Final Fry Up, Final Milk Feed

He looks well served. What will the rest of
us be having?

Our normal procedure for seeing guests off the premises involves giving them a "proper Irish Fry" breakfast on their final morning before dropping them off to the airport. The fry, which would be well loaded with sausages, rashers, white pudding, black pudding, beans, mushrooms, scrambled eggs etc sees the guest right through the flights and any onward journey without needing to eat airline or motorway services food.

Last year's pigs and I make the May pages
of the OSB calendar. Bottom left here.

Our Help-X lad, Carsten, however, was not a great one for the breakfasts, preferring a light meal of just bread and butter, glass of fruit juice and cup of tea. Also, he was not flying, only catching a train at 2 pm headed west to the town of Westport; with that timing, The Woman of the House was always going to do him a fine packed lunch.

The Amelanchia is looking like doing us
a fine job flowering this year. 

Carsten still wanted to experience this culinary delight though, so we opted for having the fry as his final evening meal. He definitely enjoyed it and dipped back in many times for seconds, thirds etc.

The sheep in 'The Woods'

The rest, as they say, is history. I dropped him to the railway station for his train and he is by now, we hope well installed at his new job on Achill Island. Up to now I have always said that the best kind of Help X guest are the ones you'd use all the good adjectives for - fit, strong, able, helpful, fast learner, safe, happy, positive etc. For Carsten I am going to up the 'ante' and add another clause. - ones where you wish they weren't actually leaving! I could easily have used Carsten for another week or more. Ah well. Welcome back here any time, friend.

By chance, Carsten was also the last guest to bottle feed the lamb, Bábóg. I had 2 grass-related problems and we solved both on a '2 birds with one stone' basis, plus a third thrown in for good measure. Out in the East Field the grass is still very shorn (by the sheep) and is not moving much yet in this slow Spring. The sheep were shouting hopefully for hay or crunch every time a human appeared. Meanwhile, in the wooded bit by our drive, the grass and herbage was getting long enough to need mowing.

First class transport for ducklings to their
new, outdoor quarters

The fence there is not good and certainly not sheep-tight, so I'd been wary of letting the sheep at it in case they headed for the hills. Elizabeth, fortunately, is braver than me about these things and thought that the sheep would be so delighted with this new grazing and browse, they'd stay around, at least till their bellies were full. After that they'd be biddable enough to be led meekly home to the secure field for a lie down and a ruminate. So it proved and they have now had 2 days at this.

What's this odd green stuff under our feet?

On the first day we both noticed that bottle-fed Bábóg seemed to be tucking into the green stuff with gusto. Weaning bottle fed lambs is quite a tricky process because you have to do it hard and fast. Their little rumens get out of balance ferment-wise if you keep giving them big shots of milk.

Dad introduces himself. 

The advice is to let them get to 7 weeks old (tick) and "make sure" they are eating around 250 g of 'solids' per day, then just STOP the bottle feeds. We both reckoned that she was eating easily that so Nurse Elizabeth (I/C Maternity Unit), dropped the axe and lo!  the girl is weaned. Even she seems to understand and her hopeful bleating has all become very uncertain and half hearted. After half an hour in the woods, her little tummy (OK, huge fat gut) is bulging and she needs a lie down with the rest of them. So that is it. She's done. Does anyone need a third of a bag of Lamlac formula powder?

Turkey sex here seems to involve a lot
of standing on top of your wife and not
a lot of contact between the vital 'bits'.

Our other progress since Carsten departed is that the ducklings have now been moved to their new quarters, a rabbit run with a 'bedroom' section. It is so warm at the moment that we think they can do very well without the 'electric hen' which never really works for ducklings anyway. It is designed for baby chicks to creep in under it as they would their Mum's skirts, and feel the warmth on their backs. Ducks is different. If they tried to creep in under Mum they'd be under water, so their instinct is to climb up on her back and blag a piggy-back ride. When they sit up on top of the electric hen, they do not get much benefit from the warming plate.

Towser climbs onto the keyhole bed, the better to observe
proceedings.

So, they spent the day outside in the lovely sunshine meeting a succession of our other birds who all happen by in the course of their free range circling. All three of our grown up ducks came and said 'Hello'. Time enough for them to meet face to face when they are big enough to cope with those drakes 'laying down the law'.

Roast Lamb supper.

That is probably enough for this one. It is 9 pm and I should probably go and have the now-nightly argument with the Guinea Fowl about the need to go to bed before Mr Fox comes calling.

A Weighty Tome

Event poster for the Spring Day

I am sneaking this post in before the normal 'due day' (Tuesday) because a) I have plenty to say already and b) I am likely to be too busy tomorrow evening what with the arrival of our Help-X volunteer. Reason 'a' has largely to do with Elizabeth playing an absolute blinder and finding me a lovely day's entertainment on Saturday. This took the form of a day of walks and talks "celebrating Spring" based in the 'village hall' buildings of nearby Kilmovee village.

Yomping through the woods

What had caught her eye was the involvement of our main man at the National Biodiversity Database, Liam Lysaght; it turns out that his brother was setting it up. After what feels like 6 months of wet and Winter, the weather came up trumps too and the day took place in lovely warm sunshine. However, there is no point in re-inventing the wheel, so it is easiest if I just reproduce here the text of a review I offered to write for the Kilmovee website. Here it is.

Mammal Atlas (cover)

Many, many thanks today to the team at Kilmovee for organising the excellent ‘walks and talks’ event, “A Celebration of Spring”. This was a brilliantly assembled event full of interest and healthy exercise on a gorgeous Spring day which had arrived hot on the heels of a long, wet March and April – a welcome break.

Mammal Atlas (Fox pages open)

We started in the ‘classroom’, the village’s Thatch Roof Building attached to the Village Centre with fascinating presentations by Liam Lysaght of the National Biodiversity Database on the need for that resource, by Chris Huxley on bird migration and by Lynda Huxley on the conservation of swifts, swallows, house martins and sand martins.

The ever-more-massive lamb, Bábóg. Compare this pic with
the size of her 6 weeks ago.

Our first walk was down to a woodland around 20 minutes south of Kilmovee which was pure joy in the sunshine ‘armed’ with our assembled experts in many ecological areas – bird song, Summer migrant and other birds (we were quickly ‘shown’ willow warblers, swallows, blackcaps,  mistle thrushes and chiffchaffs and even a buzzard came zooming through with a hooded crow in hot pursuit), butterflies and bees, plus botanists to point out wood sorrel, anenomes, greater stitchwort, pig-nut and the not-quite-ready bluebells.

A 4th bag of Lamlac is needed.

There are some impressive ancient beeches in that wood too, which had us hankering for a local historian to tell us some of the past of this site.

We adjourned back to the thatched cottage for a superb lunch of soup, soda bread, sandwiches and biscuits plus, of course, tea and coffee.

Not the tidiest drinker. Bábóg gets sprayed liberally on at least
one side of her face with milk.

Refreshed, we were back into the ‘class room’ for a lovely, relaxing, post-prandial talk by local poet and writer, Terry McDonagh who is also an expert on local, famous, 1700s poet Anthony Raftery, blinded from age 10 by smallpox and the “last travelling bard” famous for his poems about Spring.
The final entertainment was a walk out to the local stone-built and excellently preserved ‘Cashel’ – a ring-wall 2m thick and 2.5m high on private land just outside the village.

Duck eggs in the incubator start 'pipping'

Delightfully, the village is currently host to a stone-mason training course with 8 or so lads all learning the ropes just beside the thatched building. A 1000 year old stone cashel would be right up their street, so they were invited to join us as we got a look round the place and an excellent presentation by University Historian, Dr Yvonne McDermott (GMIT). Dr McDermott had done us a brilliant job but it was nice to receive some input at the Q+A from the lads coming at it from the actual builders’ point of view.

Very recently hatched - still wet.

All together it made for a thoroughly enjoyable day and if anyone was thinking about going and then decided not to, you missed a real treat. There is talk of this possibly becoming an annual event – mark it in your diary. Thank you very, very much to the whole team at Kilmovee and to all the speakers and volunteers who made it all so good.

...and that was that.

3 out and dry, now moved to the brooder box for food, water
and the warmth of an electric 'Mum'

Friends of the Blog will know that my main involvement with Liam is through recording all my flora and fauna sightings onto the Biodiversity Database, which I have been doing now for as long as I've known it existed. They may not know that this data gets used by the team there in a whole host of ways, one of which is to produce periodic books and atlases mapping the distribution of the sightings. They had advertised that a mammal atlas was coming out in 2017 and I'd added it to my 'Dear Santa' list but we had had no luck finding a copy. The chance to actually finally MEET Liam in the flesh seemed like an equally good opportunity to obtain the book - he would surely bring me a copy down and I could pay for it there. He even autographed it for me.

It is a lovely book full of fascinating information and all that data. I get a special wee thrill when looking at the maps knowing that most of those little (10 km) squares around the north end of County Roscommon are my own data/sightings. In the back of the book is a full listing of all the 2500-odd people who contributed data and there are the names of the Woman of the House and myself.

A weighty tome. My new sheep book.

While we are on books, I also came by a new sheep book on the recommendation of a sheep expert who I respect mightily, Tim Tyne who wrote my all time favourite sheep-for-smallholders book. When it arrived I wondered quite what I'd done. A weighty tome indeed - 690 pages hard back and weighing 1.7 kg, it looked worryingly like a medical dictionary. I spend enough time now fighting off people who think sheep are just single track animals looking for new ways to die; was I going to end up like one of those Wikipedia/Google self-diagnosers who show up at the GP claiming to have bovine tripanosomiasis? You'll be pleased to know it is a whole lot better than that and written very well to explain sheep issues to farmers who are not fully trained vets.

All 9 sheep have their noses down. Well rested grass on the
front lawn is filling up their bellies. We'll have them weaned
in no time!

Meanwhile, you will see from the pictures, that the ducklings have started to hatch. We have 3 so far from a set of 16 eggs and they are doing very well. More on them in the next post.

Waning, Weaning and a Good First Night

A bit swampy round the gate in the East
Field but at least the sheep can stand in
the dry to eat the rescue hay. Many sheep
keepers are suffering way worse.

I'm not sure how you, at the reading end of this blog, are doing for weather, but here in Ireland, our appetite for this rain and wet is waning fast. I was off collecting straw today for a beef farmer friend who asked me last time to just get half a dozen because he was sure he'd have his animals back out onto the grass "soon" and he'd not need the full load of 15 bales in my small trailer. Now he is more "they'll not be out to May Day at the soonest now". Another guy at the straw dealer was bemoaning that we'd need a good 2 weeks to dry it out even if it stopped raining today.

At least the sheep can have dry(ish) feet while they eat their
hay. I have spread a lot of gravel into this bit to stop the ground
chopping up so much in winter.

As a whole, Ireland is looking down the barrel of another Fodder Crisis like the one in our first year here (2011) as saved hay and straw start to run out. For luck, I slung a couple of hay bales onto my load - there is precious little grass yet in my sheep field. There is a little movement but the sheep are very pleased to get their crunch and hay each day so they can at least have that full belly feeling.

It's not all rain. I managed to get this complete line of post-visit
table linen through the system.

Which brings me to a related matter - weaning the bottle fed lamb. Little Bábóg is three weeks old now and starting to look very burly. We noticed that all the other lambs have started sneaking their noses in between the adult sheep to snatch a bit of the 'crunch' (like muesli with molasses) or the hay that we are feeding to the ewes. They are weaning themselves off the milk as Mum's milk starts to peak-flow and their ruminant guts start to work as proper grass-fermenting chambers. I have even seen Polly's two lambs (5 weeks) sitting in the shelter cudding.

Our flowering cherry, just starting.

It was back to the books then, for us, and the label on the 'Lamlac' packaging, plus a discussion topic opened up on Twitter to see how you go about this on bottle fed lambs. The consensus seems to be to wait till Day 35 at least and then, if you think (or know) that your lamb is taking at least 250g of solid food per day, you just do a "hard wean" taking the bottle away in one go. No messing about with watered down milk or small measures; the lamb's gut cannot happily do both food types at once unless they are coming little and often.

You are being watched. The ever-hopeful pigs keep an eye.

Readers may know that the sheep liver fluke is a complicated parasite which spends only part of its life cycle inside the sheep, chewing away at its liver and creating a good range of 'unwell' symptoms. The rest of the life cycle is spent in a mud-snail which loves the wet Irish bog-land soil. In normal years it seems to stay away from our, higher ground and we get no fluke problems in our sheep. Every time we send a lamb to slaughter, we get the butchers to slice through the livers and check for any damage. They are always 'clean'.

Silvergirl's thriving and surviving 5 chicks, 3 weeks old here.

This year though, you will know, that one of (ewe) Rosie's post-natal problems was early stage fluke damage. Vet, Aoife, told us that it is such a bad year that pretty much "everyone" has the problem. I can imagine. I look out across those sheep foot-print sized puddles in our field and I can just see the little flukey snail bas***ds thriving and doing a population explosion across the acre.

Sporting their new ear tags. Three of the lambs with one of
the mums.

We got all the flock into the cattle-race on a rare dry day yesterday, fluke-drenched all the ewes and took the opportunity to ear-tag all the lambs. The drench is 5.25 ml of chalky bluish gloop given by mouth using a syringe (with no needle obviously). Legal and healthy all on the same day. There's shepherding!

Meanwhile a minor miracle happened in the never-ending fox saga. The hens won a point back for their score board. The Guinea fowl alarm went up at 11 a.m. and we jumped to, and let the dogs out. They shot off with their "it was a fox" focus and speed. When there is no fox they amble about looking for a scent-trail and soon lose interest and return. We declare it a false alarm and move on. While they were gone on this one, I was able to walk round the far side of the poly-tunnel and spotted the sad slew of grey feathers. I was sure the fox had nabbed a hen.

Young love? The turkeys displaying to one another.

Ten minutes later and still no dogs, so I walked down to by the bee hive to look for distant white shapes meandering back to me between the rushes (that field, which is not ours, is more rush than grass!) and was amazed to see a grey hen walking back towards me from 50 yards out. She was very much alive, chuntering in an upset kind of voice and looking a bit shaken and ruffled. I can only think that the dogs caught up with the fox for some reason and the fox was forced to drop the hen in his flight. The hen rejoined the main rooster (Gandalf). What he said to her is not on record, but they spent the rest of the day as if nothing had happened. Go the grey hen.

Turkey egg.

Of course, you will know that the main story at the moment is nothing to do with rain, weaning lambs or the fox's antics. It is THE PLAY. You'll be pleased to know that the Lisacul Players nailed it on their first night, delighting a capacity crowd with a superb, very funny, enjoyable performance. Everyone is relieved and delighted. There are now two more performances, tonight and on Saturday, so I will give you a more thorough account in the next post, when it is all over and debut Producer (The Lady of This House) has had a chance to recover. If you are going then do as the printed programme says and "sit back and enjoy the mayhem". It is great.

Of Mighty Trees and Hungry Lambs

Three mighty Black Spruce trees loom over the
 house but perhaps not for long. 

In our front lawn stand 3 mighty trees, black spruces more than 60 years old (maybe even 100) which are, we estimate at least 60 feet high and a good six feet round the trunks at chest-height. Regular readers will know that we have many such trees but these three are 'special' because they are due SSW from the house (right in the line of the most common named-storm winds) and are only about 35 feet from the house. Also because we could "easily" get them down without needing to miss overhead wires, fences, buildings, the drive and so on, They would fall right across the blank lawn. My picture is taken so that there is no tricky perspective - the trees and the house are equi-distant from the camera. If these trees blew down they really would smack the house with BIG pieces of trunk and big side branches.

Ebony and Ivory at a week old.

Most of the time, we are happy that the trees are well glued to the ground and would probably go another hundred years with no problem. We have even been advised of this by our friend Aerial-Keith, who came and de-limbed a tree for us a while back. But those named storms come rocking through and the tops  of these guys are whipping about, you can see that massive thickness of trunk arching and you can feel the shudders through the trunk at ground level and you know it has been raining solidly for months. Then you get to remembering the 'hurricane' which hit SE England in 1987 and the scene of devastation which greeted us that morning, the roads blocked with trees and villages like Three Oaks and towns like Sevenoaks wondering if they'd need a new name and you don't feel quite so safe and serene.

You can imagine that felling them would need to be done by a pro with big machinery and insurance - it is hardly a DIY job for me with my weeny 16 inch cut chain saw - and not cheap. We have been avoiding doing anything about the trees so far but step forward a generous benefactor with an offer of possible help. Thank you GB, you know who you are. Also step forward a likely 'pro' who we spotted doing just such a task for a near neighbour and who I asked same for contact details of. I have now got this fella coming round to look at the job and quote me a price. The job will include slicing up those trunks into 16" thick rounds which I can split for 'logs', and the shredding of all the trash (sneddings). We can use the shredded stuff on the garden. I can cut up the small stuff (branches and tops of trunks) myself. Watch this space and listen out for shouts of 'Timberrrrrr!!!!!!'

Whose is that zippy looking red buzz bomb of a hot hatch-back
parked out front.? That'll be the Mum in Law come to stay!

While thinking about these entertainments, we have been playing host to Mum-in-Law, 'Steak Lady' currently gadding about in a very pretty red buzz-bomb, a tweaked up shiny Skoda hatch-back. She came for 5 days (4 nights) and enjoyed a good old show around of this place and some 'farming', plus some trips to local attractions, a bit of shopping and, of course our own home-grown food and a few drinks. We all thoroughly enjoyed it and we were quite sorry to fill the lady with an excellent breakfast (goose-egg omelettes with ham and cheese), set up her sat-nav and bid her adieu.

The trailer gets some more abuse. It just takes 15 bales with the
'top down'. Here, straw for a neighbour. 

Among the 'farming' we laid on for her were chances to join me on my feed rounds, to round up the various stock at 'bedtime' and a visit to the Roscommon Poultry Sale on Sunday morning where we were looking for Muscovy ducks. No ducks, unfortunately (only a few rather sad looking Khaki Campbell drakes) so Liz got tempted by a dozen Khaki-Campbell 'hatching eggs' which are now in Sue and Rob's incubator. We may yet be in the duck game in 28 days or so. More on this when things happen. She also got involved with bottle feeding our lamb.

Lucy gets a first dose in the dark of Sunday night.

"Bottle feeding?" I hear you exclaim, "Why so?" Long story, but if you have the patience, read on. We had been worried for a few days that our problem-child, 'Lily' to whom we have had the vet a couple of times now seemed to be only milking out of one teat and we had only seen the bigger of her twins, Rosie, doing any suckling. The weaker of the two (Lucy) seemed to be struggling and we had seen her standing with back arched; which we thought (from last year) might be another unformed anus problem, her straining unsuccessfully to poo.

Liz and Lucy getting a bit more professional by Monday morning

However she had the required orifice and was pooing OK so we looked further (Google is your friend!) and found that she was actually standing the the classic "hungry lamb" position, back arched, knees almost touching elbows and all 4 legs and feet almost together (see pic). We sought advice from our experts (Charlotte and Carolyn!) and realised that we needed to rapidly become competent in supplementary feeding - bottle feeding!. This, though, was Sunday evening so we had to find a DIY solution. Liz found a reasonable sounding mix of cow milk and beaten egg on the internet and (oh so luckily!) Charlotte remembered that among her 'stuff' being stored in our spare room while they move house, would be a box labelled "Charlotte's bits and bobs". This might contain the one lamb-sized bottle-teat which she had kept as a souvenir from her own teenager sheep/lamb rearing days.

Lucy in what we now know is classic 'hungry lamb' stance,
elbows and knees almost touching, back arched and tail
pulled in tight between the legs. 

A bit of 'bucket chemistry', the teat successfully located and a washed out beer bottle and we were away. Out in the dark by head-torch we managed to find the lamb and then get the teat into her mouth, all be it, getting her face and front and Liz's gloves and coat liberally sprayed with milk in the process. We really felt like beginners and were worried that we'd not be able to help the girl because of our incompetence. Lucy was trying her hardest to co-operate though and we soon had her suckling away and got a half inch or so of bottle-depth into her.

Lucy's breakfast, dinner and tea for a few weeks. 

We have got a lot more proficient since then and on Monday morning we were able to get hold of some proper lamb-milk (Lamlac) formula and some better sized teats. We are now getting decent quantities of the warm goodness into her , though nowhere near the 1 litre a day you'd do if that was her ONLY food. We suspect that it is not - she is also starting to wean now (3 weeks old) so we see her grazing and stealing some of the adults' 'crunch' mix, plus she may be getting some milk from Mum and also from 'Aunt' Myfanwy. The Lamlac milk, though, has quickly started to put some weight on her and we both think she is plumper, warmer to hold, more lively and a lot less 'hunched up' looking. It is 8 pm as I write this, so I have actually just been out to do the last feed (today) and she was going well even when interupted by her sister (Rosie) who was curious at all these shlurrrping noises and wanted to try out this new thing. We have the vet called to Lily, obviously, as she may have mastitis or some other problem which is causing the milk not to flow from her left side. More on all this as things develop.

In through the side of the mouth seems to do the trick!

On the archery story, I have been down now to my first beginner-training session and I am bubbling over to anyone who will listen at how enjoyable and good it was. The coach, 'Con', is by way of being a former army weapons trainer (among other things) so I guess I should have expected my Silverwood's taster-session technique to be completely trashed so that I could start again with better foundation but I thoroughly enjoyed the process. There are 3 of us beginners but, by chance, my 2 colleagues were unable to come that day, so I enjoyed some one-to-one tuition.

The Mum in Law gives the bottle feeding a try.
I ask "Is this the first time you have fed a lamb?"
She says "It's the first time I've been near
enough to one to touch it!"

Con started by barring my Crocs (shoes) from future sessions and went on from there, changing my 'sidedness' ( I now shoot holding the bow in my  left hand and drawing the string with my right even though I am left-eye dominant), and then ripping into my stance (hips, belly, head, you name it) but in a good way. This was not a 'boot camp' and he kept saying "hope you don't mind a good slagging!" so that we both had a good laugh about it. He was impressed by my consistency, however, so that my groupings of arrows were good and tight throughout. When I do it wrong, at least I do it wrong the same every time, which, apparently, makes me a lot easier to work on.

Not one of ours - I just love Herefords!

That's about enough for this rather long and rambling post but I will just close with the fact that as well as the duck eggs sitting in Sue's big incubator over at her place, I have set 13 chicken eggs (mainly pure bred Buff Orpington) in the little incubator we borrow each year from the currently away-at-college Charlotte (Thanks, C!). This was going to happen anyway but we did it today so that Mum in Law could see the start of the thing. She may come back in 21 days hopeful to see some hatching. That City Girl is definitely starting to get 'infected' with all the goats, lambs, geese and other birdies.