Fox once more

I've not been writing any blog entries recently, John lost his fight against cancer a week ago when he died peacefully in his sleep early on Monday 22nd.  Lots of arrangements have had to be made since, but the funeral won't be until Wednesday 7th January. Christmas was practically non-existent for me, but I have had wonderful daily visits and phone calls from family and friends, and Annie is with me right now.
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I'm sorry I'm finishing my blog for 2014 on two sad news items, we've had another visit from a fox today.  The day started quite well with Annie taking photos of me with my ice-breaker stick
getting duck breakfast and water bowls ready after the coldest night we've had - ice on bowls and buckets and ponds an inch thick!

Later in the morning I was upstairs trying to get some decent shots of the pheasants for Annie's paintings,

when I saw the ducks coming up noisily and flapping their wings madly. By the time I clicked they had stopped flapping, but on close inspection of this shot ....................

.................. I could see that I had caught the fox and his victim on camera.  I saw it running downhill with something in its mouth, thought it was a pheasant's tail hanging down  - unfortunately it turned out to be our duck Beyoncé.

Our remaining 14 ducks were very disturbed, they didn't know quite where to go for safety.

Dotty keeping a small area of her pond ice-free:

In the afternoon Annie, Ollie and I went into the fields where we saw lots of tracks in the snow, but couldn't make much sense of them:

Ollie was as happy as a pup in the snow, but his poorly front paws were hurting him.

A short time after 4 this afternoon our ducks still weren't sure what to do with themselves, 13 of them went into the duck shed for the night leaving poor Dotty by herself in the other hut. I couldn't have that and called the "twins" and Billie and Gertie out.  They did eventually go and join Dotty for the night as always.

Annie took a very pretty photo of me as we were getting ready to go shopping this afternoon: