Hay making and a difficult bird.

We are very busy making hay now. Finished the fields on our farm a few days ago. Then it rained for two days so today we started cutting the grass on fields we rent from another farm (where there is no farming anymore) and hopefully we will be able to go straight on to another farm where we rent two fields because they're not needed by the farmers there.

Later we will start cutting on a farm that belongs to the town (no farming for years). We cut most of the fields there too. So lets hope there will be no rain. Please.

I want to tell you about one of the birds that make our job a bit harder and that's Kria or Sterna paradisaea, the English name is Arctic Tern. It's a beautiful bird as you can see here and here but it always amazes me how they can year after year lay their eggs in the most difficult (for us) and fatal (for the chicks) places. Here is one egg almost on the road.



And here is the parent, I could not get a photo of it attacking me, they are very aggressive when parenting.


Hubby doesn't like them at all (one had just taken a dive at him there), but I saved two little chicks (one was wet, just out of the egg) from the field and the thanks I got was droppings on my head and shoulders. Come on, where is the gratitude? Lol. Well at least they didn't peck at my head.


Those are our hay cutting machines. My tractor is a Case 575 or 585, never can remember which and hubby's is a Massey Ferguson 690.


Here is DS2 on another MF. Hubby made that one out of two broken down tractors (we bought just the parts we needed), the front part is an 265 and the back is 500 something. The machine is for turning the hay so it will get dry. This photo and the ones above are taken this evening. (About 10 o'clock)


But the following photos are taken after midnight almost a week ago. First is DS1 driving the MF 265 / 500 something. I don't know the name of the machine but it makes the hay go in to lines.


Then comes hubby driving the MF 690 with the baler. (He's fixing some minor glitch there)


Followed by me and my Case with the wrapper.


Then we had friends over from another farm. They had a problem with their baler and had borrowed our old one which had then broken down (after baling over 100 bales) So, it was conference time. You know, men and broken down machinery. An endless fascination.


Well, they figured out what was wrong with their baler, it wasn't really broken, just needed another way of working through the hay lines. So the conference payed off. We came home at two thirty in the morning and I was absolutely bone tired.

I've bin off the computer and will be for some time to come, but that's life.

Sunna.