Does Lightning Strike?

An awful sight struck Roger as he rode his motorbike around the paddock this morning. He was checking the cows that are calving, to make sure they were OK and not having calving problems. What he saw was three dead cows at the foot of a tree.

Three cows - dead under a tree :-(

We are wondering if lightning has struck the cows. Not being experts in that sort of thing we didn't really know what to look for. There were no obvious burn marks on the cows which we thought there might be from a direct strike. But because they were under a tree it could mean that the lightning struck the tree and then travelled through the cows. Maybe I should have looked more closely at the tree...

Two of the cows had not yet calved, which makes the loss twice as bad. The third was very upsetting though, because she was a special cow named Annie.
Annie was born the day before a terrible storm in May 2005. We presume she was a twin because we never found a cow without a calf. She was alone in the paddock when we first saw her, all tiny and newborn. Thinking that her mother would come back for her we left her there, but discovered that she was still alone and frightened and shivering the next morning after the storm had passed. She was brought home and bottle-fed. Sophie was only seven then and she took care of the calf, heading out to feed her before school each morning and again when she came home from school in the evening. The calf grew and at weaning time she was put out in the paddock with the rest of the calves. She had a reprieve from the abattoir when she failed to fall pregnant in her first season. Usually "empty" cows are sent off on a truck, but the children begged their father not to do that to Annie! So she stayed and has produced five calves. Just last week she had a new calf, a huge big silver calf delivered without any trouble. Or so we thought... That evening Matthew found the calf dead in the paddock. The death still remains a mystery, and when Annie died she was still carrying an udder full of milk for her dead calf.

The lightning was very close to the house last night. Roger and I had been out and when we got home we found the children huddled on the sofa together loudly exclaiming how the house shook and the windows rattled and the thunder was so loud!

Shearing the Rams

The sheep at Wattle Creek have been shorn, and today was time to shear the rams at home. We had managed to keep the rams dry in the shed during the storm yesterday and last night. (We had over an inch of rain, which is most annoying at this time of the year.)

First up the young merino rams were shorn. These are from our breeding nucleus, and their fleeces were weighed so that we can add the data to their body weight and wool micron measurement to calculate an index which we use for selecting the breeding rams.

Next the older merino rams were shorn. I really love the look of the horns on merino rams!

Then the Poll Dorset rams had to be shorn. The nature of these rams with their temperament and size makes them difficult and dangerous to shear, so they are given some drugs to calm them down beforehand. Roger injected them about an hour before they were shorn so that they were not too difficult for the shearers to handle.

 

Hugh loves to help in the shed, and he spent some time helping to sweep up wool off the floor.

Feeding Sheep

Many people think that farmers are always wanting rain, so when two inches (50mm) of rain fell in December we should have been ecstatic. In fact rain in December is disastrous on a farm like ours. We had so much pasture in the paddocks which had dried off, leaving dry feed which could have sustained livestock for many weeks. Rain on dry feed leaches out nutrients leaving little more than fibre, and now, even though the sheep have dry grass to eat to fill their bellies, they cannot maintain body condition on such rations. So The Farmer (Roger) has started to feed out lupins to the sheep to give them protein.  

Yum, yum! Lupins...

Looking for food

All in a row

Following behind the feed trailer

lupins, good food for sheep!

Notice that the sheep have been shorn? And they have yellow on their backs. That is a chemical to kill the lice. Unfortunately lice have become a big problem in recent years, and we have had to treat the sheep after each shearing. If they are not treated they get in a very bad way, constantly scratching and itching, and they become quite unwell. I saw some sheep badly infested with lice last year on another property, and it was not at all pretty.

severely lice-infested sheep - poor animals...

Eureka Gold! The yellow spray kills lice on sheep.