Sad news

I have to report that we have lost our guinea fowl. To be honest, he's been gone a while, but I found it difficult to write about. That's him in my avatar - Tommy.

He arrived in November 2010 - just turned up one night, we don't know where from. MrsH said 'There's a bird sat on the window sill outside'. I took a photo through the glass and it was true. Over the next few days, we saw him scuttling about in the garden, creeping out from the shrubbery when we fed the ducks, but a bit afraid of them.

We saw him more and more over the next few weeks. You may recall that winter was a bitterly cold one - down to minus 20 at night and we wondered how or if he would survive.

But survive he did, and he decided to make our garden his home. He decided to sleep at the top of a huge hawthorne tree - always on the exact same branch every night. A real creature of habit.

Although he wouldn't let us touch him, he was happy to eat meal-worms that we left on the top step of the back door. He actually spent many hours there, especially in bad weather. He also shared meals with the ducks (who by now he was 'in charge' of) and would often come to the back door, squawking at us to tell us it was time for their food.

Although he was effectively 'wild' and would wander off to neighbour's gardens and (nerve wrackingly for us) across a busy road sometimes, he always came back and spent most of his time here and always in time to get up into his tree before dark.

On 29 June he wasn't around in the morning. Not unusual, he'll turn up for his meal worms later, we thought. But he didn't.

We wandered all around the neighbourhood, walked up and down the road to see if he'd been hit by a car - looked everywhere. Same again each day over the following week. Nothing.

We cannot know for sure what happened to him. His disappearance was as much of a mystery as his appearance.

However, one day we heard the ducks making a commotion. We went down to the river and they were all on the banking, on guard.  We'd seen a female duck with three chicks recently, but then only two. Then we saw something in the water and the long brown shape of an animal swimming with something in its mouth - one of the chicks. We later looked it up and we're sure that it was a wild mink. I dashed to the water's edge and threw a rock at the thing as hard as I could. It dropped the chick (already dead) and swam off. We've not seen it since, but the ducks took a good while before they would go back in the water.

So we can only assume that rotten creature got our Tommy. I love animals, but I sincerely wish that thing were dead.