weaning the lambs

added by David on Friday August 20, 2010 at 3:03 pm

The dry spell of weather that lasted through much of April, May and June has well and truly passed and with some welcome rain so the grass has started to grow again. But even with a new flush of grass, the lambs and ewes soon find themselves in competition for the same grazing, and by the middle of July they are better off separated from one another.

Weaning tends to be a slightly chaotic job. Although the gathering of the various flocks is straight forward, once in the sheep pens the  dogs push them single file through a long narrow sheep ‘race’. At the end of the race I switch a gate from one side to another putting ewes into one pen and the lambs into another. As more and more sheep pass through the race the din of bleating ewes and lambs increases, until we end up with the flock split completely in two. The ewes are easy to return to the fields as they will run in search of their lambs assuming that they will find them back in the fields from where they came. These adult sheep need little grass for the rest of the summer, so I chose the barest fields to return them to.

Lambs require a little more attention, and this year they received a worm dose, their second vaccination against clostridial disease and  a bolus containing selenium and cobalt (a bolus is a heavy solid lump about the size of the end of your little finger, which lodges in the stomach and dissolves over 5 months) Each of the lambs takes thirty seconds to treat, and this year we weaned 800 lambs!

The lambs can now have the best grass for the rest of the summer, but driving newly weaned lambs is not straight forward. It needs lots of dogs with lots of energy, so this year it was the turn of  Mist, Eddie and Fly, with a little from Fern (when she could be bothered!) Fly is really proving herself, and has absolutely boundless energy. But the lambs feel leaderless and swirl and split and break in all directions, so driving over four hundred lambs through the track in the woods was quite entertaining! It took nearly an hour to drive the lambs to their new pasture. By that time the dogs were deparate for water and rest. It’s a great reminder as to why I need to keep young dogs coming on to join the team.

For twenty four hours both ewes and lambs break the tranquility of Borough Farm, with a chorus of bleating, but the fresh grass soon proves a distraction and peace returned to the valley.

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Alfie’s new best friend

added by David on Thursday August 19, 2010 at 12:46 pm

If you have followed ‘Mist Sheepdog tales’ on Channel Five, you might well have spotted that Fern is far and away the grumpiest sheepdog on Borough Farm. She does what she pleases when she pleases and now that she’s almost eleven years old, she has decided that she wants to retire to the kitchen. However, Alfie has been living in the kitchen for the past month or so, and we’ve been a bit worried about the grumpiest dog on the farm joining him…… but perhaps we’ve been worrying unnecessarily.

Fern seems to have decided  that she will take on the role of ‘Great Aunt’ and spends her time playing with the young pup, allowing him to pull her tail and bite her ears!

So we’re not quite sure at the moment if Fern has really turned over a new leaf, or whether she has just decided that the only way to achieve her ambition of retirement in the kitchen, is to pretend to be a great babysitter!

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fly’s first outing

added by David on Thursday August 19, 2010 at 12:26 pm

Last week it was time to wean the lambs away from the ewes on Morte Point, and with Fern nearly eleven years old, it was time to give Fly her first taste of gathering the sheep on the coastal ground.

I’m always a little worried when working a young dog amongst gorse and bracken and near the cliffs for the first time. Up until now Fly has been trained and worked in fenced fields,  and would have no understanding of sheep grazing near the cliff edge. So I kept her close at hand for most of the time and didn’t let her go any where that I couldn’t see her. She did try to run through a patch of solid gorse and seemed surprised that she just bounced off! But for the most part she did pretty well, and I was particularly pleased that she was beginning to run wide through thick patches of scrub, in order to head off the sheep. It’s a long way to go before she’s up to the standard of Jake and Mist, but it was certainly another positive step on the path to becoming one of my top sheepdogs.

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fly’s surprise

added by David on Sunday July 25, 2010 at 10:23 pm

We have lots of arrivals on Borough farm, mainly expected, some unexpected, like the lamb that was born on Morte Point this week (in the middle of July!) but when  I opened the kennels one morning a few weeks ago I had a surprise to beat most…..

Fly failed to materialise so I poked my head inside the door to be greeted by the unexpected whimper of a single tiny black and white pup (the result of a brief dalliance with Jake when he’d been returned to the wrong kennel for ten minutes). I admit that I did groan a bit, as Fly having a puppy in the middle of the summer wasn’t really part of my plans. Fly wagged her tail and seemed unsure as to whether she was to be a working or stay-at-home mother. Jake wagged his tail, tried to look innocent  and gave me that “wasn’t me” look that he usually saved for a when he’d been told off for barking.

My wife and children quickly arrived at the scene and whisked puppy ‘Alfie’ and his mother off to the post-natal ward in the kitchen. Leaving me to contemplate how long it would be before my youngest member of the team would return to work.

I needn’t have worried, by lunchtime Fly had decided that Alfie was in good human hands and wouldn’t miss her if she popped out to work for an hour…. such is the life of a working mother!!

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Alfie

sheepdog displays

added by David on Thursday July 15, 2010 at 10:32 pm

It’s the middle of July and we are already well into our season of Sheepdog and Falconry displays at Borough farm. Although the weather has been much better than it has the last few summers  (in fact I’ve been hoping for a little rain to make the grass grow) for the last couple of weeks, Wednesday seems to have been the only wet evening of the week!

However, it’s given us a chance to try out the new barn as an undercover seating area, and I’m pleased to say that it works really well.

But we’ve had enough rain now to freshen the grass and even to put a little water back into some of the ponds again, so I’ll be quite happy to see a return of the sun. As an old farmer said to me recently when I commented that we could do with some rain ‘be careful what you wish for, it might not know when to stop!’


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the first display in the new barn

the old timers

added by David on Wednesday June 30, 2010 at 1:05 pm

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!

Gail and Ernie cooling off

a dry time

added by David on Wednesday June 30, 2010 at 12:31 pm

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!!

A dry time on Morte Point


Sheep grazing on a very dry Morte Point

treating the lambs

added by David on Wednesday June 9, 2010 at 11:00 pm

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.

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the joy of Roy!

added by David on Tuesday June 8, 2010 at 2:22 pm

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!

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The end of an era

added by David on Tuesday June 8, 2010 at 2:09 pm

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.

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Swift 1996-2010

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