Tractor heritage, news and features

Creepy Crawlies

The pony, Hazel, who is our ‘lodger’, (loaned to us by a kind lady who has too many ponies) has had to wear a grazing muzzle, which has a hole near the mouth which allows only a small amount of grass to be eaten. She can drink all she likes, but her grass intake is limited. It might look mean, but the alternative is a painful disease called Laminitis which comes about from the overeating of lush grass. Welsh ponies are designed to live on the hills were the grass is tough, wiry and low in calories, plus the winters are hard. That keeps them thin. Put them in a lush green field and they will literally eat themselves to death.

So yes in this part of Wales drought is never really an issue, and the summer meadows are almost always green and lush because of all the rain we have. One down side of a warm wet climate is maggots. My brother sheared my sheep early in the summer and we found that under the wool one ewe had maggots burrowing into her flesh. It is said that maggots will only thrive on dead flesh, but when it comes to sheep that is not true. Generally they are attracted by dirty wool around the tail, or by an injury, but sometimes the bluebottles, or blow flies will simply lay their eggs within the wool and before you know it the maggots will start to burrow into the flesh. They are not difficult to get rid of once you have spotted them, as there are plenty of products on the market that will get rid of maggots and that will prevent further attack, but all the same a wound oozing with maggots is one of those sights that’s not for the faint hearted. I’m scratching just thinking about them now.

But that’s nature, intrinsically cruel it has to be said. Another unlikeable character we have around here is the sheep tick. The abundance of bracken and heather on the hillsides seem to provide a haven for ticks, and lambs are particularly vulnerable. I can recall years ago, after gathering the sheep off the hillsides my brother spotted that one lamb was looking a bit dull and weak. He caught the lamb and called me over to look at it. The underneath of the lamb, where the wool is thinner and shorter, was absolutely riddled with ticks, they were clustered all over the groin and behind the front legs, so much so that I’m sure you could have heard them crunching as the poor animal walked. The lamb was gradually having the blood sucked out of it and it was losing condition and becoming weaker and weaker... it was a horrible sight. Again, ticks can be got rid of by chemical means, and this lamb was lucky that it got noticed, because you really have to study your sheep to spot the little tell tale signs that tell you that something is starting to go wrong. There are chemical pour-on applications that will prevent fly strike and ticks for a number of weeks, but one wonders at the wisdom of eating a sheep that has been treated with a chemical so powerful that it will deter flies for weeks on end. The use of these chemicals is understandable when farming on a commercial scale, but since our meat is for personal use I try to stay away from such products unless it is absolutely necessary. I have so few sheep it should be easy enough to keep an eye on them, and really I should have noticed that my sheep had maggots, because she would have been scratching and flicking her tail about.

To spot something like this though you have to spend a good while studying your livestock, because if you just walk to the gate to look at them they tend to stop whatever it was that they were doing and they just stand there looking at you. Next summer I shall spend more time sitting out in the field with a glass of wine watching my sheep of an evening. It sounds like a pleasant enough past-time. If I can cope with being eaten alive by the midges that accompany our damp summers here in darkest Snowdonia that is.