My stone soup adventures a couple of weeks ago were mostly a bust, with one delightful and important exception: I relearned key subtleties of active shepherding that I’d let slide over the last few years. Chief among them: the essence of shepherding is creating the opportunity for sheep to have a sense of discovery about their food. Parents will not be surprised.
The challenges of keeping everyone well-nourished in this exceptionally dry summer are leading me into the shepherding equivalent of stone soup: creative use of the patches of good forage and biodiversity that are still around, while still keeping the flock safe from fire threats.
Saturday, 4 January. As I’m writing this, we’re experiencing a Very High Fire Danger day here in Tas, but nothing like what they are going through on the mainland. I’m inside, out of the heat, but listening to the 50 kph winds whistling around my house, and obsessively checking the Tas Fire Services website to see if any new fires have started up anywhere nearby. The southerly change (front) that is making it so windy has reduced the temperature, and blown away this morning’s smoke haze. Knowing just how dry the landscape is, though, keeps me on tenterhooks.
In the continuing extra dry conditions for Tasmania, shepherding has once again become a priority. We’ve had less than half of our annual average rainfall over the last 12 months, and with the Indian Ocean Dipole at a record high, it doesn’t seem likely we’ll see much precipitation before early 2020 when the sea surface temperature pattern is expected to return to a more neutral configuration. (See my other farm journal, Yarns from the Farm, for a discussion of the IOD.) Knowing what’s causing the dry, and even when it’s likely to finally let up, is useful but doesn’t get us very far in terms of how to manage this gracefully. Shepherding will help.
I haven't seen the flock move into the Lucerne Reserve on their own, so I'm assuming I'll find them somewhere in the middle of the Basin. The forecast wind is westerly, so depending on how miserable it is I may or may not have trouble moving them down the hill into Old Cabin. If that all goes well, I'll take them on our usual circuit around the perimeter of the paddock, and from there into the Lucerne Reserve.
The morning started with a gorgeous sunrise, and a -2C (28F) frost--our first proper frost of winter. Although it's only forecast to be 10C (42F) with sunshine and light winds I'm hoping for a lovely morning circuit. However, more rough weather is on the way, interfering with my shepherding schedule, so I've decided to move the flock to the northeastern end of the Basin Grazing Area today.
I love my full-day circuits. I think it's because the length of time, with only the animals and the landscape around me, lets me enter a different part of myself. It's restful and timeless, in the sense of no deadlines other than organic ones, like hunger or fatigue. I hear and see so much: birdsong, wind in the she-oaks, the sound of an eagle's wings as he lands in a tree near me, the chatter of a fairy wren family, the sound of sheep eating.
I cheated and looked to see where the sheep were yesterday evening when I ran the dogs, so I'm assuming I know where they'll be this morning. There's lots more forage in the Back Gully Reserve, so we'll take another trip there today, unless the flock completely fools me and ends up on the northeastern end of the Grazing Area, in which case we'll go for the Lucerne Reserve.
I'm expecting to find the flock about where they were on Monday, and then with the northwest wind to graze them into the Back Gully Reserve, one of the biodiverse areas. There's quite a lot of gorse in the gully itself, and so far the sheep haven't shown their usual winter interest in gorse as a forage.
Whenever I tell someone I have a waterfall on my place, they look at me quizzically or pityingly, as though I've completely lost the plot during this extended dry time, and am seeing mirages. But I really, really do have a waterfall, with about a 15 foot drop, in my steepest gully of all. Ok, not all the time.
It's as though winter has decided to make up in a week the lost time in March and April, when it was so warm and mild. We had yet another ½ inch of rain overnight, following an inch on Monday night, both with blustery westerly gales. Last night as I drove back from choir practice about 10:30, it was sleeting horizontally, and the temperature outside my kitchen window was hovering at freezing.
I'm wimping out from shepherding today-forecast is for significant rain. Here's a photo from Saturday's shepherding-one I took with my real camera and its real telephoto lens. My only unhappiness with Instagram is that I have no way to zoom in on the images I want to send you! This was coming up through that rough gully. Notice the nice bite full of long grass in the lead sheep's mouth. By the way, I often see this older ewe up front, so maybe Horatio has some competition for Prime Minister.
There's lots of good forage still in the Highway Reserve, so my plan for today is to head back there and try to work some of the less-grazed corners. I have no idea where the sheep will be, so have done an "eeny-meeny" guess. We'll see! Light northerly winds may help us to do a full length transit. I've appended two of my favourite photos of Elf and friends Clara and Vicki.
Assuming the NW winds are keeping the sheep towards the western end of the property, I'm planning to take them on a repeat of yesterday, into the Highway Reserve from the southwest end. This time I'll see if I can get them to graze down the hill to the west, before heading north into the tricky gully at the bottom.
After our wild weather (and nearly an inch of rain, calloo, callay!) I thought today I might just take the flock through the middle section of White Gum Grazing Area, the paddock I call White Gum Wood. We'll concentrate on the downhill side of the paddock, and time permitting, may poke our noses into the southwestern end of the Highway Reserve.
The good news is we had 14 mm (just over ½ inch) of rain over the weekend, in a series of wild storms and gale force winds. The ground is covered with tiny moths flying below the radar--their first chance for the right hatching conditions all year, I suspect. Today the forecast is for 50 kph winds, so I think I will let the wet sheep hang out wherever they darn please, and give myself a break from trying to convince them they WANT to go into (or even with) that wind. I skipped Saturday's half day as well, mostly because I was still worn out from Thursday's marathon. You see how easy it is to slide into laziness and complacency with this shepherding business? Good thing I have all of you to keep me honest! I really will do a circuit on Wednesday--probably back to the Highway Reserve for half a day, to let them enjoy this:
My somewhat radical plan for today is to go back to the Lucerne Reserve for the morning, then take the flock into Old Cabin, which is actually part of the Basin Grazing Area for the afternoon, then out via Waterfall Gully Reserve and back to the White Gum Grazing Area. The plan is radical in that I don't normally graze into a different Grazing Area.
I had a great plan for today, but the sheep forestalled me by doing it on their own yesterday: grazing the steep hill facing north toward the farmhouse. They spent the morning there, contentedly grazing the burned area from stem to stern, and even more importantly, from top to bottom. All I can say is downhill in this case was also upwind. Wind won, this time.
Well, though on Saturday I promised you a circuit in a new area, I lied. Not lied, exactly, just didn't think it all the way through. I'm betting the sheep will still be on the eastern end of the White Gum Grazing Area and therefore close to the Lucerne Reserve. Might as well have another bite at beating the bugs to the lucerne crop!
It continues terribly dry, though a bit of rain is forecast for Thursday, so I decided to do my full-day shepherd a day early and keep Thursday for a (hopefully!) rainy day of finishing my quarterly taxes. The bugs are gaining on the sheep in the lucerne (for those who missed earlier posts on this, I have aphids/mites turning my beautiful stand of lush green lucerne (alfalfa) into yellow standing hay).
I've been out with a nasty tummy bug since Friday, so no shepherding this weekend. I'm preparing to totter around the Racecourse GA (Grazing Area) with the flock this morning, hopefully all will be ok. We are now desperately short of rain, again. Essentially no rain for the past 7 weeks. So I am trying to spin out the grazing in the Racecourse GA as long as I possibly can, before putting the flock back on the White Gum Grazing Area.
