Fixed the tractor and made a scarecrow .... or a scare hawk in our case

Got the part back from the tractor place and installed it, got through the ditch and rotary hoed the bit I wanted to dig over and then drove back through the ditch and into the shed. It took a bit more digging to achieve all of this because both times I needed to reduce the ramp angle in the ditch to be able to drive through but I got it done. The tractor place did make a mistake when the assembled the bit in that they forgot to put the wheel studs in the hub. Luckily I'm pretty inventive and figured out a way around that problem without having to take the parts back again. I have no idea how much the repair bill is going to be, they're sending me a bill next month.

We have loads of newly hatched chickens running around and this is proving all too tempting for our local hawks. Since I'd rather nor shoot the hawks we decided to build a scarecrow.

Of course I wanted to build a scarecrow with fully articulating joints and one that I didn't have to rebuild every couple of years. So I put my thinking cap on (always a dangerous thing) and came up with a plan that involved me cutting up a whole lot of galvanised pipe I had hanging around. It took eleven bits of pipe of various lengths and a bit of ingenuity to make the joints and I had a all singing and dancing skeleton ............ but no head. At least a bit of pipe wasn't going to cut it as a head because it is really difficult to put a hat on a piece of pipe.

So I went and found an old piece of telephone pole and set to it with a chainsaw to do the rough carving. Then I sharpened up a few chisels and got my wooden mallets and carried on carving by hand. I ended up with a rather Hermann Munster'ish head but once I put the cap on it it didn't look half bad. Certainly good enough for a scarecrow.

I then put a few screws in its head and hung the head from the pole I had prepared to hang the scarecrow on. That looked rather amusing having this head dangling around. However fun it might have been the next task was to dress the skeleton and hang it from the head.

The results look pretty good and will be even better once we have stuffed the clothes with old hay. the idea of hanging the scarecrow and having moving legs and arms is so that it moves in the wind and the hawks are less likely to realise that it isn't a human standing there.

Here's hoping it actually works and we don't loose any chicks to those hawks. Otherwise the gun will have to be pressed into service. I wonder what roasted hawk tastes like?