Good news from Alexander Chancellor’s menagerie

There is at last good news to report on the poultry front. In the past, when I have mentioned my chickens or my ducks, it has usually been after some grisly tragedy — a duck decapitated by a terrier, another disembowelled by a fox. I can no longer remember how many chickens I have lost to foxes, which usually leave only piles of feathers as evidence of their visits (though I once saw a fox brazenly killing a chicken in broad daylight just outside my front door). But since I am determined never to yield to terrorism, I always head off to the poultry centre in Towcester to replace whatever bird has been killed with one looking as much like it as possible. I thus keep my poultry numbers roughly stable at around eight ducks and eight chickens at any one time.

Since a spate of fox attacks in the spring, the saddest thing that has happened to me is the loss in June of four tiny brown ducklings, the first offspring produced by any of my poultry.