Relaxed Farming - our farm in your classroom

Another day of mixed weather but as the photo shows the sun did shine occasionally and everything enjoyed a good deal of time outside... (Any 'eagle-eyed' readers may notice a rake in the foreground of the picture. This is NOT the rake that fell on our poor duckling (see 6th June) and furthermore this rake is firmly secure by having its handle through the fencing so it cannot fall over.
We have had a couple of poorly animals today: our Blue Maran, one of our oldest chickens (she's actually only four and a half so not that old - chickens can live to 8-10 years - but is one of the oldest we have) seems to have a case of sour crop. Sour crop is unpleasant for both the chicken and owner - for the chicken because it means they have an infection which makes the food they eat turn bad in their crop and for the owner because this 'bad food' often comes back up into the chicken's mouth and really smells. The advice is to turn the chicken upside down and try to massage the bad food out of her and to give her 'live' yogurt and apple cider vinegar (ACV): yogurt to try to get some good bacteria inside her and ACV to help kill off the bad bacteria that is there. We were unable to get anything out of her but did give her the yogurt and ACV although how much we got inside her we are not sure. What is a little strange is that her crop actually felt quite empty. We have isolated her and will see how she is tomorrow.
Our Indian Game cockerel was also spotted looking a little under the weather: he turned out to have the 'sniffles'. There are various illnesses that can cause chickens to get what is in fact the equivalent of a cold and fortunately we always have some antibiotics on the smallholding that can be given to chickens to help them get better. He was given an injection and will be checked again tomorrow.
To finish with an update: on the 26th May we confirmed we had ordered a Larsen trap (see 15th May for a full explanation) and we have now caught and humanely dispatched several magpies. The good news is that our egg numbers do now appear to be slowly increasing... We feel sad that we have resorted to this method but our birds and eggs are our priority!!