PEEPEE, our peahen, has at last succumbed to domestic life. Well, at any rate, she is sitting on a nest of five eggs, and having daily arguments with Mr Peacock.

He will not leave her alone to sit on her eggs but instead keeps hovering around and making a noisy nuisance of himself. You can hear the pair of them honking away to each other from early morning till night. I thought they called when they wanted to mate. Not after.

Just to make sure that at least one of the eggs that the new Mrs Peahen is sitting on might hatch, my brother-in-law Geoff has slipped a fertile egg into the nest, hatched at about the same time as Mrs Peahen's own eggs.

The plan is that we shall check the eggs in about three weeks to see if they are viable. By floating the eggs in a bucket of warm water, any that rock are goers and any that just hang around in the water, are not.

If, miracle of miracles, all of them are fertile and the first four eggs hatch out before the egg Geoff placed in the nest, then he will have to do a mercy retrieval and pop the last egg under a bantie (or his jumper) until that one hatches.

The hen will smuggle the new chick under Mrs Peahen at night, and hope that although a peacock has many skills, numeracy is not one of them.

We appreciate that this is a classic case of counting your peacock chicks before they have hatched, but even if none of them hatch, it has been an exercise in bonding for the peacocks, and stopped both of them from eating any more of my pot plants for a month.

Peepee has chosen a very safe, but extremely awkward place to nest - on top and on the edge of a haystack that is not yet completed. She is out of reach of any fox predators, but until the hay and straw are all stacked up, she is sat exactly in the midst of where John and Geoff want to be with any fresh bales.

At the start of the week, John combined all the barley. It was a good crop and all that they will need for next winter's feed.

Now, it is in a large heap in the biggest grain shed, ready for Geoff to put through the drier and into the feed bins. Combining finished, John started to bale the straw, before the annual, or even bi and tri-annual custom of breaking some inaccessible piece of machinery on the baler. In this case, the knotting mechanism. Baler mended and straw baled it was time to use our latest piece of farm tackle, the new 33ft trailer.

Geoff had a little moan about the fact that it was too high to load bales onto, but as it handled beautifully, took three times as many bales as before, and was still not anywhere fully loaded, he gave it his seal of approval by the end of the day, but reminded John not to let me anywhere near it.

When John and Geoff came to throw the bales off and start stacking them, the peacocks were incensed at this invasion of their privacy and nesting territory.

Mr Peacock trumpeted and honked his anger, Mrs Peahen snaked her head back and forth in wrath. Hell hath no fury like a peacock in a rage.

In the end, Mrs Peahen was cocooned in a special peacock-shaped sanctuary on the stack and left in peace to sit her eggs. Until the next load of bales, that is.

Updated: 11:34 Thursday, August 02, 2001