Guinea Fowls, cicadas, gnomes and Halloween

We have two new friends living in our orchard that we are slowly planting with fruit trees.  Looks rather bare at the moment with  a few little citrus trees dotted about but we have plans!  The chickens and ducks live in this orchard of ours and now we have a pair of domestic guinea fowl too!

 Sitting on a bench at a nature reserve I felt water dripping from the Winter Senna tree above me.  I looked up and we discovered that there were cicada on the branch directly above us.  Apparently, the froth is produced from the cicada eating the sap from the tree!

 New cicadas!

 We found a little bat on our verandah one morning.  It seemed fine and we kept it in a dark drawer until evening and then released it on to the tree we near our verandah that we know bats like to hang out in.  Hopefully, the little bat was okay after that!

 I harvested a decent amount of chamomile from my herb garden.  Just love the smell.  And hooray for my own chamomile tea!

 We have one little baby chick called Sunny who joined our chicken flock in October.

 Noah has been busy creating himself a donsy of merry gnomes!

 

Our duck, Jemima has been sitting on eggs for what seems like ages.  One little duckling hatched and sadly died a few days later.  It doesn't seem like any of the other eggs will hatch.

 

And to end October, on Halloween, the boys carved fierce looking pumpkins and had a good time on a treat treasure hunt around the garden in the dark.  They then discovered lots of toads in the pond and spent ages sitting in the dark with a little torch watching the toads.