Ducks are mucky – mucky ducks. No sooner have I put fresh water into their bowls and swimming bath than they climb in or fill the bowls with mud.

Nevertheless I change their bath water every few days and they enjoy swimming in the fresh pool

Click below

They also jump into the (washing -up) bowls

Here’s a fact you might not know – ducks and geese like to mate on the water as well as on land. Thankfully only in the spring months.

See below for ducks rooting around in the mud as I refill their bath with clean water.

Because ducks are so mucky I am not inclined to eat their eggs. The crows and jackdaws are not as discerning as me and they regularly fly into the duck run and steal the eggs. I hope they get upset tummies but I doubt they do!

This year the sitting duck got off her nest to feed each day and one by one the eggs disappeared. The discarded shells appeared all around the garden, dropped by the crows who had eaten the contents and discarded the outers. They do the same to the goose eggs usually cracking open the egg with their beaks and sucking the yolks. Some days we manage to get the goose eggs before the crows but it’s a competition that we don’t always win.

I always remember the vet in St Neots telling us that Nigel was going to be a small cat. He arrived at the home of my late and much missed friend Heather. He might have been in the back of a van delivering lawnmowers to Heather’s husband. The tiny scrap (at the time nameless) was hungry and lost. Heather called me for some cat food but before I left my house she had decided to take the kit to the vet to check if he was microchipped. He wasn’t and the vet kept him at the surgery for a week and advertised the lost creature on social media. Nobody claimed him and we asked if we might take him in as we had recently lost one of our two black cats who had been run over by a distraught motorist (it was not his fault, Mack had misjudged running across the road). We collected the stray and brought him home where his appetite did him proud and he grew and grew and grew into a very large and handsome cat with the name that the veterinary nurses had given him – Nigel.

Since then Nigel has become a major feature of our menagerie. He has a huge personality, is a prodigious hunter, a tree climber and a thief who uses his paws to open doors and dishes. Several visiting electricians and plumbers have lost their lunch sandwiches because they have left their van doors ajar. We warn contractors to lock their vehicles when Nigel is outside.

No longer young and slightly overweight, Nigel continues to hunt and climb and sit on our laps either purring loudly or play fighting – depending on his mood and ours.

This morning he managed to climb up onto the roof of the pergola

These are their first lambs. Each of the sheep had twin lambs. All are sturdy and gorgeous. Their father was not a Jacob ram but a polled (hornless) white ram. I immediately noticed that the lambs didn’t have horns whereas ours do as both mother and father Tufty are horned Jacobs.

It was a joy to see them and also to see the three ganders and one goose that also came from The Gables. All doing well and they have plenty of grass to graze and a pond in which to swim. Lucky geese.

The sound of a nagging lamb wakes me from a deep slumber always filled with improbable adventure stories and random characters many of them from family casting some who are still alive but often I am joined by the dead (how comforting to spend time with mum in my dreams).

My sleep disrupter is Luna calling plaintively for the bottle of milk she no longer needs. I give in and stumble downstairs to heat three bottles; one for Luna, one for Radish and the third for Rosemary, knowing that Ginny (Domino’s huge bottle-fed daughter) will hang around her three half-sisters hoping that I will feed her too. No chance but there’s no harm in trying. Some days Poddy (a fully grown ewe who is about 6 years old) will remember her bottle-fed infancy and line up to suck from a bottle thinking that she too is a lamb. I stroke her and tell her not to be so silly.

As I feed the girls, one at a time, the male song thrush belts out his complex notes to guard his territory. Just as I thrill to the calls of “grandma” from any of my grandchildren the notes of the song thrush delight me again and again. I never tire of either sound.

Click below for the song thrush as well as the sound of the common chiff chaff, ring necked dove, wood pigeon, corvids, robin and the background noise of our cockerels.

A friend of mine has a subscription to Claude Ai. They asked Claude to read this, my blog, from January 2026 until present and to write a story about Mabel based on what Claude had read. I think the style asked for was Beatrix Potter. Of course the material was mine but the story and its construction was Claude’s and all in a minute!

With going home gifts of rhubarb and jam and a book

The Morning Mabel Stole the Butter

Told by Mabel the Cat

Mabel wished to make one thing absolutely clear: she had not stolen the butter. She had merely investigated the butter knife, which had been left out in a highly provocative manner on the kitchen counter, and which smelled, she felt, as though it needed attending to.

Nigel, naturally, took all the credit for being the mischievous one on the farm. Nigel with his dramatic hunting. Nigel sleeping in his sheepskin box. Nigel stealing drops from the lamb bottles in full view of everyone, grinning his unrepentant grin.

Mabel preferred to operate quietly. She waited until the kitchen was empty. She ascended to the counter in one fluid motion. She attended to the butter knife with great thoroughness.

When the Farmer returned and found her there, Mabel descended with equal dignity, sat down, and began to wash her face. She had never been in the kitchen. She did not know what a butter knife was.

Nigel, watching from the doorway, looked almost impressed.“There are two kinds of cats, Mabel reflected. Those who are caught, and those who are not. Mabel had simply misjudged the timing, that was all. It would not happen again. (It happened twice more).

We walked through a farm which raises hundreds or maybe thousands of truly free range hens

Planted by the husband, watered by the wife – pretty for months

Sown indoors and gradually potted on and put in the polytunnel then planted in abandoned tyres that we rescued from the side of the road a few years ago.

They will give colour snd pleasure all through the summer until the first frosts or until a gale blows them over. I have several more to plant out. I’m waiting until they are bigger and stronger.