There are some unusual nesting spots being utilised in the farm and stableyard, revealed by pauses between chores.

My wheelbarrow trips to the muck heap are attended by pied and grey wagtail pairs that make small aerial assaults on insects, though I’ve yet to locate their nests. Swallows too are well-served here by midges and flies swarming around warm-blooded animals, and there is always mud for nest repairs, with the regular slosh of water buckets and hosing down of sweaty horses.

New bales of hay must be opened with caution. Tash, who keeps her shire cross Jack here, narrowly avoids pulling down a robin’s nest inside one (the adult happily resettles on her eggs) and two years ago, one side of a haystack had to be avoided completely until a tawny owl had raised two owlets in it.

A blue tit entering the shaft of the reversible plough. Photograph: Nicola Chester

To a seasonally redundant, reversible five-furrow plough, a pair of blue tits bring caterpillars in from the field oaks. They drop down a narrow shaft at the end of its hollow steel frame above the landwheel. In between visits, I peer in to find a long, thin nest, brimful of baby blue tits, their yellow clown gapes pressed shut at my presence, safe from the bills of woodpeckers.

My yard duties done, I search for other nests among the tangled eras of farm machinery. A retired sprayer sits squatly among nettles, the skeletal wings of its mechanical arms folded up grumpily. Beside it, a hydraulic post-banger vibrates loudly, as if it is on. Careful inspection reveals a tree bumblebee nest inside the hollow mechanism.

I find another blue tit nest in a hole in the cap of the Haybob 300, a contraption that spreads, tedders and “whuffles” cut hay to dry in the sunshine, before gathering it back into windrows for baling. It is likely to be pressed into service soon.

Thankfully, both broods of tits fledge a day ahead of the heatwave that might have suffocated those in the steel plough casing, and risked a terrible farm accident on the others. Our farmland birds may be struggling in the fields, but there is a precarious sanctuary for some in the farmyard.