22 April 2010, late night
cool & calm

The rabbits are gone! Back to their original owner, who was mildly nonplussed to find us so gleefully giving her not only the angoras, but all the rest. We learned several things in the process:

That Buck is indeed ready for action, as when put in with the shorthaired females in the optimistic belief that 'he won't have room to do anything', he began frantically humping whichever female he was on top of, albeit without real success (he was quickly pulled out again);

That two of the three angora 'babies', now almost to full maturity, were NOT female as inspection had suggested, but are in fact quite male, and would have provided us with more surprises on the white angora bun and on Minnow;

And that feeding and watering of livestock goes remarkably more quickly without them on the farm.

The muscovies seem to be doing almost a communal egg-laying by the hay piles. It is an impressive number of eggs, and an impressive number have been pushed out of the nest. We're beginning to wonder if they're competing for the nesting space in a game of musical nests.

The gander so fixated on a farmer has been learning that pecking the farmer's wife results in scenes of unimaginable violence which could still lead to the cookpot. He's begun slinking off crankily instead.

Today two lambs managed to escape from the enclosure with the ram flock. They promptly got tangled in the fence trying to get back in when a farmer showed up with feed. As the fence was on, the one primarily tangled was easily grabbed, disentangled, and tossed back in. The other one was much less tractable, kicking the farmer in the jaw and shoulder when it freed itself from the no longer electrified fence. A bit of spare fencing ended up used as a shrimping net and the lamb summarily scooped up.

This weekend will see the construction of dog kennels and of a grazing ark for the goslings, who are getting too big for indoors...