Be Careful What You Wish For

The hay I get weighs 120 - 140 lbs/bale. I usually feed it out of the van, so I don't have to move whole bales. Once in a while I have to unload it, when I need the van for other purposes.

This is a very temporary stack of bales that proved too heavy even to get to the pallets (where the carport used to be). I knew I'd use this within 2 days, so not a problem.

Each year my peafowl go into the woods outside of the fences, looking for good nesting sites. This always makes me nervous, as they are unprotected out there. I've gone hunting for nests, and never found them. I have wished they would lay somewhere safer, somewhere I could keep track of the nests and help protect newly hatched chicks.

I seem to have gotten my wish. I pulled the tarp back to use the hay and found an egg. I'm pretty sure this is a peahen egg. It's not hidden in the woods, it's in the middle of my parking area. I guess that bale of hay is now dedicated to the peahens.

Another side effect of this is that I've learned peafowl are pretty protective of their nesting sites. I now have peafowl in the middle of my lane all the time, attempting to keep everyone else away from the hay bale while protected it's anonymity. My cars and I seem to be exempt from this behavior, but the Alpacas I was trying to herd up the road to get them in an upper field were not. A peahen chased them back down the road.