No, I’m not talking healthy New Year’s Resolutions. I don’t go for those! I’m talking turkey gobbles. Today we ‘processed’ our last two turkeys so there will be no more gobbling on the farm until late April when I buy in the next batch. However, I’m thinking of getting in some fertilised turkey eggs, providing I can source them, and bringing them up from babies. That would probably make them a bit better behaved. We always go through a spell of the turkeys wandering off for a while and needing to be regularly rounded up until they finally realise they live on the farm and this is the place they get fed so it’s actually worth hanging around! The ducks we brought up from eggs a while ago were very tame and easy to manage, so I hope the same will hold true with turkeys, even though they are so very dim!

I will definitely be getting some fertilised hen’s eggs to raise. Father Christmas left this in my stocking this year. It’s perfect. Up to now I’ve only ever seen industrial-size, expensive incubators so Father Christmas, whom I’ll call Chris for short, must have done a lot of detective work to track down this mini one.

egg incubator

Caiti has also suggested I get a pet turkey so I always have one around. That’s a tempting idea. I’d rather like a pet Ardennes Rouge or another unusual breed.

On a bird theme a few cormorants have been hanging around so today we put up our anti-cormorant device. It’s a piece of blue string (actually, lots of pieces of blue string off the hay bales tied together) that stretches across the big lake. Chris rowed and I unwound. My initial big ball of string wasn’t long enough so we had to leave the loose end floating on the lake while we went off to round up some more blue string. Now it remains to see how well it works as a deterrent. We think it could be very effective. Cormorants are awful at taking off and landing. They can only climb or descend very slowly and need to circle the lake several times in the process. We’re hoping the string, which we’ve strung up roughly halfway down the lake, will mean they don’t have enough space to land in. If necessary, we’ll hang some scary, shiny CDs from the sting to put them off even more.

You can see the blue string on the tree but it's harder to see it going across the lake

You can see the blue string on the tree but it’s harder to see it going across the lake

cormo string chris row further

I’ll give you an update in the New Year.

Wishing you a happy, healthy and prosperous 2014.