Relaxed Farming - our farm in your classroom

More torrential rain last night and this morning but the top and right hand side of the barn remain dry inside: hooray!! We felt we could not put Jupiter and Neptune out with the poultry as in places it was just too slippery for them, so we kept fingers crossed that the fox will keep away for a while after his scare yesterday. We have been put in touch with another 'vermin control' guy (Clive) and because he has permission to shoot on the land next door to us, and because the particular fox who is causing us problems is known to have several 'runs' (regular paths and routes) on this land, Clive IS going to try to shoot him for us.
We still have mixed feelings about it all but our duty of care to our chickens is the most important consideration and short of keeping our birds inside all the time, we have we feel now exhausted all other options and we also feel we are badly letting the poultry down. We will wait to see what success or otherwise Clive has and in the meantime have sourced some bulk woodchip so that at least we can create a non-muddy area around the pop-hole and gates and hopefully then have the alpacas outside safely. It is rather annoying that we now have them (and that they do seem to be good at scaring the fox away) but that because of the state of our land, we cannot always have them outside with the poultry.
The ducks gave us quite a scare today as in unison all three took off for a flight down the paddock but then bore left with one of them heading over next door's fields, over the village road and towards the moor!! This was several hundred metres away and quite out of sight. After a minute or so, Orange and Pear reappeared back in the barn, then after over HALF an hour, Banana appeared too!! Goodness knows where she had ended up BUT how extraordinary that each day they do fly around like this and yet always come back!!