Relaxed Farming - our farm in your classroom

Today we collected NINETEEN chicken eggs, all of which were unbroken and okay!! We have not managed to collect that many in one day for ages. So, has our magpie problem disappeared?? The short answer is 'probably not' BUT the long answer is that we may be winning and the first photo gives a clue as to why. This rather handsome paper hawk is actually a large kite, bought many years ago in Beijing. We flew it a fair few times when we lived in Oxfordshire but not since. David rather cleverly remembered we had it and strung it up just outside our barn and directly underneath the magpie nest in one of our Scotch pine trees. We still see the odd magpie (or three) and yesterday we did find a cracked egg in the main chicken house BUT we do feel there are not as many around and we are definitely not finding as many cracked eggs as we have been doing. We even left two old ones in the basket in the barn (where several chickens lay each day) and they have not been taken, suggesting our magnificent hawk is doing its job!! We are not convinced our luck will last and we have found some decoy artificial owls that we could buy if we need to. For the moment we will continue to collect eggs as regularly as we can and keep our hawk in place (plus all our hanging CDs) and see what happens...
The second photo is of Pear and the Indian Game chicken mentioned on 20th SHARING the job of incubating Pear's duck eggs. Tomorrow is the first possible hatching day (we think) and we are not quite sure why Pear is allowing the chicken to share her nest like this. If we go anywhere near we are squealed at and pecked but the chicken is accepted even though she has 'stolen' half the eggs. We do keep taking her away, as we don't really need these ducklings to have 'two' mums! We have given duck eggs to chickens before and it is both funny and heartbreaking to see chickens reaction when their 'babies' discover water!! They are not impressed! We will probably give this Indian Game her own set of eggs over the weekend, by which time Pear should have hatched her set. We are very excited about having ducklings running around: hopefully we will be posting the photos this time tomorrow...