Hill Farming, Lambing

In Praise of Older Females

Last year she had her 8th and 9th lamb, both large (10lb and 11lb). She is now 8years old and last year I wrote in my lambing record, after I’d helped her lamb in the open, ‘No fuss’.

My shepherding friends sing the praises of a young flock and tell me to cull the old ewes but that doesn’t seem fair if they are healthy and productive and easy to handle so I stick to my guns.

Today was Number Thirty’s due date and, sure enough, she took herself off after lunch to the top of an otherwise empty field but, oddly, she was making a lot of noise — not a labour type baa (some of them are quite noisy, just like some women, but she isn’t usually one of those). Nor was it a bubbly, talking to a lamb baa — it was a loud calling baa (like when one sheep has crossed the stream and calls to the others to come too.

I went up and sat in the sunshine on the bank and she quietened. After 20 minutes or so I thought I’d go and get the evening feeds ready but as I walked down the hill she started calling again so I went back, and she stopped. It seemed she wanted me there — don’t ever tell me sheep aren’t intelligent.

She laboured on but things did not seem to be progressing as they should despite strong and prolonged contractions. Alan came and took one look and went off to put on his waterproof trousers.

I caught her during a contraction and could feel the two front feet and the muzzle with a swollen protruding tongue, the lamb was moving but huge and it didn’t want to budge.

Alan got back and we caught her again easily and this time he held her and I heaved, holding so tight to the hooves that I thought I might damage them and easing the head out. The feet kept slipping from my grasp and I had forgotten to bring a towel. I pulled off my T-shirt and dried the legs with it then used it to hold them. She contracted, Alan urged her on, I pulled with all my might and at last could feel it coming — the legs extended, the head was free and shoulders were born and with a slither and a gush of orange, meconium stained liquor the mighty leviathan arrived – one ear up and one ear down but breathing.

I laid it down by its mother’s nose and though prostrate with exhaustion and still will an Alan around her neck, she licked its muzzle and it gave a little bleat and she gave her bubbly baa.

Half an hour later Alan had gone to the pub and the lamb was all spruced up and had had a feed and Number Thirty was as lively as anything and in no hurry to re-establish the normal distance between the species. She had her supper while I (in a clean top) weighed the monster — 14 lb.

We sat for a while on the steep bank — ewe, lamb and shepherd. Two farm trucks came down the lane which is on the other side of the little valley overlooking our field. The first flashed its lights and the second honked its horn and wound down the window and waved. I don’t know who they were but they were acknowledging a special moment that they recognised.

Lesson learned: next year I really must get them scanned so as not to overfeed the singletons.

Hill Farming, Lambing

Pink Balloon but No Celebration.

Lamb Friday — all white and fluffy now.

Even in the Welsh Hills fewer and fewer farmers lamb out in the fields — most do it in the shelter and warmth of large sheds with pens and good lighting and enough sheep to make it worth while and to have someone there day and night.

We are an anachronism — I stumble around our fields with torch or hurricane lamp listening to the sounds of the night — for the soft bubbly baa of a ewe calling to her new-born lamb or the hysterical rhythmic baaing of a frightened young ewe, lambing for the first time. By and large our sheep do not lamb in the hours of darkness — one of the advantages of not having the lights on all the time — their circadian rhythms are undisturbed, even if ours are not. Our lambs usually arrive at first light.

Last night, though, was an exception. It was clear and frosty and there was a huge bright full-moon casting weird shadows over a black and white world. I was woken by a bleat at half past one in the morning and went to investigate.

Up in the corner of our steep field was one of our first-time ewes running after two lively new-born lambs. I’d been worried about her as she had been large and uncomfortable and had had a large swollen udder — it was bare of wool and oedematous so that it looked translucent, like a large pink balloon. This should have made more of an impression on me.

Anyway I was very relieved to find that she had delivered without any trouble and that the lambs were so lively and went back to bed… Mistake!

At dawn Alan counted the sheep and called me — only one lamb at foot and something white on the ground.

Sure enough there was a dead lamb on the ground but the young ewe still had her two lambs, one was tucked up behind her.

After failed attempts to resuscitate the perfect, cold, dead ram-lamb, we had a roll call and tail inspection of the other ewes in the field — no one had any signs of having delivered a lamb.

The two lambs born in the night were exploring their leafy environment and I was pondering on missed opportunities and lessons to be learned:

1. Be particularly vigilant on bright moonlit nights when the light level is high and when all night can seem like just before dawn.

2. An udder like a pink balloon may herald triplets (quite rare in our breed).

3. Remember to wait a while after delivery as it’s the last, often smallest, lamb that slips out unnoticed or sometimes just rolls off down the hill and gets overlooked when the ewe has so much new to deal with.

Hill Farming, Sheep, Uncategorized

The Worrying Case of the Good Friday Lamb

Considering it was born just after dawn with cloud resting on the hilltop and rain dripping from the trees, our first lamb seemed reasonably robust — it was standing but, ‘It looks a bit torpid,’ Alan said as he handed me the binoculas.

We watched — it had done the two most important things — it had breathed and it was on its feet but it would not suckle. Our most skittish ewe had delivered it onto the moist leaf litter behind the hedge and it teetered around under its mother’s belly looking for something (it did not know what) but it tired and slumped down onto the wet grass when its mother pawed at it ominously with her foot. It stood again and she nudged it backwards along her side. Half heartedly it butted the ewe’s back leg, missing her udder, failing to let down any milk and not sensing the teat at all. Again it flopped down in the mud. This happened over and over and the ewe looked pitiful — uncharacteristically she let me come very close.

Something would have to be done — the lamb was getting weaker, the ewe was pawing at it more roughly, more desperately.

Worried ewe — over 2 hours and the lamb has not fed

A makeshift pen was constructed nearby and I carried the lamb into it, it was female, her mother followed without any fuss — even human mothers comply with their attendant’ suggestions when at their wit’s end.

Makeshift pen

The lamb didn’t like being picked up and a little surge of adrenaline probably did it good. As I placed it on its feet, it ran to its mother (now restrained by a hurdle) it butted her udder, which is what they do when they run home for safety, and I squeezed the teat which squirted the lambs face with milk — she latched on immediately and fed.

Full stomach, ears up, baa working, bowels working, bladder working, numbered like Mum (number 12, on the other side) and tummy sprayed with iodine, she is ready for a healthy sleep and not the engulfing drowsiness of hypoglycaemia that can carry off even a healthy lamb if she cannot achieve all three gaols of her birthday — breathing, standing and feeding.

Now she can do them all!

Ecology, Hill Farming

The Midwife has arrived…

in her black and white uniform.

Who called her? Nobody knows. But she knows: she knows exactly when every baby is due and she moves in a day or so before to watch over the mother.

Unlike her human counterpart she has no concern for the mother, she is here to collect the placenta and the membranes. There’ll be no rotting flesh on our fields to attract predators. All will be whisked away by the midwife bird.

She, or he, has been working up the valley following the wave of lambing which creeps up with the warming air and the growth of the grass. The first sign of her presence is a smear of wool on the field; she has taken the liberty of pulling some wool from a ewe’s back to line her own nest and leaves a little on the grass, alarming as she chose the wool marked with red marker — does the colour of blood attracts her?

Magpies are hated by most farmers because of their partiality to another delicacy: they will peck the eyes from dead sheep and sometimes from not-quite-dead sheep and even from the head of a partially born lamb.

This upsets farmers (not surprisingly) but the flash of this bold and watchful bird will often alert him to a miscarriage, premature lambing or a fallen ewe and you can see magpies on occasions, perched on the back of a sheep, patiently picking out maggots from soiled wool which, if left, would attack the skin and eat into the sheep’s flesh causing rapid septicaemia from fly-strike and death if untreated.

Magpie looking for parasites and maggots

The midwife bird is here to warn you that lambing is nigh — ovine tempers are frayed but the fields are drying out nicely so

brace yourselves for an avalanche of lambs.

Astronomy

Grass-Root Astronomy

What do you do when you are caught out by a 95% lunar eclipse of the sun — you watch it as Galileo might have and as your granny did — projected onto the wall of the house through her colander!

Hover over images for explanation or click for a slide show —

See the moon passing over the sun

The image is inverted but clear

Multiple images of the eclipse

Afterwards its just a colander again

But that’s not all — other shadows are temporarily weirded —

Nature taking artistic liberties during the eclipse

The camera, without a view finder, gave a image without damage to the retina

Solar Eclipse 20/03/2015 seen in Wales

Art

The Soul of the Soulless City

It stopped me in my tracks, that image, with a gasp
(I turned to see if anyone had noticed).
It had reached out from the wall and grabbed me.
Like a snake in the grass – really, not a metaphor,
but a primitive reaction.
As I passed, the picture had crept un-noticed through the corner of my eye, into my brain, and hit a trigger – KAZAM and spinning round, amazed,
I recognised the view —
the exact view from my earliest childhood, or so it seemed —
though I’ve never been to New York.

Soul of the Soulless City by CRW Nevinson ()

Soul of the Soulless City-CRW Nevinson

Wide-eyed and gripped by New York in 1920 and never so moved before by art, I was perplexed.

Even more so when I found this!

Roofs of New York CRW Nevinson in my grandparent's flat circa 1955

My Mum and Dad with the Roofs of New York by
CRW Nevinson, in my grandparent’s flat circa 1955

You see — it’s not the same image at all — just an essence, the blowing steam, the style, and I was a child when I last saw that picture. But still I spun round when I saw through the same eyes, sixty years later — the eyes of CRW Nevinson. What does this tell us about art?

Here I am looking the other way!

Essentially unchanged

P.S The artist renamed the picture which is now on show at the Tate Britain when he fell out with American critics years later, it had been New York — an abstraction, it became The Soul of a Soulless City. This explains the disparity between the positivity of the image and the negativity of the title, I don’t believe he thought the city soulless when he painted it!

My grand-parents picture was sold many years ago — perhaps to a conciliatory American.

Ecology, Humour

Eye shine — you shine but I don’t

I spend a lot of my time with individuals who see the world through very different eyes.

For a start their eyes shine at night, not with avarice or the holy spirit but with any light that they catch in their eye —

Eyeshine in Welsh Mountain Sheep

You see they are a prey species and they stand out all night in the darkest fields uneasily looking out for wolves and rustlers so they need to see in the dark. One of the adaptions that many nocturnal mammals have made is to acquire a tapetum lucidum, a biological mirror behind their translucent retina, so that light stimulates the retina as it falls upon it and stimulates the retina’s photosensitive cells again as it bounces off the mirror layer heading back the way it came — this helps them to see in the dark.

So when you go out in the field at night with your torch and all the sheep turn to look at you because they think you are something spooky, all their eyes light up with intense pale green light, all directed at you, which is definitely spooky.

Dogs have a tapetum lucidum too — this one shines bright green.

There’s a sheep behind him. Foxes have eyes that glow green, different species have variation in their tapetum lucidum and glow differently — hunters who went out lamping for rabbits and foxes (I think it’s illegal so they don’t do it anymore) will tell you they can tell what they are shooting by the shade of the eyeshine, as they charge around in a truck with a lamp on top picking up eye glow and shooting things — very fortunately humans do not have a tapetum lucidum, otherwise more of them would get shot.

Cats are famous for their glowing eyes and that is where I got into trouble. I spent a happy evening flashing and snapping at our cats, trying to demonstrate their eyeshine and their strange lozenge shaped pupils that constrict down to a tight vertical slit in bright light — you see one of the problems for these creatures, who are adapted for the dark, is managing bright light. Mainly they shut their eyes.

Cat dealing with bright light

Partially dilated pupil

Mid-position pupil, not round nor slit

Wistful in bright sunlight – pupils narrow vertical slits

Minutes after this unsuccessful photo-shoot, Midnight (our short haired black cat) started doing something very strange and alarming, kicking his right foot out then grabbing at his mouth with both his paws as if trying to pull something out of his mouth — he did this repeatedly making a peculiar slavvery noise. There wasn’t anything in his mouth or throat, he wasn’t salivating or retching and there was no sign of a bite or sting on his lips. The other cat and the dog looked worried and followed him round fussing as he repeated his odd stereotyped gestures, like non-verbal Tourette’s Syndrome. OMG he’s been out and got a head injury, or a brain tumour… Or epilepsy due to flashing lights.

There then ensued a period of research on the internet. While the cat twitched, quietly now, on its chair by the fire, the other two animals sat upright on the floor next to him watching anxiously.

By the time my husband had got home I had cracked it — Feline Hyperaesthsia Syndrome… Can be provoked by stress ( like being chased around the house with a flashlight). This is a diagnosis of exclusion and mindful of vet’s bills we adopted an expectant policy — we’ll watch and expect it will get better.

It did — for twelve hours or so he looked spaced-out between twitches that gradually got less complicated and with longer gaps between them– first the kicking disappeared, than the grabbing at his mouth, then the licking of his lips gradually stopped and he had a long sleep. Then he woke up and had a large breakfast and has been fine since. We didn’t photograph any of this — we thought I had done enough harm.

Returning to the great mysteries of the mammalian eyes that follow me daily —

Horizontal rectangular pupil and fetching eyeshade of pale lashes

Why do cats have vertical pupils and sheep horizontal ones?

They both need to be able to restrict the bright light of the mid-day sun. Cats need very sharp vision, right in front of them and the potential to use a whole cross section of their lens (this has complicated optic reasons to do with putting back together the spectrum that bending light tends to produce), thus they need a vertical slit because they are predators and they pounce on little creatures right in front of them.

Sheep need a more global view of the world, they live on grassland and need to be able to spot movement all around.

With her protruding eyes and wide pupils, she can see from right in front and to right back along her flanks. Provided she walks in a slight zig-zag, which they do, she can see all around herself, even in bright weather when her pupils are constricted — she couldn’t do this with a vertical pupil.

Dogs have round pupils like us but can see in the dark — they have reflectors at the back of their eyes which shine but are not so sensitive to the light that they need slit pupils to protect themselves by day — I suspect this is because at night they see mainly with their noses!

Ecology, Humour

Kissing Frogs

Now is the time to look for signs of Spring and here, where there is still snow in the shadow of the hedges, we haven’t seen a bulging bud. But the birds know something’s up! They have a sense of anticipation and an irritable awareness of their territory — the robins are scrapping and the chaffinches have started to sing and me? Well, I go out every morning to look for frogspawn and on the morning after Valentine’s night — there it is!

Something for our newts to eat.

Otherwise things look quite wintery though the moss is strangely spruced up and vibrant.

It’s making the most of the early sunlight before being caste into shadow by the burgeoning verdure that will soon overwhelm it — the uncurling fronds of the ferns and bracken and the canopy of oak leaves.

And the lichens are looking shaggy after a winter unfettered by the competition and unbroken by the resting bottoms of weary ramblers.

The wild unicorn on Van Hill still has his winter coat and hasn’t started yet to get his new horn when he will hide in the woods like the moss.

Ecology, Hill Farming, Humour, lifestyle

Hearts of Oak

‘The measure of a man’s importance is the size and number of his woodpiles’.

I was told this fact many years ago in rural France — it made a great impression — so contradictory was it to the progressive philosophies of my young French friends that I found it oddly reassuring — and still do!

We have woodpiles — burning wood when you have lots of trees is great but trees need cutting down and they don’t go quietly, they have a lot of stored energy and can lash out ferociously. They need logging and drying and wood burns amazingly quickly so you need loads and plenty of room for storage. We have an old barn, thirty feet by twenty feet already full of timber.

Last back end (as they say in Lancashire) we culled a Leylandii hedge, grown 40 feet high in a blink of Mother Nature’s eye. We cut off the branches and burned the brush-wood —

— but when the exalting roar of the chain saw had stalled for the last time we were left with a daunting amount of timber — a mountain where our new workshop was waiting to be built.

There it lay until last week when we were taken in hand!

Not by the Forestry Commission or the satellite snooperage of Rural Affairs, Wales (it was nothing to do with illicit romance in the hills) — it wasn’t even our very grown-up children who, though they never tidied their rooms, now worry about the state of their decrepit parents. No, it was a young neighbour (well relatively young) who knew that all we needed was a tiny push, a little encouragement.

‘I’ll come and help you on Tuesday — I’ve nothing much on this time of the year — I’ll be with you at midday.’

We refused, we protested, we were tempted, we said he’d have to have lunch (would there be meat? — Yes), he accepted, we capitulated, it was arranged and, in the intervening few days, we got on with what we should have been doing for months!

By the time Tuesday came we had started two new woodpiles and that day something strange happened — tree trunks scudded over the ground, whizzed through the air, crashed into trailers, flattened the saw trestle and just about spifflicated two pensioners temporarily under vigorous new management.

Chainsaws started willingly and logs marched to the music of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice jumping happily onto the new woodpiles.

By evening, by some miracle of effort and teamwork, well mainly one man’s effort (we helped as hard as we could and tried not to get in the way) we had uncovered the bare earth where our new workshop is to be sited.

Temporarily repaired trestle on the almost cleared site — Digger just watched and didn’t help at all.

It’s a miracle. Just another of the miracles of living here — Thank you David!

New Woodpile

Birds, Poetry, Welsh culture

‘I am a man like you,’ but was he? R.S.Thomas (1913-2000)

Yesterday was one of those days that can’t be wasted — bright winter sunshine, long shadows on crisp all-day frost — a day for adventure.
We have been reading the poems and the entertaining biography, by Byron Rogers, of the Welsh poet, R S Thomas, referred to by Philip Larkin as Arsewipe Thomas whose personality was as fascinating as his poetry which was, though marvellously constructed, at times, patronising and judgemental of the Welsh ‘peasant’ (a strange concept in itself in the second half of the twentieth century).
Thomas’s enigmatic personality has intrigued me since I saw him speak in an interview on the television about Wales and the Welsh language, never had I seen someone’s subject so at odds with his delivery! His words were contradicted by all the non-verbal elements of his speech.

Thomas’s identity seemed caught between two cultures and isolated by ‘intellect’, education and calling. He was ordained in the Church of Wales, the Welsh branch of the Episcopal Church, essentially the Church of England, viewed with suspicion by many Welsh, the majority of whom attended Non-conformist Chapels.

He was an Anglican priest who had adopted an affected upper class accent though he was born in Cardiff and brought up in Holyhead, North Wales, but he felt Welsh to his core, learned Welsh as an adult and was an outspoken nationalist.

Yesterday in the sunshine, we went in search of clues to his persona, not with much expectation.
We visited his church in Manafon, not far from here —

St Michael’s Church, Manafon, Powys

St Michael’s Church(Eglwys Mihangel Sant) Manafon, Powys

R.S.Thomas’ rectory at Manafon

He was not the first poet to have had the living, the heritage board listed a whole bibliography of bardic priests — R.S. was only the last of many — did that egg him on to write in Welsh — his poetry in the Welsh language never seems to have made the grade which must have frustrated him.

The church was locked but the situation was idyllic with its rectory on the riverside, surrounded by meadows and tall trees.

R.S. Thomas wanted to see the beauty of this landscape reflected in the true Welsh people but they disappointed him seeming brutalised by the harshness of their lives.

You failed me, farmer. I was afraid you would

The day I saw you loitering with the cows.

Yourself one of them but for the smile, […]

For this I leave you

Alone in your harsh acres, herding pennies […] (Valediction)

Apart from poetry, Welshness and a preoccupation with the darkness of other people’s minds, oafs and yokels (The Country Clergyman), R.S. Thomas was a bird watcher — I suspect like an old boss of mine who expressed interest in a trapped bird, flapping itself to a frenzy against a closed sky-light — when I asked if he would like me to get the pole and open the window, he said, ‘Oh no, I shouldn’t bother, I can see now, it’s only a starling!’

The starlings yesterday in Manafon were making their presence felt if only by weight of number. A vast murmuration had settled on tall trees near the church, the wide valley thronged with their chatter. You could have swept them up from the ground.

Starlings — a cloud resting in the trees —

–and on the ground

We drove in a wide arch through the Banwy valley, skirting snow capped Snowdonia, to Eglwys Fach (Little Church) Thomas’s next parish, arriving at dusk, another church dedicated to St Michael and I am reminded of the lines

A little aside from the main road,

becalmed in a last-century greyness, (The Chapel)

Memorial Gate, Eglwys Fach.

Church of St Michael, Eglwys Fach.

This was a Welsh speaking area close to the bird reserve at Ynys Hir but a lot of the parishioners were middle class English ex-pats. In the church yard there are stones inscribed with names that are not Welsh —

Come to Wales

To be buried: the undertaker

Will arrange it for you. We have

The sites and a long line

Of clients going back….

It ends… Dirt cheap, a place where

It is lovely to lie. (Welcome to Wales)

The church was locked — whether to keep God in or keep him out — one cannot tell.

They laid a stone trap

for him, enticing him with candles,

and thought he would come like some huge moth

out of the darkness to beat there… (The Empty Church)

R.S. Thomas spent a lot of time waiting for God, but then… The meaning is in the waiting. (Kneeling) Possibly he was looking in the wrong place. In his quest he moved ever Westward.

On the next irresistible day perhaps we will follow him to the far west and the Lleyn peninsula.

Trees behind the church at Eglwys Fach in the last of the sun.

	dianaashworth on Ready, Steady…
	tranquil2d54061c01 on Ready, Steady…
	dianaashworth on Another Unusual Visitor!
	dianaashworth on Another Unusual Visitor!
	Brenda Hargreaves on Another Unusual Visitor!

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: