Tale of woe with a happy ending..............

Well we encountered our first death in the animal department on Friday, sadly one of our little welsummer chickens died. We're not sure what happened, she was in her nesting box when I let them out first thing and when I went back to check them she was dead. So, armed with marigolds and a spade, I had to remove her from the nesting box, a bit tricky as she was a stiff as a board, and gave her a wee burial at the ground behind the workshop next to the burn, poor wee thing. As I'm contantly reminded by our farming neighbours, these things happen with livestock and you just have to get on with it, but it was a wee bit sad for me.

So poor William the cockerel was looking very lonely wandering round the garden with his two welsummer ladies as both the marans are broody at the minute! Until, on Saturday morning, our friends Allan and Ali came to the rescue. They also have a couple of chickens which they got from my uncle David, two light sussex ladies. Unfortunately they were being a wee bit too noisy in the back garden, so Allan and Ali decided to relocate them to beautiful Perthshire before they got a knock on the door from the neighbours!
Our two new ladies seem to be settling in fine today, they've even laid me a couple of eggs,
albeit not in the hen house but out in the run! I'm sure they'll get the hang of hows things work up here pretty soon. So things have definitely turned out for the best as the residents of the hen house are in far more even numbers, two welsummers, two marans and now two light sussex, plus William and the two geese!
Now that we have Allan and Ali's old house we're also planning on moving one of the broody marans onto some eggs tomorrow, so we'll hopefully have the noise of cheeping little chicks in a few weeks, fingers crossed.
The geese are looking a bit sorry for themselves these days as they've started to moult and have now stopped laying for the year. We were very lucky as they laid for a lot longer than expected, we'll just have to look forward to Valentines Day for some more eggs from them as that's when they'll hopefully start laying again.