Unwelcome visitor.

Once again we have had an unwelcome visit from a mink, this time however it  made a thorough job of it's killing spree and completely wiped out our main house which housed our lovely Copper Marans and our Cuckoo Marans, twelve birds in all which should have been my breeding stock for this year. Mink might be small, but they are deadly and strong. This house is a very solid wooden shed with a strong door, however with all the wet weather we have been having the door had very slightly warped leaving a half inch gap at the bottom, this was sufficient for the mink to get it's paws in and force it's way into the house. These birds were all pure bred, to replace them would cost a considerable amount of money, even assuming I could get good stock, so we have gone back to Hybrid birds,

six Copper Stars and six Speckled Marans, they are quite nice birds and far cheaper than the  pure breeds, plus they should lay all year round. As we have a few regular customers for our eggs it was rather a case of having to replace the birds  with something and it's the wrong time of year to obtain pure breeds.

The door has now been doubly secured, with a bolt top and bottom, and we are hopeful that Meg, our young Jack Russell has dispatched the mink as she went missing for over five hours after confronting the mink in a burrow, she couldn't quite get it but as there has been no further sign of it and no mink has taken the fish from the trap we are reasonably sure that this mink has gone, one way or another. Meg is not a dog that roams, the fact that she was gone so long indicates that she was after something. It is so hard to protect birds from mink or Pine Marten, they seem immune to electric fencing unlike foxes, which are simple to control by comparison. The amount of damage that mink have done to the countryside is incalculable, lakes where there should be Coots and Moorhens are devoid of them, they have devastated most of the ground nesting birds, thanks to the release into the wild by animal liberationists, and owners of mink farms, who released these predators when the bottom fell out of the market of the fur trade.

So far this winter we have had nine bad storms, maybe we have noticed them more as some clever person thought it would be a good idea to name them,

the last one was Henry so we decided to take a trip to the coast to see the waves.

They were spectacular, the waves were the biggest we have ever seen,

according to reports they were ten to twelve metres high,

I certainly would not have wanted to be on a ship, quite scary, but very beautiful.

The river at Easkey, Co Sligo

Some of the dwarf daffodils. 

 It is still mild, way above the normal temperatures for this time of year, the garden is totally out of sync,

daffodils are blooming yet snowdrops are still only in bud.

Buds are swelling on lots of the trees and bushes including the Ribes sanguineum, several shrubs have kept their leafs throughout the winter although not evergreen.

This was our first ever Hellebore, it came as a seedling from friends in Spain.

The Hellebores are looking quite spectacular,

I hadn't realised how many different varieties we have,

I love this double white.

I will have to look and see if any of them have self-seeded as according to several other blogs this is something they do quite frequently,

it would be nice to fill up empty spaces with yet more Hellebores without buying them.