So this last weekend when I went up the hill again, by a different route, I found a lovely recently hatched egg:
It was just on the edge of the heathy bit of the hill, and bigger than a blackbird egg (no scale included, sorry) perhaps 2cm long dimension? So, any guesses as to whose it was?
And the other big news of the weekend is that our joint bid with our neighbours for the field in front of the house has been accepted. Here are some views:
The top one is from the stile into the field from our garden, and the lower one is a google map.
At the moment there are calves in it, as there are most years from March to November. The picture of a calf in the header for this blog is one of them, so you can see they are Guernseys, and some of them are Guernsey cross beef of various sorts. They arrive in late winter or pre-spring looking forlorn and mucky, and by this stage the field has done them very well, they have filled out and taken possession of its 4.5 acres. There are 12 this year. The grass has a particular cycle to do with the seasons and the growing calves: at this time of the year when it is growing fast and they are quite small, it outgrows them, so that by the end of May they are often knee and sometimes shoulder-deep in it. Then as the summer wears on it gradually gets shorter: grass grows more slowly and calves get bigger and eat more, until by the time they leave in November, the field is down to a bumpy almost tennis court in length (never quite that short: it takes sheep or horses to really make a tennis court). This year, I suspect the grass won't get as far ahead of the calves in the next few weeks as it often does: long late winter and then dry means the grass isn't growing as fast as usual.
It was just on the edge of the heathy bit of the hill, and bigger than a blackbird egg (no scale included, sorry) perhaps 2cm long dimension? So, any guesses as to whose it was?
And the other big news of the weekend is that our joint bid with our neighbours for the field in front of the house has been accepted. Here are some views:
At the moment there are calves in it, as there are most years from March to November. The picture of a calf in the header for this blog is one of them, so you can see they are Guernseys, and some of them are Guernsey cross beef of various sorts. They arrive in late winter or pre-spring looking forlorn and mucky, and by this stage the field has done them very well, they have filled out and taken possession of its 4.5 acres. There are 12 this year. The grass has a particular cycle to do with the seasons and the growing calves: at this time of the year when it is growing fast and they are quite small, it outgrows them, so that by the end of May they are often knee and sometimes shoulder-deep in it. Then as the summer wears on it gradually gets shorter: grass grows more slowly and calves get bigger and eat more, until by the time they leave in November, the field is down to a bumpy almost tennis court in length (never quite that short: it takes sheep or horses to really make a tennis court). This year, I suspect the grass won't get as far ahead of the calves in the next few weeks as it often does: long late winter and then dry means the grass isn't growing as fast as usual.
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