Mrs Down's Diary

John's brother Geoff is coming to look after the cows and sheep and poultry. Friends are coming in to look after the ducks. These are very labour-intensive and created a lot more work than John had envisaged. "But at least I know now what to do if we rear any number of them again," he said. Life is a steep learning curve but it has been great fun to watch their explosion in size.

The ducks never seem to stop eating and are the messiest birds ever with their water bowls.

They preen and paddle around the water dispensers and quickly turn a splash into a puddle. With their exponential growth rate has also come a need for more space to house them.

Fortunately, we have the ideal system with the waste water disposal set up for the dairy herd. What anyone else would do I do not know. By the time we come back it will nearly be time to turn them out on to the ponds. They will just love it.

The main job to be completed has been sowing ground cover for game birds in the autumn.

As with any land work it is a laborious and repetitive task. Not boring but the land needs firstly to be sprayed off, then disced, then ploughed, then power-harrowed '“ twice '“ then drilled, then rolled.

This is because land around us is really heavy and it is difficult to get a good seed bed without a lot of preparation.

The land has previously had a game cover over winter. It has provided a good feeding resource for birds but needs renewal. It had already been pulverised in February, which coincidentally provided an ideal nesting site for lapwings, four of whom are nesting there.

Throughout all of these tasks John has taken great care not to disturb the birds and is thrilled they are all sitting tight on their nests, surrounded by little banks of earth, thoughtfully provided to protect them from the wind.

Lapwings (or green plovers, peewits, pewits, pie-wipes, pee-wees, chewits, lappys, tuefits, toppyups, peasiewhips, teeacks, teeicks, ticks nickets, tieve's nackets, thievnigs, thievnicks or teewhuppos as they are also called) sit very close on their nests.

Even when the eggs were lifted out of the way of the tractor before replacement after the implements had passed over the nesting site, the birds remained close by.

One became so tame that she rarely strayed more than a few yards from her nest, while the others watched from a distance as the eggs were carried from a nest in the path of the plough, for example, to a safe spot in a newly-turned furrow, before being carried back again to the original nest site. The nests were covered up when the land was sprayed.

According to my bird book, the lapwing has more regional names than any other British birds. I might not even have all of them here.

John has always called them tuefits, even though that is a name originating from County Durham. Their annual breeding cycle mirrors the seasonal round of agricultural work, and when they are nesting is a clear sign that spring has sprung.