Nasty furry animals..........

After a bit of an early start last Saturday morning, I delightfully came home with more feathered friends to add to the growing menagerie...........! I'd headed up to the rare breeds sale up at Thainstone market just outside Inverurie, what a fab day! Joined by my Uncle David, Aunt Alison and the two little monsters Katie and Chloe, we all wondered round checking out the poultry for sale wondering what we would purchase for ourselves. Katie was after some white silkies as she'd like to show them and hatch some chicks, so her daddy very kindly bid on some lovely little bantams, a gorgeous little trio, had her name on them. I managed to buy totally not what I expected, I came home with 5 wyandotte bantams, 3 blue laced and 2 red, and 3 apricot call ducks, all very sweet and settling in well. Uncle David managed to purchase loads of weird and wonderful looking hens, about 16 in total I think! Aunt Alison got herself a pair of Embden geese to befriend lonely Amelia the chinese white, who are now all getting on very well.

This weekend proved that keeping poultry is not all sweetness and light, collecting your eggs in the morning and having a loving trail of chickens run after you. We had a vist from the mink, a nasty little creature that could cause devastation in a chicken run at the blink of an eye. Luckily, we managed to spot him coming up the burn, the cheeky little monster poked his head up through the planks of the bridge trying to catch our chickens by the legs but was unsuccessful in catching any for his dinner. We managed to get a trap from a very kind local farmer - he even had it baited for me. So we spent most of Saturday morning camouflaging the trap set into the banking of the burn in the hope that we might catch something in the next day or so. To our amazement we came home to find the mink in the trap only a matter of hours after setting it up, our little chickens are so lucky, they could all have been eaten in less than 24 hours. The mink iscertainly a beautiful little animal but unbelievably vicious, the noice that it made was really quite disturbing. Again, thankfully one of our neighbours was able to help us dispose of the little creature, not something I would have liked to have done myself. Another episode in the adventure we seem to be leading, certainly one that I would say was character building.