Jewel with Oscar

Othello and Oscar: mentally challenged?

It too quite a while, and some canny shepherding, to get the new lambs feeding regularly. Oscar, the smaller of the two, seemed about half blind, stumbling around weakly trying to find his mother's nipples for what seemed like forever. Othello, who found the source early, seemed to lose it again. In the end we gave Oscar a bottle twice, and held Jewel down twice and forced the lamb to the nipple, squirting milk into his mouth, before he finally began to suckle vigorously at about the ten hour point. (Jewel wasn't very pleased with these procedures, and complained greatly, but then she should have smarter offspring.) After that we saw Oscar find the udder on his own, and feed properly, and so could relax. Which was a good job, because we were expected at another couple's house for dinner an hour or so later. We made our dinner date still smelling faintly of manure, and with iodine stains on Aimee's hands.

So much for natural intelligence. Neither of these guys is going to make it into the breeding stock, so we won't worry. They'll both be whethered in a few weeks, and both slaughtered this fall.

On a colder day, that delay might have been all she wrote for little O-boy. In Britain, when night time temperatures are often 40 or 50 degrees F in lambing season, no-one worries too much about lambs. They're born unattended in the field, and the shepherd just checks on them a few times a day. Here, where it was 15 F again last night, with a nasty cold wind, well, they have to feed to live or they will become quickly hypothermic, and we check constantly in the first few hours and have to make sure they're getting fed, or feed them ourselves.

This morning, they're still wobbly, but alive. I only felt the need to check on them once in the middle of the night, and they seemed ok.

Oscar? Othello? Aimee's picks. Oscar could be Oscar Meyer, unfortunate for any livestock baby. Othello? I guess he was black, Shakespeare's Moor, and both of these lambs are coal black.

Go figure...

Jewel's Easter twins, better late than never

Jewel took forever to pop out her lambs, possibly because she was "lookin' out for better weather" as the old north country sea shanty goes. Stumbling over her own udder much of the end of the week, she was. Anyway, right on time, that wicked storm abated last night (not without forcing me to dismantle the hoop house) and when I rose to check on her at 4am, there they were, two black-as-jet baby Jewels.

Watching baby lambs try to find the nipple for the first time is excruciating. It's like rooting for the Steelers when they're 20 points down in the last quarter, and they have possession, only worse, because the lamb will die if it is not fed.

One of these little buggers has latched right on, tail wagging vigorously (we love to see that tail wag), the other is still very tentative, and we have not seen him or her feed yet, for sure. For all we know, she (or he) is only two hours old, and she (or he) is still trying fairly vigorously to locate the precious tap, so we won't intervene right away. But if in a couple hours the lamb starts to fail, we'll have to hold Jewel down and put the lamb on the nipple. If that fails, we'll feed the lamb ourselves from a bottle, to give her (or him) some strength to tide her over. If all else fails, we're a dab hand at intubating lambs. Get 4 ounces of colostrum replacer in the weak ones, pop them under the wood stove for forty minutes until they wake up and bleat for their mothers, then back to mother's nipple, hold her down and put the lamb right on there.

The heat lamp is part of the scheme for having a good crop of lambs here in Maine. It was 20 F last night, too cold for a wet lamb to do well by herself, if left out too long. Later today we'll sex the lambs and sterilize the umbilical cord stub. Right now it's too cold for germs to thrive, and we want Jewel and her lambs to figure out the feeding thing before they are disturbed.

Because of the need for all this shepherding, lambing is a busy time for us, and we don't like to be gone from home too long.

It's an "O" year. lambs born this year have to have the alphabetical naming scheme: names beginning with O. Last year was "N", so we had Nellie, Nugget, and Neeps. Suggestions for good O-names, male or female, can be posted at the comment line below.

Lambs are such a delight. Like a nice bunch of flowers, or a sight of a moose in the woods.

Aimees photo archive

To see what we did on our recent business/science trip to Scotland, England and Wales, go to

http://www.unity.edu/facultypages/aphillippi/Scotland.htm

Lambs are coming!

Well, we're back from our field trip to Scotland and just about over the jet-lag. And right on time, Jewel, who Aimee says always likes to be first, is going into labor.

She first started showing signs a few days ago. One side of her udder "bagged out," then the other, last night she was lying down, refusing to get up, and groaning softly to herself. Her vulva is now swollen and she is taking herself apart from the other sheep. Any time today, she will drop a lamb or two, hopefully without complications. We're staying home and hanging out in our farm clothes, checking on her every couple hours.

Watch this space for pictures of the newborns soon.

Twelve Below

Brrrrr. Cold AGAIN. I am really looking forward to our trip to Scotland and Wales, if only to have someone else be responsible for home heating for a few days. I checked the weather in Ardgay, Sutherland, close to where we'll be, and in Cardiff. Ardgay is still in winter, Cardiff in the middle of spring.

Here, we're waiting for the jet stream to move north. The standing wave of the jet stream system in the upper atmosphere controls Maine's weather at this time of year; as the jet stream waves move across, we alternate cold and mild air masses that control our temperature. Cold and mild, cold and mild. As the days lengthen, the influence of the sun begins to beat out the influence of the air mass, and so it can be warm and nice, and and feel very good in the ever-brightening sunshine in the mid-afternoon, even on a very cold day like today is expected to be, but at night the warmth is long gone.

Racing days are another feature, each day and each week brings noticeably more daylight.

In Scotland, in the far north where we're going, the weather has warmed up already from January. I expect we'll see very many fewer snowbanks, if any at all. There will be a snow line on the mountains above which life remains arctic, and that snowline will descend to sea level from time to time. But at low altitude, it will be a weak kind of snow, not the all-pervasive kind we have here. I have a six-foot snowbank in my front yard where the Kubota has been at work, and a good foot in the fields and woods.

In the Welsh valleys where my family lives, it will be warm and sunny, and there will be lambs and daffodils.

Lambs. Bliss. We too will have lambs soon, when we return. Tilley and Tootsie and Jewel and Maggie are bred and will drop sometime after the 10th. Abraram, the patriarch, will get all bolshie again defending his many offspring. Randy old bugger that he is, he's a very prolific parent and grandparent.

Watch this space, and the Sustainability Blog, for both Highlands and lamb pictures.

Highland Regeneration

Very soon, UC Wildlife Care and Education professor Amy Darcangelo, her graduate student husband Joe (who before he was a graduate student was an expert zoo display and captive wildlife habitat designer, and has a UC BA in Environmental Writing), my wife Aimee Phillippi, a PhD marine biologist and Conservation Biology professor, and myself, your sustainability blogmeister and tame environmental policy wonk and economist, will visit the 24,000 acre Scottish Highland estate of British millionaire Paul Lister.

Alladale, as the estate is known, is a traditional Highland country seat dating back to the Victorian era, when famous British industrialists and aristocrats followed the lead of the Queen herself, by setting themselves up as Highland "Lairds." One Highland historian called this process "Balmoralization" and the ethics that drove it "Balmorality."

Mr. Lister has a very different proposition, which, since I'm teaching ethics this spring, deserves at least an analytical note or two here. He proposes "rewilding" the Highlands, regenerating the Caledonian forest, re-equipping the highland ecological community with the predators that would police that forest, keeping herbivores in check, and to boot, demonstrating that this scheme is actually a more profitable land use than others for the landowner and community.

This is quite a tall order. But not impossible or out of the question, given the various regulations on wildlife and land use in effect in the UK and the Highland region.

I have a little personal experience with the "re-wilding" proposition. It turns out to be a combination of older ideas, from various sources. In the Highlands, the proposition that regenerating the native forest would prove more economically sound than other forms of land use dates back to the 1980s. I was “there” when it first became popular, and knew some of the protagonists, interesting back-to-the-landers and activists such as Bernard and Emma Planterose, Andrew Wightman, Donald McPhillemmy, Jonathan Caddy and Alan Watson of the Findhorn community. In the US, this idea came out of the radical environmental movements, and out of academic ecological restoration movement in the 1980s and 1990s, and was taken up by protagonists like Michael Soule, David Foreman, Patagonia clothing entrepreneur Doug Tompkins, and so on.

Some of the Scots "rewilders" were forestry and other graduates associated with the radical Centre for Human Ecology, then at Edinburgh University (soon to be sacked from there by a Thatcherite administration) and now at Strathclyde University. One of the founders of CHE, the eminent Dr Ulrich Loening, had sponsored much student discussion and interest in forestry. I remember he also had a sawmill, and had some of his students work in small-scale forest product harvesting and milling, centered around Edinburgh town, using over-mature ornamental trees as feedstock. So I think the root idea of regenerating the Caledonian Forest on a large scale can be loosely traced back to Loening and his students and graduate students at the Centre. Caddy, one of Loening’s students, was the Findhorn connection.

Two lasting programs emerged from the endeavors of this loosely affiliated group, the NGO Reforesting Scotland, which with its magazine of the same name, continues to be interesting and influential, and the Findhorn-based charity Trees for Life, which, although closely associated with the New Age commune, has also been influential, particularly on the Glen Affric estate. I've always liked the Reforesting Scotland ethos because it emphasizes people and wildlife in a native forest, which seems to me to be more pragmatic and less romantic.

As a partial result of this activism, in the mid 1990s, the official government-run Forestry Commission and Scottish Natural heritage both became interested in native forest plantings, and the emphasis on regeneration began to spread. Because former plantings of non-native conifers were proving uneconomical, this was partly a response to public sentiment, but also partly pragmatic. In the face of competition from "liquidation harvesting" from other global fiber and pulp producers, what form of Highland forestry would have been economical? At least in the short term? My take is that Highland foresters, who for years had depended on economic arguments for employment, switched to native forestry as a way to keep forestry alive in the Highlands.

As a result, a good deal of forest regeneration work has been attempted since then, on private reserves and on government land of different types. An earlier, and quite successful regeneration effort on the Isle of Rum, begun in the 1950s and 60s, offered lessons in "how-to" but was never intended to be anything more than an adjunct of the nature preserve there. The new ideal of Highland native forest regeneration is intended by its advocates to cover a good deal of the landscape. Very often economic arguments are invoked, as when the Planterose's set up a demonstration working private forest economy near Ullapool. I would love to know if this experiment still exists.

The forestry work is not unlike some of the ideas we have for the few acres of the Great Farm Aimee and I own and lease. Cutting to waste of non-natives. Husbandry of native seed stock. Managed grazing.

The there's the wildlife aspects, which is why Amy and Joe are involved. Both are expert in captive wildlife care. The introduction of two previously extirpated animal species have taken place already in Scotland, the sea eagle, and the osprey. The European beaver has been released, although not to the wild. Mr. Lister has introduced moose and boar to large enclosures, although not to the wild, and intends to add lynx, brown bear, gray wolf, and other extirpated species.

This intent has led local antagonists to call his estate "Jurassic Park," which seems unfair, but, believe it or not, political discourse in the UK can be even more prone to hyperbole that in the US. (if you don't believe me, listen to the UK House of Parliament's Prime Minister's Question Time on C-Span! You'll get the idea quickly.) I was exposed to a good deal of this kind of vitriolic and scathing criticism when I did my Master's thesis research. Highlanders would scathingly abuse the government agency I was studying and it's operations.

Anyway, that’s all for now, but watch this space for more to come on our Alladale experiences.