Sitting Duck

Mystery solved.

After a slightly worrying night, we headed down to release the ducks from their house and duck number four just appeared, having been out and about all night.

Not much later Sue relocated her quietly sitting on a clutch of eggs under the abandoned pea crop.

So in a matter of weeks we've gone from sharing the farm with four black ducks to now having an extra three white ducks, six ducklings in the capable hands of Elvis and a clutch of goodness knows how many under this girl.
At the moment our ducks are more productive than our chickens - I'm talking eggs - but any young born this year will be strictly for meat. Shhhhhhh. Don't tell Elvis or this mum to be.

So, that was the exciting news for the day, but there was a shock in store too. Today was mowing day and every time I get the mower out I seem to suffer some sort of mishap, usually another piece of the mower failing dismally or falling to pieces.
But today I managed to sever an armoured electricity cable which someone had considerately laid far too close to the surface. As I jammed my arm under the blade mechanism trying to work out the degree of entanglement, yes, you've guessed, I got a rather nasty shock. For the initial severing had tripped the electricity in the house, but Sue had helpfully flicked the switch back up, so returning electricity supply to the bare cable which I was endeavouring to unwind from the mower blades!

I lived to tell the tale, as did the mower. The cable was not needed anyway

There's been a change of landscape today too. Those neat lines created by the combine yesterday were today transformed into a strange landscape of giant straw boxes.

View from my bedroom window.

They'll probably be gone again tomorrow and it won't be very long at all until the field is ploughed (I get to scan through thousands of Black-headed Gulls and Common Gulls in a vain search for something rarer), tilled and sown with the next crop.

Tomorrow's plan is to tart up the veg plot in readiness for our visitors this weekend. The potatoes need topping and the onion stems are lying down so they are ready for uprooting and drying.
What actually happens tomorrow, though, could very well be different. You never quite know.