Mrs Down's Diary August 6 2008

THE farm trailer had stood empty for a week or two. With no cattle to take into market or sheep to move, it stayed parked up outside the big corn shed. A lifeless aluminum hunk.

When John came to use it to take a heifer and calf from the foldyard to join the herd in the fields, he noticed a small pile of bird muck in the corner of the trailer. "I thought I can't have cleaned it out properly," he chastised himself, as the trailer has to be hosed down and cleaned out after every animal movement, "but I thought no more of it as we were not moving off the farm."

The trailer was kept on the move that day, transporting ewes with triplets to a different field in the village. They have proved very useful as a clean-up gang, and John puts them in to graze off several small plots that would be time consuming to get into with tackle. Instead this keeps the ewes happy, and the place looks tidy.

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All in all the trailer was out of place for most of the day. When he parked it back in its allocated space late afternoon, he stepped out of the tractor and was nearly decapitated by a pair of enraged swallows dive bombing the trailer air vents. "I thought I'd just go back into the house for a cup of tea and then take the trailer back to hose it down," he said. "But when I saw the swallows I put two and two together and realized that the pile of bird muck must be beneath a nest."

It was. It is. The daft things have chosen a mobile home for their domestic residence, rejecting their usual nest building sites in the old barns. Usually from May onwards we can never shut the doors on the meal shed or old milking parlour as they nest in the beams. They also make use of the big foldyard but there are so many gaps for ventilation in those buildings and in the silage clamp that they would never be in danger of being locked out.

This is the first time that any bird has ever considered the trailer as a home. Perhaps with it staying immobile for over a week while John was away fishing, and because it it is dry, warm and rain proof, everything was just too tempting. Maybe they are a very trendy pair of swallows, going for that minimalist, brushed aluminum look in preference to old fashioned wooden beams and the traditional clutter and profusion of spiders webs that every farm shed sports.

But their new home presents a few problems. John pressure washed the trailer out but took care not to disturb the nest '“ just washed the muck away. But next week it will be needed to take some fatstock into market and he is trying to work out a way of keeping the cattle away from that corner of the trailer so that their heads do not knock the nest down.

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Mrs Swallow is now sitting tight on the nest and there are four or five eggs in. Sat tight apart from when it has had to be moved to get the combine out of the big shed. Then she flew out and sat on the telephone wire and waited rather impatiently until the trailer returned. "Just not good enough," her attitude reflected.

Breaking news: Problem sorted. In the last minute John has just come back into the house after negotiating the loan of a trailer from a neighbour. The housing crisis on this farm resolved.