The Great Outdoors

The two marmalade kittens are growing fast. At 12 weeks now (we think) they are not big enough to take on the dogs and we don't yet trust the dogs with them, but they are getting too big and lively to be confined to the one room. If you go into the Sitting Room to sit with them they quickly start doing 'wall of death' style charges around all the furniture and racing up your legs or across your shoulders. They are fast and agile and look every inch as if they NEED a bigger space to let off steam into. They also, rather alarmingly, make a dash for the door to their room as soon as you open it a crack, so keen to greet you that they seem unaware of the doggie danger lurking just outside.

Newest member of our menagerie meets our most seasoned
veteran. 

We have taken to smuggling them outside while the dogs are sleeping off a walk and letting them play round the yard and buildings with both of us supervising in case they should decide to split up; one person would only be able to keep tabs on one of these. The weather has been warm and it is very pleasant sitting out there in the sunshine watching the antics of 2 kittens.

Sitting in the sun supervising kittens. 

They have met some of our birds and even play-stalked the Guinea Fowl. They seem to find the chickens and, especially, the rooster, a bit big, so they've not pushed their luck there. Liz noticed that they seem to have an aversion to grass, even new mown short grass. Maybe they have 'feral concrete jungle' DNA, she says, as the kittens race between hard-standing areas and sprint across the grass between.

When you want to take cute kitten pics
among the flowers but they want to play
among the engineering. 

They loved the front 'drive' bits and the car-port with its 'Mad Max' vehicle and stacks of wood. When we carried them over to the 'Darby and Joan' chairs so that we could sit by the pond, they could not wait to get up off that grass by climbing into a lap or onto a shoulder. Ah well. I suppose they will get used to all the rest in time. We are doing all we can to get them to grow big and strong so that they can join the dog-owning half of the family without risk of getting chewed. When Blue was a kitten of course, Towser and Poppea were tiny pups - they grew up together without one side being dominant and when Soldier arrived he was big enough to cope and well versed in dog-management. This introducing tiny kittens to a full grown dog pack is all a bit new.

A nice tight cosy pen seems to be the answer. Nobody has
space to think they might get up some speed if they charged
 'that way'.

My other 'livestock' stories are 1) just that time came round again to foot-trim the sheep and 2) we 'harvested' a first Hubbard rooster. The sheep were last done at shearing and though you can't really get a good look at feet when they are wading through tall-ish grass, I'd been seeing occasional tenderness or lameness when Lily or Polly walked across the dry mud bits of their paddocks.

A neatly trimmed hoof. Lily in this case.

Nothing for it but to run them onto the concrete of the cattle race and give them a proper going over. We could now see that some of the sides had grown a bit long and were splaying, and some toe-points needed attention. We are good at this one now, so it was the work of no more than half an hour to do them all with my special "secateurs" while Liz subdued and calmed the neck and head end.

Every trimmed foot then gets a splash of the bright purple spray even though I could see no signs of foot rot. I even get most of it on the sheep's hoof (and up the gap between the 'cloven' toes) and not too much (OK some) on my hands or up the side of the sheep. The girls are then all released back into the East Field and we like to see the comfortable, relieved gaits on them as they spread out to graze. Job done.

First Hubbard rooster of 2016

At 80 days the Hubbard chickens are right at the start of their 'proper' harvesting time; we normally leave them to more like 100 days to let them get nice and big. However, we fancied a chicken for the weekend roast and had none in the freezer, so one of the boys got it in the neck. He plucked and dressed out at 2.320 kg, or about 5 lbs and was the ever reliable Hubbard version of delicious, tasty, meaty and tender. They really are superb, these hybrids specially bred to do the job under commercial Free Range or Organic systems and we swear by them (and thank Mentor Anne, of course, who can still get them as day-olds despite no longer being in that business and putting in orders for them by the hundred). We are always so disappointed when we have to buy other chicken in supermarkets.

Soapwort. Don't grow it near the pond - it is very toxic to
aquatic life.

Unrelated to any of this I had an exciting and interesting time a few nights back when asked by a friend in the village to 'rescue' his cattle water situation. No pictures for this story - I was not about to take my camera with me when scrambling about in a stream among cattle. These cattle live in a set of fields where their water supply is to drink from a stream just before that stream vanishes down a swallow hole. There are many of these fascinating geo-morphological features round here due to the fractured limestone geology.

The swallow hole in question sits at one end of a shallow pool but the pool-bed and the bed of the stream feeding it are only water-proof because they form a trough and dish shape made of fine sediment. Water can leak off the sides of this bed into any number of similar holes and this was what was happening when the stream became blocked by a log-jam of branches, reed-mace, plastic barrels and empty feed sacks. The 'dam' raised the water level upstream of our friend's land and all the water diverted left and right out of the stream (and underground) before his cattle saw any of it. Poor thirsty creatures were standing in the drying mud lowing their protests.

At last my Archery paperwork arrives. No stopping me now!

The friend is not really up to scrambling about in streams pulling out debris, so my job was to get in there and try to free up the dam while at the same time packing rocks and some of the bits into the 'leaks' in the sides upstream; really trying to get the stream to disappear into the correct swallow hole, rather than the neighbour's ones. Well, it worked and I managed to free up the log jam. The water surged forwards into 'our' pond and the cattle got to drink some before it gurgled away underground. I checked it all again today and it was still free, so everybody is happy.

False Alarm!.... (or not).

Good book choices among the Birthday present 'haul'

In my previous post, I recorded that both a turkey hen and a goose had gone broody; the former in an inconvenient place lost in a neighbouring field, the latter nice and tidy in her proper coop. Well, as soon as I had gone to print, of course, both ladies changed their minds. In the morning, the goose was off her eggs and asking to be let out with the gang into the orchard, where she happily stayed all day and the cold eggs, I picked up for normal kitchen use.

Calf-eens a-plenty in many neighbouring farmyards.

In the middle of the afternoon, while I was away buildering, Liz texted to say that Barbara had turned up, butter wouldn't melt, looking for food in our yard. False alarm? Well, you never know with poultry. The goose, having taken her day off, decided to go back onto (some more) eggs and has now spent the last 2 days sitting tight. I assume the eggs can stand this on/off start to the incubation when they are still only a 'germ' of embryo. Barbara spent a day or so very much here, mooching about with the husband (Tom) but today went AWOL again from about 9 a.m. till just before lock-up (8 p.m.). These eggs are either taking a long long time to lay, or she is doing like the goose and building up to broodiness.

Rounding up the mini-horses. 

Meanwhile in the Sligo dept, the mini horses which had been happily grazing the last few millimetres off the rented field down by our local river-bridge, suddenly needed moving. The person who is taking over the rented field next was asking if he could spray slurry all over it prior to the agreed date and Carolyn was not at all sure he would take no for an answer.

Primroses are everywhere this month.

K-Dub and I had to take a day off from the buildering to rapidly create a horse proof paddock about 40m by 50m at the new place (not an easy one but we made it) and then I was asked to help with the rounding up and loading of Cody, Romeo and Bob at this end into a borrowed stock-trailer. That bit, at least, was a doddle because these boys are suckers for a carrot-bribe. I offered them some nice fresh crunchy veg through the gate while C snuck up behind and slipped head-collars onto them. They are well used to trailers, being former show-horses, so all three were led up the ramp with a minimum of fuss and off they went to Sligo.

The warm weather has given us some gorgeous sunsets

Out of nowhere we have been enjoying a week of gorgeous sunny, warm weather. That's 'warm' by Roscommon standards, you understand, so daytime highs of 17ºC, nothing too tropical (or even Mediterranean) but after a long, cold, wet, miserable winter it is a lovely relief. Liz and I have been able to enjoy a post-work coffee 'al-fresco' and on one evening sat out by our pond in the 'Darby and Joan' chairs till gone 8 p.m. rather than spoil it by coming indoors to cook. We didn't even light the range. The dogs had been let loose in the orchard at 6:15 p.m. expecting to only get the usual half hour and they were still out there, running free, at 8 p.m.

A '365' pic of a nearby swallow hole. The yellow arrow
shows flow direction before the water disappears under-ground.
Obviously I have not put the arrow on the 365 version. 

I heard my first cuckoo out in Sligo (on the 19th) while we were putting up the horse-fence; he sang away all day. I then heard my first home-bird the next morning here at 7 a.m. on my first dog-'patrol'. We saw our first swallow near here on the 16th and then saw a load of them flying over a nearby lough (Lough Glynn). We have since seen "our" swallows dipping over our pond to catch insects and to drink. Summer is definitely coming, even though the forecast has some nasty cold nights (down to 2ºC) coming up over the weekend.

Keep warm, people.

"Swolly" Hole

We find ourselves both involved in errands of mercy. For Lizzie a run to Galway with Carolyn of the mini-horses. This is mainly about a hospital visit but the girls also go for an explore around Galway, being a city close to us that we had not actually visited yet. It was known to have a Marks and Spencer for the clothes and underwear but Liz also discovered a branch of that favourite source of bed linen, a TK Maxx. The M&S proved to have an excellent vintage cheddar cheese, in this case their "Cornish Cruncher" variety from the Davidstow Creamery.

Wind-felled, Ivy-clad, hawthorn tree

For me, a call from John Deere Bob to cut up a couple of size-able trees blown down in the storms of November and now causing him fencing issues as he goes to turn out cows onto the spring grass. As well as the fields in the immediate vicinity of his house, Bob owns 12 acres the other side of Lisacul village in an area of small fields with overgrown mossy stone walls from the tops of which sprout way overgrown hawthorn and ash trees which were presumably once the boundary hedge. They are now 20-30 feet high and weighed down with a dense canopy of ivy. No one has maintained these hedges for a good few decades (not just Bob, everyone in the area does the same) and the trees are now top heavy and get blown over by the gales of November taking lines of fencing with them. The ivy stems criss-crossing round the trunks to form a tubular 'net' of ivy wrapped around the hawthorn wood make the cutting up of these trees an interesting task, and the thick leafy shroud make it hard to see where to cut anyway. It is slow work. I always take my bill hook down with me and chop away some of the ivy so I can see what I am at.

JD Bob's Swallow Hole

The piece of ground is also interesting to the physical geographer in me. The geology here is lower carboniferous sandstone and (mainly) limestone, so features the occasional swallow hole (they say it "swolly hole" here) and Bob has one at the bottom of one of these fields. It is a good sized feature. The stream running through here is a good 5 feet wide and 2 deep even when it is running slowly; the clear but brown stained water coming off the local peaty soils and bogs. At the hole this all just gurgles away through some openings in the big blocky rocks, to reappear, Bob tells me, way down the valley, below the village, quite near to the main river (The River Lung).

Yellow arrows show the 2 main holes

At the site of the swallow hole is a large basin looking like a nearly dried up lake, with a good lot of twigs and bits of rush and reed at the 'tideline'. Obviously, when the stream is in spate, the swallow hole gets partially blocked by this debris and cannot cope with all that volume of water, which fills up the 'lake' but I could see no sign that the lake overflows as a surface stream. It must be quite an impressive sight to see all that water spiraling round the "plug-hole" as it gurgles away underground.

Meanwhile in the 'zoo' we have a couple of breeding attempts to report which seem to have got parked up for now. The Guinea Fowl have given up on their daily disappearances across the lane, which we had put down to the possible daily egg laying. They did this 7 times but have now stopped. We never found the alleged nest so we will probably never know why this happened and then stopped happening. Maybe she was just having a practise run, maybe she did lay eggs and they got predated by rats or mink, maybe the current chilly NE winds put her off thoughts of spring. The birds remain our most wander-lusty and today we saw them at the far side of the East Field and the wrong side of the fence, actually outside our property, so maybe they are still at it.

When I last posted on the subject of geese, one of the females (Smudge, named for a bruise like dark smudge in the feathers on the right hand side of her head, behind the eye) had accumulated 16 eggs and we were expecting her to go broody any minute. Well, that was the 21st March, and it's now the 28th, so she is now perched on top of 19 eggs as she goes to lay (or her sister does), some of which are double stacked and she still shows no intention of sitting. I am not sure what to do about this. Do we give up and clear the eggs away, or do we keep on keeping on? One thing is for sure - if she DOES go broody over the next few days, I will not be leaving her all 19 to incubate. 19 baby goslings is a bit more than we can cope with.

We have decided to breed from Goldie again, taking advantage of the fact that Charlotte (mini horses) has just bought a NZ White buck ("Kiwi") who seems to be a bit of a go-er and she has him working his way round any of her lady rabbits who she wants bigger kits from. Our meat-breed doe, Goldie, you may recall, had a bit of a thin time of it in the motherhood stakes last year, kindling 7 babies but all bar 2 suffered overnight deaths for reasons we still are not sure of. Some of the later ones, when autopsied, had hugely full bladders so it is possible that some kind of urine-tract issue (blockages?) was the problem. We are giving her another go this year hoping that this was not genetic or was just a 'first litter' one-off. Watch this space. She was mated today, and they take 31 days to cook, so due date is 28th April. Maybe by then we will have broody geese, hidden up broody Guinea Fowl and maybe even our hen Broody Betty back on the case.