OPINION: Plans, pigeons and pheasants

Farmlife columnist Bobbi Mothersdale reveals her battles with a host of troublesome birds and a very gassy bull.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

That’s the rueful remark I frequently hear if things have not quite gone to plan. Given our volatile weather and market forces, prices for crops after harvest can differ wildly year to year – so what appears an infallible strategy for farming fortune during the back end, can start to unravel as the year wears on.

Oilseed rape was fetching a good price off the combine and yields were relatively high last year. Plus it fitted our rotation to drill rape after the winter barley was combined. So far so good. The crop went in well but we then spent most of the autumn, winter and spring battling it out with pigeons who clearly agreed with us that it had been the right crop to grow.

I’m sure somewhere there must be a master pigeon, commanding crop attacks. Just as defences are lowered, gas guns switched off, terror kites taken down, that early morning and late afternoon stroll round with the shotgun ceased, a wave of them swoop down.

Finally, though the crop was harvested, coming in at 9% moisture content and an average yield of 3.7t/ha (30cwt/acre). It didn’t break any records, and nor will the price this year, but we are just pleased it is safe in the shed and no longer at the mercy of the weather.

“The expression of relief on the bullock’s face was amazing. Its eyes refocused and it ceased to resemble a King Charles spaniel.”

We then had time to take the oilseed rape field back to grass and sow a strip of cover crops for partridges and pheasants before we got into the winter wheat and spring barley. It was a mention of game birds, incidentally, that helped me solve the problem of a particular theft that had taken place recently. It involved the nets that I use to prevent any voracious pigeons that have tired of their diet of rape and turned their attention to the strawberry patch.

Dragging the nets out of the depths of my garden shed to take to the patch, I was puzzled to find them in a tangled, torn, green mess. I was sure I had folded them away in a tidy state last back end. And, when I came to spread the nets out over the strawberries, great holes had appeared. No way could they now provide an effective guard against bird thefts. When I mentioned the damage to John, he just looked vague and muttered about rat damage. Naively I believed him.

Penned in

A little while later, while John was busy cutting oilseed rape, I took it upon myself to load a bag of pheasant crumbs and a churn full of water into the back of the Land Rover and take them across to the pheasant release pens in one of our plantations. The pheasant chicks fluttered in panic as I approached. Luckily they were restrained from flying out of their pens by oddly familiar green material, threaded with dried out strawberry leaves. Neatly fixed (probably with my upholstery staple gun which has gone missing) made-to-measure roofs had been fashioned out of the strawberry nets for the top of pens. Instead of keeping birds out, the nets are now keeping them in.

On the subject of crop rotations, trying to get everything to slot together neatly and fit in with the demands of keeping stock requires a complex juggling act and we rely on a good barley harvest to engender a satisfying (dare I say it, even smug) sense of self-sufficiency.

Knowing that there will be enough barley, with the addition of a mix of concentrates, for young stock and bullocks to be fed ad-lib till they are ready for market fits in neatly to our farming strategy. But nothing is foolproof. Despite being bedded on barley straw (yum, yum), having constant access to hay (even yummier) and you would think getting enough roughage on this diet to keep any creatures’ bowels rumbling away happily, one of the bullocks in the fattening yard managed to blow itself up. Within hours it closely resembled a barrage balloon on legs.

Once John spotted the problem he walked the bullock into the crush, hoping that nature would take its course and blow a sizeable hole in the ozone layer as a consequence. Not to mention the roof of the yard. Nothing doing. John remembered his father, with no veterinary assistance, performing a puncturing operation with a special tool to relieve a beast that had presented the same problem.

Gas leak

But we decided to play it safe and bring in one of our local vets. Apparently if we had left the bullock in its inflated state for any length of time it would probably have died. Either from a heart attack resulting from the internal pressure, or from its lungs collapsing. John says that sheep are much more intelligent than cows in this way. They know that they could potentially die from this condition, so instead they drop down dead first, them blow up afterwards.

Fortunately everything went smoothly. After administering a local anaesthetic and shaving off some hair in the area of the incision, our vet performed the necessary swift jab to release the gasses. The expression of relief on the bullock’s face was amazing. Its eyes refocused and it ceased to resemble a King Charles spaniel. And rather like a brave child after a visit to the doctor for a jab, it walked off with a big plaster stuck to its side as a reminder of the ordeal it had just been through.

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