the old timers

As I always seem to write about the younger members of the sheepdog team, I thought it was  about time that the old timers got a mention!

Gail is now over 11 years old and moved into the kitchen several years ago. She spends most of her time sleeping, and eating just about anything that she can find, but still can’t resist the opportunity to come and lend a hand at work. She often arrives half way through a job, sometimes even deciding to gather the sheep in a distant field. The problem is that she now runs at not much more than a walking pace, so for some of her more ambitious outings she needs her overnight bag! Ernie is  over ten, and is still quite active despite his poorly front leg. He loves to come on every outing riding on the quod bike, and helps with the work as and when he pleases. His real forte is still helping with the training of the young dogs, and he will appear whenever I take one of the youngsters from the kennel, heading off to the field on front of us.

They have both been feeling the heat this summer, and with the ponds drying up in the recent dry spell, Gail in particular has been prone to taking a bath in the sludge at the bottom of the pond. This makes her most unpopular when she returns to roost under the kitchen table!  I’ve provided a shallow water bath in the yard for the pair of them, which they both retire to after any brief attempt at work, it may not keep them completely clean but at least Gail doesn’t leave a trail of mud across the kitchen floor!

a dry time

There is a saying the ‘the weather always pays its debts’ and so it seems this year. The past three summers have been disastrously wet causing as many problems for farmers as it has for the local tourist industry, but this year it seems to be all change. We haven’t had much rain for over six months, meaning that the ground water level was already low, and for the past six weeks it has been hot and sunny with hardly a wet day, so the fields are already beginning to ‘burn’ (go brown)

The adult sheep cope amazingly well with short dry grass during the summer, but I can already see that the growth of some of the lambs has slowed down. It is this time of the year that we make hay and silage to feed through next winter, but so far the fields that have been mown have yielded far less grass than expected. We’ll have to try to cut further fields over the rest of the summer.

I guess that farmers always moan about the weather and we certainly have moaned about the last three summers. If it is true that ‘the weather always pays it’s debts’ we could be in for a long drought this summer, so there could be a lot more moaning to come!!

Sheep grazing on a very dry Morte Point

treating the lambs

We hardly seem to have finished lambing, when it’s time to get the lambs in for their first round of treatments. It’s been a difficult spring for the sheep, the long cold dry spell meant that the grass was slow to start growing and although the ewes were fed extra pellets, they didn’t produce as much milk as normal, which in turn causes the lambs to nibble at the grass earlier than they usually would. So the first treatment round in the second week of May included a worm dose for the lambs, together with a second dose for another internal parasite, coccidiosis, and a vaccination against pasteurella, the disease that is the biggest killer of sheep.

With over 900 lambs to treat it’s a big job, completed over four days. The noise from the sheep pens is enormous as every ewe calls to it’s lambs and every lamb responds. Once back in the fields it take several hours for the ewes and lambs to mother up again and peace and quiet.

the joy of Roy!

It seems a long time ago that I last wrote about Roy, and I guess that the reason that I haven’t felt the need to update for so long, is that his progress has been so very slow!

He’s now over 2 years old and some but not all of his puppyish over enthusiasm has gone. He can now perform simple jobs of work, he’s good in the sheep pens and in the evenings he has his training sessions. He knows his left and right, his stop and go, so he’s a long way down the road to becoming a proper working sheepdog, but whether he will ever be up to the standard of the rest of the Borough Farm pack remains to be seen!

The end of an era

It was with the greatest of sadness that we said goodbye to Swift a few weeks ago. She was over 14 years old and had spent the last few years living in the farmhouse kitchen, where she loved to be fussed by us all.

Swift has been a very special dog for me, in her prime she featured in my first diversification project,’The Year of the Working Sheepdog’. Together with her working partner Greg, she represented England in the International sheepdog trials of 1999, and of course was a major part of the displays at Borough Farm. More recently she was the matriacal figure in Mist’s adventures on Channel Five.

For many years she accompanied me when giving evening talks on travels far and wide. She would sit on a chair studying the slides on the screen, before rounding up the pictures of sheep, or any other sheep substitute that she came across. On one occasion, with no pictures to focus on, she demonstrated her working abilities by rounding up a suit of armour to command.

But above all I’ll miss her fearless working abilities, utter devotion to duty and perfect character, qualities that live on in her grand-daughter Mist.

Swift 1996-2010