerwater – taking the Rangerover and trailer to the fork, unhitching the trailer from one car to the other, dropping it off on the way to the pier back at Claire’s. Trudi, Fliss, us and one tourist were there for the boat trip. It was a quiet trip across to Soay with just a mother and calf porpoise sighting just before we got there, but Ronnie the skipper took us round the outside of Soay to head back to Rum. Trudi had a go at steering and then Scarlett had a go, steering almost all the way back to Rum. She was as random with her steering as you’d expect 😉 but really enjoyed it. Just before we reached Rum when we’d all given up on seeing anything a couple of porpoises and then at least one dolphin leapt infront and then alongside us. So that was a good ending to the trip.
Back home with all good intentions to do some more stuff but my late night had caught up with me so I was only really up for drinking tea and doing an online Co Op order. Ady cooked a really nice dinner and we watched a couple of episodes of Lost. I had a plan to stay up way later to watch EU ref results coming in but I suspect I will end up in bed fairly soon and anticipate waking up to the the news instead.