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!

Counting the chickens before they've hatched

Just over three weeks ago we set a clucky hen on a dozen fresh eggs. She had been sitting in the nesting box in the chook pen so we knew she was ready to set. We got some eggs from a friend so they are a mix of varieties. Yesterday was the day I had written in my diary as the day that the chickens should hatch. It had seemed a long time coming because Hugh had been asking virtually every day whether the chickens were going to hatch that day.
We have been keeping the hen in the old rabbit hutch, as it was the most secure place we could find where she would be safe from predators. After one particularly hot day last week I was worried that the hen had abandoned her eggs. She had left the nest and looked quite distressed, and she had spread the eggs out, which resulted in one rolling away. But she may have just been trying to stop the eggs from overheating because she went back to them and continued sitting on them for another week.
Because yesterday was the day written in the calendar as hatching date we looked in on her lots of times during the day, and excitedly went out this morning to check again. We have had very wet and stormy weather and today was particularly cold. I was glad no chickens hatched last night in such a storm. But when there was still no sign of chickens this evening I started to despair. Maybe the eggs had gone off. Maybe they weren't fertilised...
But when I took an egg from under the hen and held it near my ear I could hear tiny pecking sounds and the faint cheeping of a tiny chicken. Now we wait expectantly for the morning, when we will be waiting to count our chickens!

June Rain

Through the windscreen in Darkan

Looking out the car window across Burrowes Street in Darkan.

Have I mentioned that it has been raining a lot lately? During the month of June we had inches of rain. Low-lying areas are becoming waterlogged, and most of the dams are nearly full. It is good for the farm, but I have given permission for the rain to stop for a while.

These photos were taken on Monday and show some of the water that was left after the rain stopped.

You probably can't even see the water going across the road in this photo...