Fencing – will we never learn!
This morning we were awoken by a phone call. It was to tell us that some of our sheep had gone awandering. Again. Now this shouldn’t be a huge surprise as they have been getting out recently, but I thought I’d actually found their main egress route, and blocked it. Sadly I was wrong.
Usually the escapees are the cross-bred boys, with the occasional pure bred Soay. None of the OAPs wander, I think they’re quite happy where they are thank-you-very-much. This morning the usual suspects had been joined by all the other non-OAPs, for a total of twelve wandering sheep.
We quickly jumped into the car and drove round to where they’d been spotted. We found them quickly, and I started towards them with my trusty bucket. Usually they would run towards me, but not today. They were rather spooked. I suspect that they’d met a few people out walking their dogs and this had put them in rather a fluster. Instead we did the human sheep dog thing, and soon had them heading in the right direction. They’d clearly had enough of an adventure, and were happy to be heading home. I stayed on after them, both to make sure they didn’t change their minds, and also to see where they’d got out, and within a few minutes they were all safely back in their field.
Recently their method of escape has been to jump over the fence, so I was expecting them to jump back in. Instead they seemed to walk back in without any real problems. When I got to that part of the fence I found that a whole section had come loose, and they could just walk in and out. I was rather lucky the cows hadn’t decided they needed to wander as well!
We got out the fencing supplies and went to work to fix up the fence, and we also took another look at all the other fencing to see what other weaknesses they might be exploiting. I have to admit that recently I’ve only been looking at where they have been jumping, so have been a bit lax at checking the bottom of the mesh. It looks like they’ve taken advantage of this and pushed it up in several places, and indeed that’s how they’d freed up the loose section. An hour or so later, with some judicious use of wooden beams, some random branches and a reasonable number of fencing staples, and I was relatively confident that the fencing would hold our escape committee for at least a few days.
However, I also decided that wasn’t going to be enough. Clearly those boys would continue challenging the fence, so I needed to do something about it. They’re actually due to go on holiday fairly soon, so maybe it was time to move them in with the Borerays, who happen to be occupying the pre-holiday field at the moment. So next job is going to be to move them!
Also, obviously, at some point I’m going to need to get the whole fence on the bottom field redone. Something else to look forward to.
When we acquired the Borerays we gained not only two breeding ewes and a ram, but also two whethers and an old ewe. The old ewe we dubbed ‘Duchess’ and we both became fond of her. She was a very friendly ewe, and would usually run up to us whenever she saw us, and happily eat out of our hands, the only one of the Borerays to consistently do so.
She was rather old, and over the last few days has had problems standing. She was still eating fine, but was rather weak, and needed help to get up a couple of times. This morning when I went out to feed the sheep I found her in her little hut. She wasn’t moving at all any more. I think she’d only just died. Poor duchess, but at least she had a fair innings.