Curiosity killed the ... sheep

Guinea fowls in the wet.




Sunday 23rd September 2012

You may have thought I was playing it up a bit yesterday with my "Will the Baillon's Crake be there or not?" line. Well, this morning there was no sign of the bird. We were very lucky not to have had a wasted journey.

Onto today.
On my way to take the sunrise photo, the whole guinea family were up on top of the fence. The babies have been stretching their wings of late. In fact, they are now too big to freely pass into and out of the chicken enclosure through the wire fence, so over the top is the only option. As the parents flew down to feed, the youngsters followed. Not quite totally in control of their flight yet, two made it all the way across the chicken pen and crash-landed into the fence on the other side. One overshot completely and made it over the 6 foot fence! I had to usher it back in through the door.

As I am suffering a severe case of man flu at the moment I went back to bed to sleep it off. It it was a good job that Sue was up and about as I was rudely awoken by her shouts up the stairs to "Come now. The sheep have jumped in with the pigs!"

Now there is intelligent curiosity and there is darn right stupid curiosity. The sheep come somewhere in between. For a few days they have clearly been interested in the pigs, standing up on the fence to watch them, but when one went a bit too far and ended up toppling over into the pig pen, the other just followed, as you do if you're a sheep.

The pigs were equally curious, but their approaches worried the sheep who couldn't work out a plan of escape. Fortunately Sue was there to sort things out. I didn't dare take pictures. It wouldn't have been the right thing to do at the time.

My plan for today had been to rest up and then harvest some more potatoes and pull some more sow thistles in the afternoon. As it was the weather closed in so I spent the whole day resting and napping. Should hopefully help me to get better sooner and be ready for action again.