Monthly Archives: March 2017

animal psychology, Hill Farming, Lambing

A Bad Start!

This ewe gives no hint that she is labouring until the last few minutes.  This morning she pushed out a large ram lamb just as I was feeding the others — I could see the lamb moving but by the time I got there things were not looking good — I pulled a great wadge of membranes from his throat but he did not react.  I swung him and pressed rhythmically on his chest.  I blew in his nose.  I even gave him mouth-to-nose ventilation (I really shouldn’t do that) but he was dead.

What a waste!  What a blow!  Fifteen seconds earlier, half a minute perhaps and it would all have been different.

I started to take the dead lamb away and the ewe wailed — I put it down again and thought, I wished she could have a live lamb…  Then I remembered!

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Here she is a few hours later with her new lamb. (Can you spot the deliberate mistake!) He’s wearing a sheepskin overcoat!

Thanks to two neighbours this little orphan lamb now has a healthy young mum with lots of milk and the ewe, well, she is none the wiser.  Her lamb that would not move, nor baa, nor feed, that lay in the pen unresponsive to her pawing was taken away for a moment by the big man who comes in the red truck and the next minute her lamb was right as rain — so right, he has two tails!

A little deception and the application of an old country skill and the dead lamb was skinned and the skin with all its associated love is transferred to the orphan (acquired from the other neighbour) and everyone is happy.

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Pink rinse from being rubbed with placenta and mud from earlier pawing.

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Bereavement, Things my mother did for me

Weeds

Dirt is just stuff in the wrong place. Weeds are just plants in the wrong place. Context is everything.

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My Mum loved me and wanted to please me (I think). She loved gardening and bright cheerful flowers. She filled every available receptacle with colourful annuals – pansies, busy-lizzies, lobelia, alyssum, salvias, verbena, primulas, snap-dragons and begonias (I hate begonias!).

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I love wild places. When we lived together at the end of her life she had a garden and I had a paddock and a wild area. But big lolloping red tulips would pop up mysteriously amongst the wild crocuses in my natural area and brightly coloured primulas appear mysteriously in the hedgerow of the paddock. She was incorrigible! Feral cultivated hyacinths were insinuated into the bluebell wood, people would give them to her and she never could stand their smell in the house (reminded her of incontinence).

After she died we moved to a really wild place where God does nearly all the gardening and where even rhododendrons are banned. But by the kitchen door there is an old sink where I have planted primulas.

Yesterday, when I was feeding the ewes, the sun came out and I noticed the first yellow star of ranunculus on the bank and two dandelions by the shed and they lifted my spirits (we’ve had a difficult few months) and in the sink by the door, peeping out from last year’s leaf litter, like a prayer, are Mum’s primulas, bright and new.

 

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Farm engineering, Hill Farming, Welsh History

Another one bites the dust!

There is an ancient lorry trap where we live.  It used to trap carts but it has never stopped. It is the reason why the old drovers took the high road — some say it is a portal to the underworld.

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It’s dusk now and the ingenuity of the Welsh farmer is bought to play — he always has a few railway sleepers about his person.  The tractor-pull has failed. The two-tractor-pull has failed — the chain has failed, fired like a mediaeval weapon into a field, but on this occasion no one is killed.  Eventually with a little modern help from the biggest jack in the world the sleepers are inserted and the spell is broken.

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What happens here repeatedly is that a right angle bend, on a 1:10 rising to 1:5 hill, arrests the vehicle.  It backs down, thinking it will take the alternate route, the driver turns the wheel clockwise. “Left hand down!” I scream as I hurtle across the field (Alan has told me to do this) but it is all too late.  There is a thud as the heavily loaded grain lorry slumps against the bank.  Sadly,  think our sheep (who have seen it all before) nothing is spilled, carts were much better!

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