Category Archives: Countryside

Where the smart money goes…

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The guineafowl are living on borrowed time. They’ve been accused of scratching up garden plants and making too much noise so, it seems, they have to go. No more biodiversity, no more permaculture, just an empty, lifeless farm.

There is a bright spot of course. In a battle of wits between birds and farm staff all is not as it may seem. Having observed the staff in action or the years (or should that be staff inaction?) I’m not anticipating an early close to the matter.

Having discussed this with several people the smart money is on the birds.

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Having said that, after a week of skirmishing, I turned up this morning to find the farm was winning, with most of the birds penned in the barn. There was just one still at liberty, and it was on top of the barn crowing for all it was worth. It’s a numerical advantage to the farm but the noise and propaganda victory goes to the birds.

Seeing as the pigs and chickens escape on a regular basis I’m waiting to see if this is the final act or not…

Birdwatching, students and politics (that’s in order of preference!)

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Last Friday we had reed buntings at the bird table, which was a first for us as we haven’t seen any here in all the time we’ve been coming. They are a somewhat portly bird, as are most buntings, and radiate a feeling of cheery domesticity, so it was a surprise to read that they are apparently the most adulterous of all bird species, with over 50% of chicks in a brood being fathered by males who are not the male in the pair. I’d never thought of adultery in birds until I read this bit so it just shows what you can learn, and it will certainly come to mind every time a see a reed bunting from now on.

Things moved on today with a mixed group of buntings coming to feed – nine reed buntings and  three yellowhammers. With low temperatures overnight and light covering of snow on the fields they are probably finding natural food hard to come by, which is why we come into play. This is certainly the opinion of the BTO and they tend to know these things.

Apart from the birds we have a group of students from a local college visiting to gain experience for their animal health course. They are currently finding out how to put ear tags into pigs (we have some going to market tomorrow). You can tell this from the protests of the pigs – they aren’t keen on ear tags. Our normal Monday group is assisting, as they have now done this several times. It’s good for their self-confidence to be able to show their skills to the students. It’s good for the students too, because it shows them that people with learning difficulties are actually more skilled at some things than they are.

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Johno will be giving a couple of presentations to the college later today but he’s fitting in an interview with the local press at the moment because he’s standing for the local council in the May elections.

Got to go – politics is making me lose the will to live…

Looking back

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It was a crisp December day today, which was good because a wet, grey day would have taken a lot of the fun out of it. We had a change of gear today with the Christmas Event and though Santa and Elf worked in harmony we still managed to scare two children. I tried to  make one happier about the situation by taking my wig and beard off to show him there was just a normal man underneath it all but this just made things worse.

Either I have a face that scares children or, as Tim put it: “To him it just looks like you peeled your face off.”

Sometimes you just can’t win. On the other hand when you examine the picture there is definitely a touch of Dan Aykroyd and Trading Places in my eyes,

What was particularly good about the day was that we saw quite a few new people and were able to talk about the farm. That’s always good because, as we found at the conference last year, when you talk to other people you realise what progress you have made. To be honest, although I’m there most days it’s a case of not seeing the wood for the trees. This is ironic when you see what I do when I look out of the window (i’ll post a picture tomorrow).

Hopefully some of those people will be reading this, so it might be a good time to apologise for talking too much, or for discussing care farming whilst dressed as Santa.OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

 

We made the penguins from beads – only sold one but thought they were worth a picture anyway,

Saturday

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Some results are in from last night – including that we sold two wreaths and two Christmas trees so that’s a boost for Quercus funds.

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It’s nice to know that things went well because a lot of effort goes into organising events. Strictly speaking the turkey event is nothing to do with us but what’s good for the farm has to be good for the groups that use the farm. Ultimately we are a community and what is good for the yoga, Shipshape Arts, Quercus or the bread group should be good for all of us.

There’s an ulterior motive in all this, as there always is. As I helped with a bit of bread group tidying on Thursday I had home-baked cookies forced on me. Positively forced! I think the correct term for this working together is synergy, but I’m happy to think of it as “biscuits”.

Meanwhile, I was out and about on family business today, including my mother’s 85th birthday. Travelling along the A 52 to Grantham I saw three buzzards perching on lamp posts in the final stretch. Two of them appeared to be preening so I don’t know what was going on. Normally it’s a good week if you see three buzzards perching anywhere, let alone three in a couple of miles. Even then they mainly just sit there looking for food.

When I was a young bird watcher you had to travel to Devon, Wales or the Lakes to see buzzards. The eastward resurgence has been a welcome event of the last few years, unless you are a partridge. Even then, I’m not sure how many partridge deaths can be blamed on birds of prey.

I can’t say the same for magpies. It was good to see them to start with but can it be coincidence  that their arrival in my garden marked the start of a much decreased garden bird population? You can’t blame cats for it all.

 

More food

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It’s a shoot day on Saturday, though from the casual attitude of the pheasants we saw this morning they haven’t it’s clear they haven’t been told.

I’ve no strong feelings either way – I like birds but I also used to enjoy shooting. The lack of feeling is further intensified by the fact that I don’t find pheasants particularly enthralling. though I am quite fond of partridges in both their varieties. We have a number of red legs about. They potter down to the barns like middle-aged married couples in thee summer evenings to browse through the poultry food.  There were as many as three pairs at one time this summer,

We’ve also raised grey partridges this year. Also known as English partridges they have been going through a rough time over the last  few years with a 91% decline in numbers between 1967 and 2010. Hopefully we will be able to do something to stop the decline.The farm has spent a lot of effort on hedges and headlands and the gamekeepers have been working hard so there is a good chance of improving the population.

As we wait and see at least people won’t go hungry on Saturday as I’ve been cooking Honey and Treacle tarts for lunch. I don’t always get on with celebrity recipes, though I won’t go into it here, but this one worked well. I didn’t have any black treacle and I upped the ginger after my practice run, though that could be down to my powdered ginger being a bit old. I might tone down the orange and have a go with root ginger next time. And I cheated by using ready-made pastry cases. Life is too short to make pastry.

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Nearly forgot to say – the recipe makes a bit too much filling for a bought in pastry case – I’m going to cut it back by around 15% next time and see how it goes.

Caterpillars aren’t birds…

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As I suspected, the noise generated by a couple of our clients working in the garden scared all the birds away so I will have to try for photographs another day.

 

I decided that I’d go for something a little slower and easier to capture in a picture. So here they are – the late hatch of caterpillars that have been laying waste to our nasturtiums for the last week. They are still there today, chewing voraciously. Somehow, despite the lack of fins, they remind me of Great White Sharks.

After trying the caterpillar identifier and calling up a number of species that I’ve never heard of (who ever thought of calling something the Lead-coloured Lichen Moth?). The fact that the moth isn’t lead-coloured and only seems to be found in North America merely add to the mystery of moths.

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Of course, it isn’t a rarity. But for just one moment, rather like the instant  just before you check your lottery ticket, there was a world of potential awaiting. They are just the caterpillars of the Large White. Hungry ones at that. You’d have thought that the birds could have made an effort and eaten them. So much for permaculture…

Bird feeders

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We moved the bird feeder last week and the visitors have been building up nicely. For some reason we never seemed to get many birds in the old location but within a few days we have had chaffinches, a robin, blue tits and great tits.

We have house sparrows, greenfinches and goldfinches around so I’m hoping we will see them before long. There are also dunnocks and a wren but they aren’t great visitors of bird feeders so they may not bother.

I’ve seen yellowhammers a couple of fields away and we get occasional visits from long-tailed tits. It would be good to see them visiting too. With my luck we’ll probably have a visit from a sparrowhawk.

They fly over on  a regular basis and we suspect that they have taken a number of young poultry over the years. One morning a female sparrowhawk emerged from a gateway as we drove along the road. She had a pigeon in her talons and was making heavy work of trying to carry it away, being unable to gain height with her burden. I’m not sure who was most surprised by the meeting.

We will set some time to one side on Monday for bird recording and see what comes. One of the group did well identifying birds when he visited a nature reserve last week so we want to maintain his enthusiasm. We might even get a photograph.

In the meantime here is a picture of a grouse from the moors on our break last week. It’s not the best photograph of a grouse ever taken, but it’s a start.

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A sheep story

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Generally I ignore the sheep on the farm. They tend to be quite disdainful about me too.

However, after reading this article I’m looking at them in a different way. It’s quite clear this is too bizarre to be a random event and nobody would dump this on purpose so all I can suggest is that the sheep arranged it.

Good luck to them. A sheep’s life is mainly about wet wool and foot rot so if they can do anything to make it more fun I’m all for it.

On a more serious note, fly tipping is a growing problem in the countryside and the RSPCA treats 7,000 animals a year after they are injured by litter.As if that isn’t enough we add to the burden by releasing balloons and sky lanterns.  The sheep were lucky to find the bags full of recreational drugs: it could have been a lot worse.