AB's 6 from 6

AB 'schmoozing' up some bullocks with a bag of feed as bribery

We are now well into our 3rd week with Help-X volunteer, 'AB' and it's all going brilliantly. This week he has managed to add 2 species of domestic livestock to his 'list' of animals of which he has had experience, and two new species of weed to his 'bashed' list. The animals are sheep and cattle and the weeds are rushes and thistles.

A whole shoulder and front leg of venison, Fallow Doe in this
case. Slow roasted in a buttery foil parcel. Delicious.

The sheep were ours. One of our ewes, Lily, had gone lame favouring her front left. We think this was perhaps where she had trodden on a bit of blackthorn bush in the area AB and I had recently cleared of old prunings, tree branches and stinging nettles. Nettles are now known in these parts by the French name "Ortie", usually preceded by a rude epithet. We needed to get hold of Lily so that I could clean, check and trim her feet, giving the soft parts a good explore with my thumb to make sure there were no blackthorn spikes in there; a bit like getting a splinter in your finger.

It was AB's day off but he happily piled in with the shepherding back and forth to the Cattle Race  and moving gates about. I was worried that moving the 6 animals might be complicated by the presence of the 2 new lambs and, particularly, Pedro the Ram. I needn't have worried. It all went like clockwork and we probably could have done it without AB, but it was good to have the extra man-power shutting off the 'side-roads' and keeping the sheep on course.

That venison again. Couldn't resist another pic.

The cattle thing is just AB getting involved with the daily feeding job I am currently doing for a friend; 8 bullocks all coming up to 'end' weight. They are big animals, as you can imagine, maybe 600-800 kg (live weight) but AB, City boy with no experience of any kind of farming takes them all in his stride and moves confidently among them under my supervision, staying the right amount of quiet, calm and quiet-voiced. My 8 "boys" just accept him and seem to know he is no danger, especially when he is rustling a feed sack.

AB's 6 from 6 at 20 feet in Week 3

He's also made a good impression in the Archery Club - I have been taking him along on Sunday afternoons for a taster as the club's Coach, (Con) is currently running beginner training. Our club is a very welcoming group of people, happy to accommodate new members and enthusiastic in our encouragement of their early successes. The training happens on the right hand side of the hall, on the short-range targets (20 and the 40 feet) while we experienced regulars shoot down the left hand side to the full range butts.

This means that we each have to be very aware of where the 'other lot' are at and all stay in the safe areas till someone shouts "Collect" to the whole range. Quite often, therefore, we 'old hands' have finished shooting and can keep a quiet eye on the beginners as they go through their paces. We see when they get a bull's eye and, if appropriate (and allowed by Con), cheer, clap, whoop with joy etc. That's where we all were on AB's Week 3 when we all spotted that AB, who had been told to shoot off all 6 arrows, had got 2 bulls from his first 2 arrows.

We cheered his 3rd but were shushed by Con and held our breaths while AB focused on his 4th arrow. He knew we were all watching but you could have heard a pin drop as he planted his 4th, 5th and then amazingly his 6th right into the gold. Good shooting, AB. The lot of us went mad cheering and whooping and Con called for the photographer(s). He was as pleased as Punch, as you can imagine. His reward, of course, was to get moved on to the 40' butts, so he was back to square one but he will not forget that moment for a while. Because he is with us till 20th Oct, I have booked him in for a 4th session and he thinks he will keep with the archery when he gets back to Paris, trying to find a local club over there.

My only other news is that the Honesty Box for eggs is steaming along and spends a lot of its time sold out. I had to make a 'Sold Out' sign to fix across the main sign to save people fruitlessly getting out of their cars and checking the box. OK, we are never going to make our first €million as we still only have 3 ducks and about 7 hens in lay, but it is still a good feeling to know that local people like our eggs and our prices. We even made a couple of new friends when I spotted a couple of strangers rooting in the box and asked them in for tea and a look round the place. They are from nearby village Kilmovee. Welcome aboard.

New Horizons

Pretty but disappointingly scent-less, these lily bulbs from Lidl

I wrote in the last post of our having to hospitalize one of the younger turkeys, struggling with a bloody, cut swelling on the right side of his (her?) head just behind the eye. We think this poor guy had taken a whack from the sparrowhawk before that had been chased away (unsuccessfully, you will have read) by our big male turkey, Tom. Well, the little fella struggled on moopishly through Weds, Thurs and Friday but, although we got some cod liver oil and some water into him he did not eat anything and did not recover. On Saturday he went downhill fast and by 5 pm the kindest thing seemed to be to put him out of his misery. Shame.

One turbine is up. A second, to it's left is still on the ground
in 'kit form'

On our northern skyline we suddenly have two new features, huge wind turbine towers as part of the new Roosky Windfarm. This impressive title actually only covers the pair of them. The 'farm' is around 3.5 km from here, roughly North. When the huge tall crane appeared I assumed it might be for drilling of water-wells but, no, this windfarm has had planning permission since 2003. It is all on the land of one land owner and he agreed to the farm and takes, I gather, an annual 'compensation' from the power company Gaelectric. The turbines are being assembled and erected by Moriarty.ie, a big civil engineering company.

The websites for Gaelectric and Moriarty are not that up to date but I read that the two turbines plus associated buildings, cabling and power sub-stations etc will cost around €8m, they can put out 4 MW of electricity and supply the power to 1800 homes. The towers are 84 m high and the blade (propellor) diameter is 80 m. With one blade vertical, then, the total height is 124 m or 406 feet. There will also be a meteorological mast on site.

The second turbine under construction.

Unless you have been living in a bubble these past few decades, you will know that these things are controversial and there are plenty of folk who are anti, either because they don't like them near their property, or they do not like the visual impact on scenery, or they have concerns about migrating birds and such. I have to say that I am quite supportive of the need for alternative sources of energy (though not nuclear power, till we find out how to dispose of the waste) but I do accept that we are not at the end of a design / improvement road yet.

View from our hilltop with a standard lens - not that much
of an eye-sore!

Also, I might think differently if these tall structures were our immediate neighbours, of course. We are told that they can be quite noisy when spinning in a good wind and we like our country silence. I have taken a standard-lens shot from our hill top to give you a more realistic view of what we see. Not that much of an eyesore, I think you'll agree. If you look closely at the first pic you might be able to see the many turbines of the bigger Gorteen windfarm "behind" our pair, up on that hill. If the bright sun glints on the spinning blades and white towers and there is a dark sky behind, you can see those distant turbines too. Liz and I both find them quite graceful and elegant in design.

Bob's cattle tuck into some new season silage. The weather
had been so poor for grass growth that they had grazed off
all his non-silage land and he had had to bring this group
indoors to rest the grass.

Closer to home, I am still assisting JD Bob with his cattle. (Amusing aside warning!). It is definitely "cattle" round here because these are bullocks. The word 'cows' is only applied to the females, so you can ask Bob how his cows are and he will look you straight in the eye anxious to correct your wrong impression of him as a farmer and say "I have no cows, Matt, only these bullocks and a few 'weanlings' "(young calves just off Mum's milk). I am regularly caught out by this 'trap'. Lost in translation. This has been a bit of a run around with different groups of cattle being shifted between loactions while grass fields were rested.

The outdoor group get a couple of cow-with-calf-at-foot
pairs put in with them to try to calm the flighty boys down. 

There was added drama when a couple of more flighty bullocks took off across the fields at a round-up "jumping the fence like a hunter" (said Bob) and spent some time in with Mike-the-Cows's rental grazers (and the bull, Felix). The escapists have now been extracted from that group but not before one of them over-ran his 30 month old limit for top prices at the meat factory in Ballyhaunis. This is not, apparently, the same as the 'mad-cow' age limit in the UK, but the meat factories deduct money for older cattle for quality reasons. At least one of the cattle-men I have spoken to chunters about the factories "just playing games" to diddle the farmer, when they themselves are currently doing very nicely out of the Euro/Sterling exchange rate, thank you.

White lace cap hydrangea.

For me this 'work' is nearly done. Bob is getting better each day from his leg injury, most of the cattle from the indoor groups have now been returned to their rested fields and the 'escapists' plus a few more are due to be collected by the meat-factory's cattle-truck in a few days. I will miss them (especially gentle old 274 with his pale-buff limousin colouring and big soft eyes, bless him). I like cattle and I admire these beefy, chunky 2-year olds, plus I like working with them. We do not have the land or infra-structure to 'do' any of the full sized commercial-beef animals ourselves, but we have talked about keeping one or two of the diminutive Dexter variety. Dreams, I guess. May never happen.

The bee blanket in use this week.

Even closer to home, Liz has been getting on with the sewing-machine 'evening classes' and has started to branch out from throw cushions and test squares. I commissioned a 'bee blanket', a roughly 18 inch square of dense, opaque material which you drop over the hive frames when you go in to examine the hive, and then peel/roll back frame by frame as you work. This saves having to expose all the bees immediately to daylight (and heat-loss) before you need to - you start at the back frame and it takes a few minutes to examine each, so the last frames can stay snug and dark while you work.

We prefer the white variety of Japanese Anenome, though
 these flowers are a bit rain-bashed.

Liz has also decided to give a try to making actual bee-keeper suits with all the zips and all-enclosing shape that they entail, including the wire hoops stiffening the veil and the mesh visor itself. She has sneaked my suit off to one evening class to get the pattern worked out and has today been measuring me in all directions and has gone in armed with all the special cloth (white 'drill') and bits and pieces. Brave girl.

A Pig in a Poke.

An excellent list of As, Bs and Cs
gets Em-J a handsome 425 points.

This blog has now been running for so long that our dear niece, Em-J, who first appears as a lock-gate wrangler on our 2007 narrowboat holiday aged just 9, has now moved all through 'big school' and come out the other end as one of the tens of thousands of students getting their 'Leaving Cert' results this week. For my UK readers, Leaving Cert is equivalent to 'A' Levels although thought to be slightly higher by many UK Universities. The exam takers take up to 9 subjects and the Cs, Bs and As all contribute points to the final score. These points mean you will either get accepted by the colleges and Uni's or not. We are very proud of both the 'victims' we have anything to do with (Em-J and one of Liz's students, Tilly) who both came out with superb results and enough points to get to Uni (all be it Tilly is actually moving back to the UK and had applied to Gloucester Uni.). UK readers may also be interested to know that these courses and exams are standard across the whole country - all the students sit exactly the same exams on the same days and time, papers are marked nationally too and results come out all from one database and website. Anyway, well done Em-J and Tilly. We are very proud of you.

Piglet pyramid. There are 12 here. 

An amusing distraction and adventure came our way on Wednesday this week when we were asked to help "catch 9 piglets". These babies belong to our friends Rob and Sue and had found themselves born into a pig ark in a big grass field instead of a barn where they had been intended to be born. Worse, the nice new grass field the parent pigs had been moved to just before farrowing had become a victim of the heavy rain through July and August and was a quagmire of 4-6 inch deep mud, too squelchy to run through in wellies.

The author releasing one bagged piggy in the barn

Total pig-ignorami may appreciate the following study notes.

• 5 week old piglets squeal and scream like mad if you upset them by trying to lift them up or take them away from Mum. They make a ferocious racket!
• They are the size of a Westie (dog) and weigh about the same, maybe 7-8 kg? 
• The normal method is to grab them by one or both back legs and let them hang head-down, which makes them go quiet. 
• Piglet legs taper fiercely down from ham, through shank-end and hock to trotter and there are no nice knobbly heels or joints to get a grip on so if the pig's leg is muddy it will slip through your hands like a sausage coming out of a hot dog. 
• Fortunately, 5 week old piglets are quite narrow at the pelvis and if you have big hands you can grab a chunk of back end which is cleaner, and lift the piglet like that.
• If you are on your own and dive into the ark to grab a piglet, you may catch one but the remaining piggies will scatter to the 4 winds in panic, out of the ark door and into the field where, trust me, you are not going to catch them. 
• Full grown sows and especially boars are over 100 kg and can easily knock you flying and make a serious mess of your good looks if they attack you. They can also run much faster than a wellie-clad person across a muddy field. 
• Parent pigs, especially sows do not like you interfering with their babies and making them squeal. They will surely come over to investigate even if they decide you are not actually murdering their offspring.
• On the other hand they are also hungry, greedy animals and if they realise that by investigating the squeals, they might be losing out in the food being handed to their colleagues at the other end of the field, they will probably say "Oh... alright then" and trot back to the shouting food-deliverer. 

Safe, warm and dry in the new quarters. 

You may by now have started to get a picture of the fun we had. Rob had tried to catch them on the Tuesday but he was working solo, so he had only managed 2 before his already injured leg cried 'Enough!' running through the mud. Grown up Grandson Lewis had grabbed a third. There were 9 for us to catch, but on Wednesday, we were going at it mob-handed - 5 humans. Rob went off to the top of the field armed with copious amounts of food in a rattly bucket, to distract the grown ups. Liz and Sue were armed with many feed sacks and cable ties plus straw to lay on the mud to make a bit of a path. I had a big mesh frame to use as a gate for the ark and Lewis had the job of going into the ark to catch and bag piglets. I stood outside the ark with the gate wedged against the opening with my foot to stop barrelling piglets from charging out when they realised what Lewis had in store for them. 

Liz's normally clean and precious pink Hunters do not look
quite so pristine now!

In the event, the plan worked and Lewis was able to catch and bag all 9 piglets one by one. Once the piglets were cable-tied into their bags they went quiet and only wriggled, trying to get to their feet when all visual clues had vanished, which was a mercy as the sow then ignored them and just looked baffled. One piggy did escape past my gate but kept circling back to try to be with its siblings inside the ark, so I got a chance to lift him back in. Periodically Lewis would pause to hold the gate while I marched bags across to the ladies, who would then ferry these wriggling bags to the barn and release the captives. One of the sows did get a bit upset by the squealing and come look, but she seemed to relax when she could see the babies through our gate. She made one lunge-attack at Sue's hand but never tried anything with me and never even tried to nudge my legs. We just paused to let the squealing subside and everything to calm down and the sow would trot back over to Rob, till the next set of lifts and squeals. 

Liz took this superb pic of 'our' sparrowhawk.

We had arrived at 11:30 and had a cup of tea before we started, and we had them all rounded up and another tea plus a slice of cake by 1 pm. A good and enjoyable mission, which I know Rob and Sue much appreciated our help in. Great teamwork. 

Wrapped around that job I am now also helping JD Bob with his cattle. The old boy has slipped on the foot-steps trying to get down from his tractor and badly barked and bruised his shin, so he is hobbling around like an 'aul' wan'. Forking silage and throwing 25 kg sacks of cattle feed around are a bit beyond him so we are helping out. I love cattle anyway and until I came here I had only had to do with dairy animals. It is nice to get some experience of these big, beefy, 2 year old Charolais and Limousin bullocks

This female sparrowhawk stands helpless to move her badly
broken left wing. 

Then on Wednesday evening at 7:30 pm an experience which was at once a once-in-a-lifetime thrill AND an upsetting horrible tragedy. The thump on the kitchen window set the dogs barking and told us of another bird-strike but we get a few of these and they are normally chaffinches or sparrows which seem to bounce off OK and you rarely find them injured on the ground. This, though was a magnificent female sparrowhawk. Sadly, we quickly saw that she had smashed one wing, compound fracture with blooded bone ends sticking out through broken skin. She was not defeated, though and would happily have raked my hands with those razor-sharp talons while lying on her back and had a go with the beak. We needed to drop an opaque cloth over her and I put on my chainsaw gloves just to try to pick her up and get a look at the injury. Tom the turkey did not help - he took exception to the bird-of-prey screams and the fact that every chicken in the place was clucking loudly and anxiously, and charged over intent on stomping her to death. Liz fended him off while I rescued the hawk.

As far as we know there is no vet round here who even knows about birds (chickens), never mind a specialist wildlife rescue centre who could help fix this fine-tuned thoroughbred. It can only have been agony for her everytime she 'bated' and flapped in a panic, to have the whole wing grating against her shattered humerus. There was only going to be one outcome to this. Although I hated having to do it to such a beautiful, beautiful bird, the only sparrowhawk I have ever got this close to, we took  few pictures and then ended it for her. I apologise if I have upset anyone with this. 

Baby turkey in the sick bay.

This morning we woke up to a sick young turkey, a patient for the sick bay. When she did not emerge from the shed pleading for breakfast, I went in a found her standing on the floor looking pathetic and with a badly swollen and blooded side to the head just behind her eye. The swelling was almost closing the eye. We have no idea how she got injured (kicked aside by Tom in his heroics last night? It might even have been the sparrowhawk having a go before it hit the window) but all you can really do in these circumstances is give them quiet, warmth, food and water (plus cod liver oil if you choose) and pray that they might recover. Some do. Some just mope around for a while and then you find them stiff and dead. This little one has hung in there all day and is still alive at the time I write. We have put the 'electric hen' (warming plate) in her crate as a substitute 'cuddle' with her gang.

...And then there were the Perseid meteors. Unusually we had lovely clear skies last night so we could already see a gazillion stars including the broad sweep of the Milky Way overhead. We had gone out to gaze upwards at around 11 pm and were quickly able to see the streaks of the meteors running through from roughly NE to the East. I tried to take a few pics with my 'posh' camera but although I took over 2 dozen long-exposure pics, I never managed to have the camera open when a meteor whizzed through. They either just beat my shutter release, or they waited till the shutter clicked closed. Never mind, we SAW them, which was the main thing. Most of our UK contacts were complaining of cloud cover and a no-show. I will not bore you with a pic, which would surely just be a black square - blown up on screen you can see the myriad stars but not, I think, on a postcard sized print. The Perseids are going great guns till about the 15th, so maybe you will get some clear-sky luck tonight? Good hunting.