SPRING HAS SPRUNG

..BUT NOT FOR THE SINGLETONS.

 SPRING has sprung on the farm and it's not just the sap that's rising which is great for some of the stock and not very good for the singletons seeking that lifetime partner or even a brief encounter to ensure the continuation of the species!

THREE'S a crowd for the turkey stags Ant and 

Dec with Little Boots far right.

OK, so that's not very romantic but Nature's way does produce a number of problems, and playing the numbers game three's definitely not company at this time of year as Ant and Dec my beautiful Bourbon Red turkeys are discovering. Thanks to the wily fox most of their hens have gone and poor old Little Boots can not satisfy their needs. The new turkeys, Norfolk Bronze breed, are still too young to understand all about the birds and bees so they are not in the slightest bit interested in attention from the adult stags.

WANTED: Single male Golden pheasant

for lonely hen looking for love.

 Meanwhile I have a very lonely hen pheasant who may look dowdy but her mate - a Golden Cock Pheasant - was a real eye-catcher. He's gone, probably by way of the fox, and so she's very lonely and looking for love. Finding a mate is going to prove expensive and difficult but I will try my best, so if you know of any Golden male pheasants looking for a mate please let me know.

COCK O'THE NORTH: An abundance

 of hens for Napoleon

 In the meantime Napoleon seems to have recovered from losing his mate Josephine (that bloody fox, again) and is back to being the leader of the pack in the hen pen. I've put the other cockerel Horatio in his own pen with a small white bird called Thumberlina and I'm hoping they will produce some fine, white Scots Dumpys in the coming year.

BROMANCE: Lovelorn Stan, left, & Oliver want their own 

hen pen but until they find new homes they've got each other.

 Everyone in the hen pen seems very happy apart from three young pretenders who want Napoleon's position as the alpha male. One is his son and is a dead ringer for the old man although when the two meet now it can get quite nasty these days. And then there's a couple of cuckoo-coloured Scots Dumpys who I'm trying to find new owners for; Stan and Oliver disgraced themselves recently during the filming of a TV series shot in 17th century Scotland. Stan decided to cock-a-doodle-do right in the middle of a love scene prompting the director to shout: "Can we lose the noisy hen, please." So once Stan was removed Oliver kicked off and had to be removed as well. Probably the most normal relationship of all the feathered stock is Mr and Mrs Bumbles who are almost joined at the hip by an invisible umbilical cord. The Guineau Fowl are absolutely devoted to each other and make a very alarming noise, as bad as someone scratching their nails down a blackboard, is either feels threatened.

SOUL MATES: Mr & Mrs Bumbles
the Guineau Fowl

Another over-crowded relationship is an unusual threesome
provided by three white peafowl - I've yet to give them names so any suggestions will be most welcome. I bought them last year from a farmer in England who started off with four but a fox took one of his peacocks and he lost heart after that. There has to be a solution to these pesky foxes ... and not all of us have shotguns or the will to sit around in the off chance of getting a clear shot.

ALL WHITE NOW: The peacock goes 

through his mating dance 

 Anyway, to cut a long story short I am the proud owner of two beautiful white peahens and a peacock but now looking for another white peacock to even up the numbers. Again, if you can help out please make contact.

ALBERT dances for Victoria but will

she come off the roof?

On the goose front, Vera my female Toulouse goose is sitting on a batch of eggs and her mate Jack is attacking anyone who goes near her. Let's hope she manages to hatch more than just one this year - whatever happened to last year's gosling Peewee is still a mystery. My Indian peacock Albert looks rather magnificent when he exhibits his spread of feathers although his mate Josephine seems less than impressed and spends most of her time sitting on the highest point of the house roof making the most ungodly sound. It's a wonder passersby have not dialled 999 yet to report someone in the process of being murdered on hearing the high-pitched shriek.

LOVE is in the air for these two doves

And our white doves need no encouragement at all. For them it seems Spring is all year round by the amount of couplings and chicks they've produced since I bought half a dozen last year. Annoyingly a pair of Peregrine Falcons kept picking them off one by one until they migrated for the winter.
 But now that Spring has sprung I think they're back again and building a nest to raise their next batch of young. And that's going to be the next focus of my attention after Spring ... keeping the foxes and badgers at bay as the young begin to emerge.

Regular readers of this columns know there is a constant struggle between Nature and Nurture - some of my interventions have been disastrous while taking a step back and letting Nature take its course hasn't always been the best solution either.