They're eating us out of house and home!

There was a cruelly cold wind blowing around our house today and we didn't have dozens of wild birds visiting our feeding stations, we had hundreds.
There were five different species of finches feeding at any one time. Unfortunately the batteries on the camera conked just as I was getting started but I did manage to capture these images before the lights went out. 

I had to fill the bird feeders up twice today but it was well worth the effort. It was just a shame about the damned camera.

Today !

First of all, let me say that I've been extremely lucky and as far as I can see, get the pun ? My eye seems to be OK.

Yesterday was a complete right off, it simply poured down with rain from dawn to dusk and beyond. This morning is another day and the weathers fine, so I'm going to put a second brood pen of Light Sussex together. When I say this, I mean that we're going to put a fifty metre enclosure of electric poultry netting up, move a shed and then, under the cover of darkness, I'm going to catch four hens and a cock up and put them together for the season.
This is how things went on.

Look! No snow ! We took these pictures today, this is where I decided to put up the new pen.

With non too willing help from young Rob, we soon got the fencing up. We used wooden posts on each corner and fastened the electric netting posts to them with bailer twine. By doing this we were able to get some real tension on the netting without it coming into contact with the posts.

 Here's the pen completed.

On Monday, we put the Chicken coop in to the run and picked the birds up that evening. Here they are.

The four ladies. These are super big hens that I hatched from eggs that a friend from Cambridge sentto  me. They are from her parents birds and are a utility strain that they've kept for thirty or so years.

The cock has a bit of age about it now and is one that I swopped with a Yorkshire breeder a few years ago.

This is the second  of two pens of LS that I have, The other one, consists of a brother of these hens running with some of my original birds.

February and its bitterly cold!

The beginning of February and its a bright sunny day but bitterly cold! Our little weather station gizmo thing was showing the temperature outside this morning as being below minus four degrees. At the moment, I'm having to top up our wild bird feeders up twice a day during the cold snap and early mornings see me tripping the light fantastic in my dressing gown and slippers as I defrost the water fountain with a kettle of hot water.
Food wise, we feed peanuts, niger seed, sunflower seed, fat balls and household scraps. The birds really appreciate our offerings and reward us by giving us a fantastic daily display. If I'm honest, I'm really quite proud at the number and variety of birds that I was able to enter in the RSPBs Garden Bird Survey over the weekend.. There were quite a few species that I wasn't able to enter though, simply because although they're here most of the time, they didn't put in an appearance during the hour when we did the survey. I was tempted to cheat but resisted.


They say that familiarity breeds contempt and just before noon today I had proof of it. I'm a stupid old fool, I took a shot with an airifle at a rat inside a wooden shed. I missed it and the pellet rebounded off the planking and straight into my right eyeball. Needless to say, it hurt and I was very shocked.
I couldn't feel or see any blood and  and nor thank god could I feel any obvious hole in my eye. I think that the pellet must have dropped down to the floor after hitting me.
Immediately, my eye was very painful and it watered like mad. It became very sensitive to light and my vision was fuzzy. I locked the dogs a way and drove myself to the doctors. That wasn't easy.
I told the receptionist that I'd been hit in the eye with a pellet but still had to wait for half an hour while the doctor continued looking at bunyans etc. Eventually, I was ushered in to the examining room where the doctor was unable to work the 'little torchy thing' to examine my eye. She eventually decided to send me to the eye clinic because to quote her," You only get one chance with an eye"
I left my car where it was on the GPs carpark and thankfully, my mate Pugh drove me to the hospital. I was there for four hours and had a real good examination. I have some bleeding at the back of my eye and I may have scratched the lense.
I've returned home with four different lots of drops to put in my eye, including steroids and anti biotics. I'm booked in to return to the hospital next Monday but if in the meantime I see any floaters or flashing lights, then I've got to go straight back to casuality.
I'm not out of the woods yet, but hopefully, this idiot has been extremely lucky. At the moment, my eyeball is throbbing, it feels as though I have gravel under my eye lid and I have a thromping headache. If things don't get any worse, then I'll be extremely happy.