by Roger Evans
I’m not about to entertain the farming folk of the area by shedding a load of bales in the middle of the village, just as some of them are making their way to the pub, so we decide to leave the load in the field for the night. I drive the loader slowly home, but the other tractor is long gone in a cloud of black smoke.
SLOWLY, AND not very surely, because of the wet August, and thus far September, the combines are picking away at the harvest and oh-so-slowly, the fields become cleared.
This is an important time for the wildlife that was born this spring – in theory, birds and animals should be big enough by now to take care of themselves, although yesterday, when I got out of the truck to open a gate, I found the tiniest of leverets tucked away in the grass. It didn’t move so I could see clearly that it would have nested comfortably in the palm of my hand.
We have several fields of third-cut silage to do at any time but, because we have refused to buy any more fertiliser at its present price, it’s a fairly sparse crop. It provides cover of a sort but hares don’t take much spotting in there and neither do the skylarks.
Skylarks concern me. Next to my passion for the brown hare, skylarks were the species I was most proud of, because there were lots and lots on our top land. But I would guess that there are less than half there now compared with three years ago, which is actually disgraceful because there must be 40 acres up there that are designated every year to wild birds. I don’t know how much it costs because it’s the landlord’s stewardship scheme, but if it was working then birds should be increasing, especially skylarks, and not actually be in decline.
To my mind the reason is plain to see: buzzard numbers have trebled, in addition to the ravens and kites that we now see every day. All of these wreak havoc with songbirds, especially those that nest on the ground.
When did you last see a hedgehog? Badgers love hedgehogs – they roll them over and eat all the best bits in no time at all. Hedgehogs are predicted to be extinct in this country in 20 or 30 years but not to worry; someone will reintroduce them in 50 years’ time.
The fact that we could intervene, but will never be allowed to, makes it all the more shameful. Not while we can always blame the farmers for everything.
AS I FOLLOW the daily routine of winter feeding, a routine that takes me mostly from one set of buildings to another (we just have a very few cattle out and they are on fields that we will need to plough in the spring, so it doesn’t really matter if they do any damage to the sward), the fields are still littered with pheasants. But they are very different pheasants to those that were about a few months ago. Those pheasants roamed the fields like flocks of tame poultry, which in a way is exactly what they were.
Today’s pheasant is on full alert. As you drive by on the tractor, their heads all go up. Those that are in the bottom of hedgerows scatter in panic as they seek to find a way through the hedge to safety. They know full well that whereas a few months ago the arrival of ‘man’ invariably meant more food, today it could be a signal that your backside is about to be peppered with shot. Especially if man turns up in numbers with spaniels and the like and you and your friends are encouraged to fly over men with guns. You also know that some of your friends and neighbours don’t come back from this exercise.
Pheasants seem to take shooting in their stride better than partridge. Pheasants seem to settle back into their routine very quickly. They usually make their way back to where they were reared and continue feeding normally. True, they are on a very high alert status, but life goes on. Your partridge seems to me to be very different. True, there are far fewer of them but they always seem to live in clearly defined coveys within clearly defined territories. Often, I will disturb a covey in a particular place and know instinctively that that’s the ‘15’ covey, automatically count them and be correct. Shooting activity often breaks up a covey and drives them from their territory and, the day after the shoot, I often come across groups of partridge on the lanes and roads that seem totally disorientated and bewildered. Give them a couple of days and they seem to have settled down again.
I like partridge. I like to see them about, especially greys. I suppose this is another example of my species partiality. I also suppose that deep down I don’t like to see them shot. I look forward to seeing them about with their young in the summer. But they do taste nice, don’t they?
I WAS talking to a friend about harvests and combining in particular. Like most farming activities, there are anecdotes to remember. I was telling him about a contractor I once knew, who, at the completion of harvest, would park his combine in the middle of the yard and leave it there, out in all weathers, until just about a day before he needed it again.
The seeds would germinate and grow, cows would rub up against it, sheep would shelter underneath it and his poultry would explore its depths looking for grain.
When harvest-time came he would change the battery and fire it up, to see if it was all still working, once he had the threshing mechanism into gear.
I was there to witness this on one occasion. His hens had been laying inside all winter. Out of the back came dozens of smashed eggs and the foul smell was not far behind – among the debris of rotten eggs was the straw that had been used to make nests and two or three hens that had just had the fright of their lives.
ONE OF my granddaughter’s pullets disappeared. I’d bought her three pullets and she had firm orders for 12 eggs a day from various teachers and family friends.
Just as they started to lay, one went missing. The family searched everywhere, to no avail. There was no sign of her, no feathers anywhere either as evidence of a visit from Mr Fox.
She phoned me up and said: ‘If I lose any more of my chickens, my business will be in ruins.’ This from a seven-year-old.
Then, lo and behold, as they say, or just like that, as Tommy Cooper used to say, the errant pullet returned, with no explanation, as though nothing had happened, and went on laying an egg a day.
Katie was at our kitchen table one day, telling the story to a friend of ours. ‘Where do you think she went, Katie?’ ‘I just think she wanted to sample life on the wild side.’ Walkabout, the Aborigines call it.
DRIVING ABOUT, on tractor or in Land Rover, the sudden movement of pheasants in fences and hedges is recorded in your mind subconsciously. Yesterday, something brown scuttling about in a fence caught my eye because its movement was different. It was a fox caught unawares by the approaching tractor. It’s harvest time for foxes. Shoots go to great lengths to collect any birds that have been wounded. It’s a part of shooting that is scrupulously observed but, inevitably, the odd bird is missed. Enter your fox to clear up.
I reported the sighting to the keeper who asked me the time of day I’d seen the fox and he was able to tell me, within about 30 yards, where I’d seen it. His knowledge of wildlife and its habits never ceases to amaze me. (Foxes, for reasons I don’t understand, are called Charlies in this area. Hares are known as Sarahs.)
The keeper tells me that there are lots of ‘new’ foxes about. A keeper on a neighbouring shoot has shot 10 in the last week, all within half a mile of his house. Where they all come from bewilders me. When my children were young, my favourite TV programme Bagpuss sometimes used to show a chocolate biscuit factory that continually turned out biscuits but there was, in fact, only the one biscuit which a little rascal called Charlie mouse carried around the back of the factory in order that it could reappear in due course at the front. Foxes are a bit like those chocolate biscuits – they keep on appearing, endlessly. Where do they all come from?
THE WET and windy weather has seen the majority of our cattle into their winter quarters and the weekend work routine has become a full and demanding one. My son still plays rugby every week at a reasonably high local level. My wife reckons he’s too old to be playing first team rugby, but when he started playing she reckoned he was too young so you can’t win, as most men have discovered. Every Sunday morning she asks if he is all right from the previous day’s gam
e. Mostly he is, apart from a bruised this or that or a cut or a black eye. Last Sunday, he was completely unscathed.
On Sunday afternoon, he took his two boys ice-skating – a birthday treat – and broke his ankle badly. He must have been doing one of those triple whatsits but he hasn’t told me how he did it yet. The boys will, when I see them.
What it does do is put a lot of extra work on the rest of us just when the routine workload reaches its highest. We’re fairly pragmatic about injuries here and take them in our stride (is that a sort of pun?) For many years we were both playing rugby, and at one time I had a broken ankle and he had a broken arm. It worked out quite well in the end because I could do what he couldn’t do and he could do what I couldn’t do and we were both getting paid weekly by our private insurance policies. Come to think of it, that was about the last time we made any money. His mother says he will be off work for three months but I noticed this morning he had two sets of crutches – one for best and one for going around the cows.
NEXT WEEK we have our annual TB test. I’m dreading it. It will be four days’ hard and difficult work at four different locations. In the summer it is a simple matter to move cattle about the fields so that they are handy to where we have our best handling facilities, but now they are all in their winter quarters we will need a bit of ingenuity and planning to achieve a test. Matters are not helped by having our main cattle handler immobilised while his leg is in a plaster cast. He has a particular knack of grabbing the unco-operative animals when they least suspect it and then has the strength to hold them while the vet does the test.
I’m also dreading the test itself. We haven’t had a reactor for 20 or 30 years but bovine TB is rampant in this county. A herd a few miles away had 38 cows taken for slaughter a couple of weeks ago. The animals were on a large estate, not in any proximity to any other cattle, and they haven’t bought stock in for years and years.
For farmers, it is quite clear that most of this infection comes from the reservoir of infection that exists in wildlife and in one particular species. It seems totally unfair to me that I have to offer up my stock for annual testing while the source of infection is not addressed. It is a question of balance that completely baffles me. It’s OK for cows to be slaughtered but not the culprit. For farmers, it’s a bit like trying to stop the tide coming in.
If we do fail our test next week, the restrictions that will be imposed on our business will be devastating. We could easily end up slaughtering calves at birth because we wouldn’t be able to sell them at a month old, and we would have neither the room to accommodate them nor the food to feed them.
I HAVE ALWAYS, it seems, woken up at two or three o’clock in the morning. There is a very good reason why I wake up at that time these days, the details of which would be inappropriate to set down here.
Thirty years ago it would have been for a very different reason altogether but the details of that would be even more inappropriate.
This morning I was woken by a throbbing noise. As I lay in a semi-conscious state I, very feebly, tried to identify what it was.
I ran a sort of roll call of my body parts to see if all was well and decided that the only bit that was in any difficulty was my left arm. I was lying on it. The arm felt sort of dead and it was full of pins and needles so I decided that it was empty of blood and the throbbing noise was in fact the blood trying to get back in.
I turned over on to the other side and went back to sleep, pleased that I had solved the problem without having to wake up properly.
The noise woke me a second time but I drifted off again.
The third time I woke I turned over on to my back and I did another body check. After a few minutes, half awake, half dozing, I decided that the noise wasn’t coming from me. I also decided to try to locate it.
First I checked my mobile phone. I use it as an alarm clock because I hate the noise it makes so it always does a good job of waking me up. I put my hand out in the dark and located the phone – it was fast asleep, just like I should have been.
I sat up in bed and realised the noise was quite clearly coming through the window. And there lay the answer – it was a rave.
They have one on a farm about three miles away several times a year and the drumbeat always wakes me up and invades my subconscious. I always wonder how loud it is if you are actually at the rave if I can hear it such a long way away.
I know the lad whose farm it was on; he’s a grand lad, even if he is a bit unconventional for a farmer. I’ve asked him if I could go to one of his raves and he said I’d be very welcome.
I went back to sleep content and satisfied. For a few minutes there, I’d thought I was having one of my turns.
I’VE ALWAYS considered myself a dog person as opposed to a cat person. There are plenty of cats around our farm but I try to distance myself from them. To achieve this, I have always described them as feral, meaning wild, as in free spirits, free to come and go as they please. This is a particularly important distancing because my farm assurance says I should worm the cats. So, when the inspector asks me the appropriate question, I take him to a place where I know there are likely to be a dozen or so taking their ease. They bolt quite violently in all directions and I have proven my point.
But I give them milk every day and, for their part, they are expected to catch the solids in their diet. Every spring, they have lots of kittens which they secrete away in bales and the like, so that by the time I see them they are too big and too wild to catch. But there have been two litters born this autumn which is very unusual. Half of them are black, and half a beautiful grey colour. I have a dish hidden away behind some bales that I put nice, warm milk in twice a day, and hidden behind a pallet is a bag of cat food. The food isn’t hidden from the cats but from the humans. The kittens get this food twice a day, as well as the milk, and now some of them will come quite close to me.
Don’t tell anyone. It wouldn’t suit my image, so let’s keep it between ourselves. Men don’t keep cats. They keep dogs, and real men keep working dogs. My dog is called Mert, an abbreviation of Mervyn who gave him to me. When he came here he had a name that was very, very politically incorrect so we quickly changed it to Mert. Mert is a real dog. In fact, he thinks he is a wolf. He probably gets that idea from watching our favourite film Babe too many times. Wolves like Mert prey on joggers, ramblers and cyclists. They are all legitimate quarry in his eyes, providing all the growling and aggressive posturing that can be done while he’s in the Land Rover with me.
Outside, he’s a bit of a pussycat. Mert had a brother called Neville who was renowned for being a bit on the nasty side, both in and out of a Land Rover. He would puncture the postman’s tyres with ease, which wasn’t much fun for the postman as he didn’t dare get out to change the wheel. Neville was run over and killed last week (I don’t think it was the postman). I haven’t told Mert yet, as it would only upset him and he might decide to change his behaviour to that of his late brother in memory of him.
I once had a dog called Freddie, who was a spaniel and Jack Russell cross, which left him looking a bit like a small Basset hound. Freddie ran away with the gypsies. I fetched him back twice, but he was soon away again. Dairy farming has got to be at a very low ebb if your dog prefers to live with travelling folk. It was a blow to my self-esteem from which I have never recovered.
EVERY YEAR we buy straw from our neighbours for winter bedding for our cattle. We buy the straw by the acre, in the swath, after it has been combined. One neighbour grows a lot of cereals and every year he allocates us four or five fields, approximately, which is presumably as near as he can get to our requirements and the requirements of his other customers.
Every year we seem to get different fields, not that that makes any odds to us except, of course, that some fields are handier than others.
There’s a main road through our village. I was giving directions by phone to a bed and breakfast guest on Saturday night and I told him ‘keep following the main road’.
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br /> He said: ‘I think I’m lost, this is hardly a main road.’
I said: ‘It might not be a main road where you come from, but it’s a main road around here.’
When he eventually arrived he said he’d called in at a pub a couple of miles away to ask directions.
‘They didn’t only know you, they gave me your number,’ he said.
Anyway, that’s a digression, back to the village and the straw.
At right angles to the ‘main’ road is a road that goes into the heart of the village. The village school is on the corner and the road is lined with houses, bungalows, picturesque cottages and there’s a stream that runs the length of the village as well.
So, this year we were allocated a field of straw that can only be approached by this road. For how many hundreds of years have people been carting produce down this road out of this particular field? No idea, but what we are doing is hardly something new.
The people in the village can see the field, they can see there are still bales in it and they can see quite clearly what we are about. But every load we brought down the village was a real test of skill for the tractor driver as he ran the gauntlet of an obstacle course of parked cars and wheelie bins.
Of particular interest were the people who took their cars off their drive and parked them on the road to wash them while we were carting straw. There were wisps of straw in the air and some dust and as we snaked our loads tortuously past the cars, the hosepipes and the plastic buckets that were begrudgingly moved to one side, we had to wonder how their minds were working.
And as we drove on, I looked in the tractor wing mirror and could see Mr Indignant of Rose Cottage with his hands on his hips glaring at me before he flicked bits of dust and straw off his damp car. Not that this would always be a problem.