The Dogs Know What Time it is

We don't exactly run a tight ship here. If you've read any of my previous posts, you probably guessed that already. But, when it comes to feeding the animals, I do my best to keep to a schedule. Animals like routine and structure especially at meal times. Hence, "The Song" -

Third verse, same as the first.

The grace period is from sunrise until about 8.30am, but after that I get this reminder. And I always respond. Essentially they have me trained.

Those dogs definitely know what time it is.

Thanksgiving Preparations

We are in the middle of a fortnight's break from shooting. The chiller is empty, aside from a fallow buck the stalker shot a few nights ago. It's the perfect time to harvest a few more meat chickens and to prepare a turkey for Thanksgiving.

We chose the fattest one. She should have been on the plate last year, but my soft-hearted husband argued her case and she got a reprieve for her egg laying skills. She may be a bit tough a year after her 'best before' date, so I'm going to hang her in the chiller for a few extra days to relax the meat.

Her friend, who is not on the menu, is showing off as I take the Thanksgiving hen away -

Who knew turkeys could be such jerks?

Now, I'm off to raid the manor house orchard for windfall apples, enough for a pie and a cake. Then the dogs and I will head to the woods and see if there are a few chestnuts we can collect to make stuffing.

Of Tags and Testicles

This year's crop of lambs are looking strong and healthy. They've finally outgrown the diseases and common accidents that befall baby sheep. It was time to make them official members of the flock by giving them ear tags. Ewe lambs get one in each ear - flock number plus a unique identifying number. My ram lambs get the "pirate special" - one earring with my flock number only, indicating that they're destined for ice camp. No unique numbers for the campers.

I was waiting for a dry spell of weather to tag the lambs. The thick surface of mud in the handling yard makes it messy, and less hygienic for putting holes in one's livestock. Dry or frozen mud would have been preferable, but it continued to rain. I resigned myself to the weather, put on my plastic pants and got the big bottle of iodine to dip ears and tags as a precaution.

As a side note, I'm wearing the cardigan I knit for this shooting season -

It's becoming a tradition to knit one in time for the cold winter nights and days out in the field. In the few days since it's been finished, my cardigan has been out picking up pheasants, killing meat chickens, splitting logs, and now tagging lambs. It's destined for a life of muck and work, and it's holding up so far.

Back to the tagging - All my lamb tools fit in a plastic box that I rested on a hay rack within reach.  It was easy enough to catch a lamb, and hold it between my knees for tagging and a basic health check. I wrote down tag numbers as I put them in so I can keep track of mother-daughter family lines.

I tagged most of the lambs on my own, but Mike and Ian came up to the field and helped me catch the last few lambs, and take some photos. The process went so much quicker with an extra set of hands (and freed-up knees)

All lambs get ears, eyes, teeth, and feet checked. The ram lambs get an extra check, to make sure that the rings I put on their testicles did the job. I took a knife to anything still hanging on. 

This made my helpers whimper and go a bit grey.

I did manage to mis-ring one ram - one of the horned ewe's boys. He had been limping, and I couldn't find the cause. I even had a shepherd stop by for a second opinion. We couldn't find anything in the leg or hip joints. 

I expanded my examination and found that I'd only ringed one testicle. No wonder he was walking funny! I made what is know as a "rig". I had no choice but to cut off the rubber ring. Within 48 hours he was sound and a lot more comfortable. Only now I have a fertile ram in my flock. He will have to be separated out before he hits sexual maturity which, in a sheep, only takes a few months.

All my lambs get a quick hug before I set them down to run and find their mothers. 

I'm not sure that my affection makes up for, say, knifing off their withered scrota, but finding mom and drinking a bellyful of warm milk makes it all better.

There is only one more lamb to tag: the ram lamb from Eudora's triplets. I mismanaged the situation, ignoring all the books that said a ewe can't feed three. She seemed to be managing, so I thought I could beat the system by simply supplemental feeding the smallest with a bottle. 

The morning after our first frosty autumnal night, I found the smallest lamb looking hypothermic. And really tiny. It was like he was melting away. All of a sudden he was snack-size for a fox again. His ears were cold, and he'd lost his suckling reflex. He was hours from death.

I stuck him in the truck, in the front seat with the heater on full blast. A cold lamb can't feed until it's warm. 

Tink had to give up her dog crate in the living room, and move into the kennels with Spud and Quincy. The crate became a lamb ICU and as it was so close to Halloween, we named the ram Pumpkin.

It took Pumpkin a week of intensive care and a trip to the vets for vitamin jabs before he started to show any signs of recovery. Even then, at a month old, he only weighed 4 kilos.

He's doing very well now, and has just started going outside in a pen to graze. He has to wear Podge's dog coat to conserve his body heat but he's eating grass now so his rumen is working. As are his vocal chords. He blares at anyone passing, demanding his bottle -

In another week, Pumpkin should graduate to a dog kennel outside for a few nights to harden off. When he's self-reliant and has some muscle tone, he'll be returned to the flock with an ear tag. Mike wants me to give him two tags - and a free pass - but I'm not budging. In a year's time, when he weighs 80 kilos and still screams at me for milk, he's off to camp.

From "The Good Life" to a Better One

I apologise for my blog absence this past month, but I'm finally able to update you on what has been a difficult time (don't worry, it has a happy ending).

The estate decided to close the pheasant shoot. Mike was made redundant. We lost both our jobs and our home in that one decision. It was very unexpected.

Being made redundant when you work for a company is hard enough; being made redundant from a family that you've served heart and soul for almost 25 years is more difficult to process. Mike has made his home in Dorset and it will be a terrible wrench for him to leave.

But - here comes the happy part - the phone started ringing almost immediately after news of Mike's redundancy was out. It's not the done thing to "poach" staff from other families but now Mike was on the market, he had inquiries from shoot owners looking to redesign or reinstate their shoots (Mike's speciality). An experienced 'keeper who has been trained by the royal gamekeeper, and presented to HM the Queen for his services to shooting is not going to be unemployed for long. (If it sounds like I'm boasting on Mike's behalf, I'm just trying to focus on his strengths and remind him of his worth. He calls it "blowing sunshine up his arse". Same difference.)

One call came late on a Sunday evening. The owners have known Mike for many years and shot here as guests, including a particularly cold and wet day last winter when they brought their young son. The poor lad was succumbing to the cold, and Mike simply took off his own jacket and put it over the boy, and carried on with the day. The owners reminded Mike of that small kindness. Mike had forgotten, and I never noticed (it not being unusual for Mike to see to his guests' needs at the expense of his own.) They asked Mike to come for lunch and have a look at their shoot, about two hours' north of here, on the England / Wales border.

We have accepted their job offer and, when shooting season is finished here on 2nd February, we will be doing the same thing you read about on M&T, but in a new place, for a new family. A family that takes notice when their employee gives them the clothes off his own back. That bodes well for Mike and me.

We will keep our acreage here, but rent it out for now, and rent new fields closer to home for the sheep (now numbering 50 head) and Kitty. The dogs have new heated stone kennels, and we have a lovely lodge house with outbuildings and a well-tended garden. And a nice family to work for - did I mention that bit?

We won't know the real reason why the shoot's closing here until sometime in the future. Often a shoot closes because the family wish to focus on other sporting activities, like fox hunting. Sometimes it's a prelude to selling the entire estate.

Now our news is out, I can resume our normal blog scheduling, including updates on the end of the filming here, our shoot season so far, and of course it will come as no surprise that there's a lamb recuperating in the living room as I write this. It also means that, once we're moved and settled, I can start writing that book, filling in all the details I've left out of the blog. At least you - and we - know now that it has a happy ending.

Plucking work!

I harvested four meat chickens this week - stunned, bled and hung them in the chiller to relax. I would love to tell you that I weighed the chickens and calculated their feed-to-meat ratio and harvested them because I knew they were at the peak of their development. This is a lie. Like all jobs tackled around here, there was a much more basic reason: the meat chickens were getting a bit cramped in their shed so I freed up floor space by harvesting some of the biggest birds first. And we were out of chicken.

The underkeeper ran them over our plucking machine for me this morning. These ex-chickens are eleven weeks old, fed on medium protein food, on a free range system -

I bought two varieties of the same ' Farm Ranger' meat breed, one with brown feathers and one with white. The brown feathered variety is meant to grow marginally slower than the white variety; I wanted to stagger my chicken harvest, a half dozen at a time, because it's so tiring to do them in bulk. And, if an emergency came up and I had to put off the harvest, I would end up with a freezer full of fat chickens. That's a costly waste of chicken feed.

Once plucked, we found no obvious difference in growth rates between the brown and white varieties. The only difference is that the white ones pluck easier and more cleanly than the brown birds. The coming cold weather means that the birds are changing their feathers, so the brown guys are extra stubbly.

White Ranger (L) and Brown Ranger (R) with its five o'clock shadow!

There's some good flesh on them already, and only a little fat. Gutted and packaged, each weighs just over 2 kilos (about 4 1/2 lbs) each. I can leave it another fortnight before harvesting a few more cockerels. This is great news as there are 114 partridges in the chiller that need plucking for the weekend.

Lambing - the Post Game Roundup

Lambing officially finished at 1.30am this morning when L817 produced twins. I tended to the little lambs' needs: tubed them with warmed colostrum (mom's milk was slow), navels iodined (to prevent navel ill), a squirt of Orojet (to prevent watery mouth), dried off with a handful of straw while the ewe recovered. A final rummage in the straw to find the afterbirth, and dispose of it in a hedgerow far from Milkweed (to appease foxes) and I was back in my bed by 2.30am. Relieved.

It was a good lambing season. The scan showed 25 foetuses. We lost one in a difficult birth, and Eunice produced one undeveloped lamb (its twin is fine), so we have 23 healthy live lambs, 10 boys and 13 girls. Thirteen seems to be our number. Thirteen ewes were pregnant this year, and between them they produced 13 ewe lambs. The lambs not put to ram, or that lambed in spring, are grazing another field, and there are 13 of them too.

This was our first year lambing at Milkweed. I converted the two stables to lambing sheds, and it worked out great. I divided one shed into 4 individual birthing pens -

Empty stable...

...pens made from hurdles to encourage bonding, and a mesh door guard added to deter foxes...

...not quite at full occupancy...

When the wet weather came in, I was unbelievably grateful for these sheds. On those late afternoons when the sun was going down, and a ewe was starting to pink up and paw the ground, I could put her straight in a pen even before her water broke. When I came to do night checks, I meant that I didn't have to hunt the far corners of a ten acre field, and hope that I found her and her lambs before a fox did. Instead, I could climb over the fence, still in my pyjamas, and peek into her birthing pen.

When I needed to lend a hand as sheep midwife (we had quite a few lambs try to come out with a leg pointing backwards), mom only had a 5' square space to try and elude me. Babies landed straight onto rubber matting and dry straw, not sodden grass. On nights when fierce wind storms erupted, mom and babies weren't battling the elements. That takes its toll on both their reserves.

My friend and shepherdess neighbour Bridget (we're lousy with Bathshebas around here!) has experience of lambing indoors and suggested a nursery shed. Like a middle school for pre-teens, a nursery shed means that smaller twins and triplets can start stretching their legs and playing together while still relatively protected. So the second shed became a nursery room -

Spare straw bales make perfect climbing platforms and sleeping corners, and I can quickly pinch one when I need to clean out the birthing pens in the other shed for the next occupants. 

Like every maiden voyage and trial run, we had a vague plan and adapted it as required. It cost more in fuel to make the four mile, 4-hourly runs over our 23 days' lambing and I've fed ten bales of hay already using an indoor system. The yard around the sheds got pretty muddy with the extra traffic of tiny sheep feet when I shut them in every night, but we can simply top up the stone surface to fix that. All in, I count our Milkweed lambing as huge success. I think my flock, including the 23 newcomers would agree with me.

These are the shed graduates -

There are eleven big enough to stay out in the field now -about half the lambs- and they hang around in peer groups like high school kids. Of course, like teenagers, they still seek out their mothers at meal times. I will put a special lamb feeder with lamb pellets on the field this week, to take some of the pressure off of their mothers to produce milk. The lambs graze a bit now, and chew the cud too.

Tonight will be my first night in 25 days that I don't have to set the alarm for a 3am lamb check. I'm almost welling up with tears as I write this. I'm really tired this time around. Unfortunately I can't get a break or a day off, as our first shoot day is Tuesday and there's so much to get done before then. The dogs are too fat after a good summer and their fitness level is questionable. I will have to be careful and ease them into shoot days, perhaps swapping dogs at lunchtime so they're only doing half days to start, especially on warm days. I combine long dog walks with picking fruit for jams and chutneys, so the dogs are stretching their legs but I'm not concentrating on refreshing their training while I'm elbow-deep in a blackberry patch. They will all be slightly wild the first few days out.

Fraggle has fallen victim to the "Spud effect", i.e. she learned to answer to her nickname so Fraggle is out, and Tink is in. I prefer the name, and it's so much easier to use. Mike of course calls her Stink, and it's often an apt description of the little dog. Tink sailed though her gun dog puppy classes and we passed out last weekend with "top marks" according to the trainer. If I can keep her hunting drive in check, Tink will be an awesome force both beating and retrieving. She won't see the shooting field this year; she's just six months old now. For the moment, she's content walking with Spud and Quincy, and rolling in leaf-strewn mud holes or cow pies.

OK, by popular demand, one more cute lamb photo -

Next week it will be pictures of meat chickens and pheasants hanging out at ice camp.

The Big Picture in a Small Village

Filming started last week, and the estate is teeming with people in neon yellow vests with radios, and extras in costume drinking coffee out of paper cups. The cast and crew put in 13-hour days, a lot of which appears to be waiting. Artistic merit and red carpet appearances aside, making a film seems to be a tedious process.

I don't see many movies and my tastes are narrow. I only make the effort to go to the cinema for Woody Allen and zombie films (if Woody made a zombie film, I would be his target demographic) and I probably won't see this one until it comes on TV. I did read the book. The first year I moved to Dorset I read all of Thomas Hardy's books. As an American, I appreciated living among the hundred-plus year old villages, churches and buildings that I could read about in his stories. My bank is in the building that belonged to the Mayor of Casterbridge, I can still eat at the Black Bull Hotel, and I regularly walk my dogs on footpaths through all his village settings.

I particularly liked Far from the Madding Crowd for its heroine Bathesheba, bucking convention and becoming a shepherdess to run a farm that she inherits. She's self-reliant both in spirit and financially, and Thomas Hardy makes the bold assertion throughout the novel that her suitors and marriage are the biggest threats to her independence. "Amen, sister." I thought when I read it.

My literary criticism aside, it's been interesting to watch the process of filming this story unfold. Filming is simply a business like any other. It requires huge amounts of infrastructure and coordination, from feeding people to moving people to building backgrounds. I can appreciate the set building from my museum days, as I remember time spent researching, designing, and labouring to create a single museum exhibition, often over a year. The process is a lot quicker with films. A whole village has been erected - complete with cottage, sheepwash, farmyard, thatched grain stores, and church - in under a month.

Grain stores in progress, made from round bales covered in thatch, with plaster mushroom "supports"

Most of these sets have been built in the main courtyard at the big house. Then one day, the 19th century arrived on the back of a lorry-

There must be a props department somewhere, where film companies just order set dressing for the time period required. Horse carts, barrels, wooden sheep hurdles, and woven crates turned up.

There's also a Base Camp for the film staff with a huge tent, motor homes, people carriers, and a double-decker bus being used as a dining hall. It sprung up like a crop of barley in a farmer's field. All the lights are on when I'm on my way to first lambing checks at 4 am. The crew keep farmer's hours.

Our house, far left and the base camp. The dogs are more interested in what the grazing cows left behind overnight.

Sadly, my fifteen minutes of fame passed me by. The actress was game for going into sheep wash herself, albeit with a stuffed sheep, so I wasn't needed to "double". To be fair, it must be easier for editing to make fake sheep seem real than to make me look like a Hollywood size zero in my 20s. The actor was not so outdoorsy, and a male shepherd was found at the last minute to get in the wash to do the cold and heavy lifting in the actor's place.

Another tick in the self-reliance box for Bathsheba, then.

My chickens have made the cut, and I drop them off to Gill the animal wrangler after my lambing checks. They asked for all brown hens, but I didn't have enough Rhode Island Red-type layers so I threw a couple of young meat chickens in there, and no one noticed. My future chicken dinners are earning a crust before they go under a crust.

When Gill's on another site filming, I look after a small flock of geese and Cromwell the goat, all regular film industry extras. They're used to handling so they're quiet, and I fit them in among my daily chores. All the animal work means there's still something extra to put in the bank, without long days in a cold bath - a blessing in disguise for me during a busier-than-usual lambing period. But, it's not such good dinner conversation as being the shepherdess double. "Always the goat handler, never the sheep wash babe." That's a saying, right?

Apparently, Cromwell the goat worked with Angelina Jolie. He doesn't do autographs, just pellets.

Mike gets occasional calls from various assistants to answer relevant game keeping questions. He's been summoned to show the actress the technique used to dispatch a rabbit. Not a live rabbit. No rabbits were hurt in the making of this film, of course. She simply wanted her scene to look accurate. I think Mike used a tea towel for demonstration purposes. (Incidentally, tea towels also make good chickens.)

Other than that, seeing how films are made is sort of like seeing how sausages are made. Personally, I don't want to know what goes into either, I just want to consume and enjoy. And with no story to tell of "the time I doubled for that actress" I will just have to be satisfied with being my own Bathsheba, and washing my own sheep. Incidentally, we're having bunny biryani for dinner tonight - one I shot, dispatched, and butchered myself in late spring, when it was fat on good weather and good grass. I hope Thomas Hardy would be proud of me.


Lambing update: Six ewes have lambed, and there are seven yet to lamb. Even with a few tricky births and to-be-expected baby illnesses, we've not lost any more lambs. As of this morning, there are nine healthy lambs.