The herd is complete

Posted on 24 May, 2009 by Simon

Having installed the walking llamas in their ‘proper’ home (see yesterday’s post), it only remained to collect the breeders from Mike and Sue’s. As this had not proved possible on the first attempt, we were expecting to have to spend some hours cajoling them into the catch pen before we could load them into the trailer.

I remember that one of the best books I ever read about being a manager was called Managing People is Like Herding Cats. This was a collation of the thinking of Warren Bennis, and is based around the notion that cats cannot be pushed into doing anything. So the manager should:

“Be humble. Stop trying to ‘herd cats’ and start building trust and mutual respect. Your ‘cats’ will respond. They will sense your purpose, keep your business purring, and even kill your rats.”

If I were now to write a book on management, I think I would use llamas as the simile. They cannot readily be herded, but can be encouraged and rewarded to do all sorts of things that don’t come naturally to them. They are driven by certain basic instincts and needs, but can learn new skills and apply intelligence to unfamiliar situations. They are very comfortable with routines, and change worries them. If allowed time to check out a situation, they often surprise you by doing something you thought they would resist. All in all, just like people. And the skills and techniques that work for llamas also work for people. And vice versa.

I suppose, therefore, that we should not have been surprised when, this morning, Mike phoned with the message: “You’d better get up here straight away, because your llamas have all just walked into the catch pen!”

It turned out that Mike had gone over to the catch pen, expecting that a long drawn-out struggle would be needed to get the llamas out of the field, and thinking that he could make a start before we arrived. No sooner had he shaken a bucket of food, than they all walked in to take advantage of the feeding opportunity. Objective achieved, before any of us were able to focus on the ‘task’ and get worked up about it!

It seemed the work of minutes to get the horse box backed up to the catch pen, and encourage the llamas up the ramp. Mike and I held a hurdle between us, and in this confined space, where there was no alternative for them, we could herd the llamas a small distance. Like people again I suppose!

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Back at Saint Sornin, the llamas enthusiastically disembarked, and set off to explore their new home. As always seems to be the case with llamas, their first action was to go right round the boundary. And then to test the eating that’s available. I found myself wondering whether this also applied to humans who are moved to a new work base.

Pedro soon spotted that there were llamas in the next field.

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Although this is separated from his field by about 20 metres, and a line of trees, this was little reassurance. He’s the stud male, and his role is to make sure no other males can get near his females. Never mind that the other males are neutered, and not interested! Pedro takes up station in between his females and the outside threat, and struts up and down by the fence, snorting and glaring at the opposition. It’s a position that he is to maintain for hours at a time in the weeks to come.

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Moving again

Posted on 23 May, 2009 by Simon

We collected the walking llamas on Friday, and had to put them temporarily into the big field (see Return of the llamas). On Saturday morning, the incredibly hard-working Jean-Pierre completed the fencing of the second field, so we could move the walkers to their ‘proper’ home.

We had been calling this second field “top field”, as the far side of it is the highest bit of our land. However, this has seemed increasingly odd, as the route to it involves a steep descent to the stream. We found ourselves saying things like “I’m just going down to the top field”. Or “I was on my way back up from the top field”. A new name is therefore needed – and we are currently debating the merits of “far field” and “willow field”. I guess something will make us go with one or the other (or perhaps something completely different). You just have to wait for these things. The true names of all things become apparent in due course!

We gathered the three llamas at the small gate out of the bottom of the big field. From there, it’s just a short walk across the stream and under the willow trees to the entrance to “far/willow field”. Moving such a cooperative group of llamas should be a piece of cake.

And so it was. For two of them.

Ana and Valentine accepted their leads readily, and – there being only two of us – we set off with them. Valentine, ever amenable, calmly walked to the gate and through into the new field. Ana, ever frisky, baulked at the stream, and only crossed when she could make a giant leap, landing several metres on the other side.

In the meantime, Duc had realised he was left on his own, and started to panic. When we returned to collect him, he was too agitated to stand still and have a lead put on. Never mind, we thought, he’s so keen to get back with the others that all we need to do is open the gate. Surely, he’ll just go straight into the other field to rejoin them?

Well, almost.

He went quickly across to the gate of the other field, veered left and down the outside of the fence, between the field and the stream. As he set off through deeper and deeper vegetation, Ana and Valentine followed on the inside of the fence, keeping pace, and encouraging Duc with high pitched calls. I followed on the outside of the fence, and managed to steer him away from the wide open spaces on the other side of the stream. However, at this rate, he would go all the way round the outside of the field and meet up with the herd of cows at the top end. Not a scenario to be contemplated at this stage!

Val bravely set off round the outside of the field in the opposite direction to Duc. Spurred on by the need to avoid a bovine-camelid confrontation, she sped round to the top of the field, wading through nettles, pushing aside brambles. In no time she had turned Duc round, and after a few hesitations he came back to the gate. As he walked through, I could swear he muttered something like “That was fun!”

Duc, Valetine and Ana survey the wondrousness of the far field
Ana, Duc and Valentine survey the wondrousness that is their new field
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Return of the llamas

Posted on 22 May, 2009 by Simon

As the big field is now fully fenced, we decided it was possible to bring back one set of llamas from their temporary accommodation at Mike and Sue’s. This field is to be home to the breeding llamas, so we arranged to pop up to collect them this afternoon.

Perhaps not surprisingly, “popping up” proved a great deal more simple than “collecting”.

Four llamas grazing in a field, and the task is to get them through a gate in one corner. Sounds simple enough? Unfortunately, llamas are not stupid and they can run. Put these two things together, and you realise that getting a reluctant llama through a gate requires enormous luck – or so many people that you can block off every possible avenue of escape.

We didn’t have enough people. Elif was not going to go through that gate, thank you very much. We’d edge her tantalisingly close, and then she’d sprint for a gap. And believe me, you have to be very stupid to stand in the way of 150 kg of determined high-speed llama.

After half a dozen failed attempts, we stopped and huffed and puffed for a while. We could see that this approach was going nowhere. Elif was getting more agitated, and this was communicating to other three, who might have  otherwise been ready to cooperate.

The Zen response, when your way forward is blocked, is not to keep pushing on but to take another route. And so we did – deciding that we should see if the other group of three llamas would be easier to collect. Never mind that their field was not yet ready …. we’d sort that small problem out later.

Within minutes, Duc and Valentine (ever keen to come into anywhere, as long as food is on offer) were in the catch pen. They accepted their leads, and after a bit of heaving and cajoling by Mike and me, I was able to tie them up in the trailer. Ana was a little more difficult, as she was mixed up with a bunch of other young females, but Mike and Suzanne separated her off skilfully. Soon I was able to heave her up the ramp to join the other two.

Within minutes, we were off on the short journey home, with the first llamas to live in Saint Sornin.

Unloading was equally straightforward . . . and we ended the day watching the threesome happily frolicking and exploring their new home (of course they didn’t know this was actually the field for the breeders, and they would have to move to their own field when its fencing was finished – we were sure the Universe would find a way to make that happen!).

Duc seems to remember Val from somewhere . . .



Rolling and grazing

Llamas at the garden fence!


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Babies – expected and unexpected!

Posted on 21 May, 2009 by Simon
Jennifer Daisy arrives

Val is in England, with the intention of being there for the arrival of her first granddaughter. Lily does the job well, and Jennifer Daisy is born on Monday in the presence of her soon-to-be-doting grandmother. As Val was due to come back to France on Tuesday, her journey is postponed to allow more time for daughter support and granddaughter bonding.

Which leaves me contentedly enjoying the solitude. And without internet or telephone, this really is solitude. Plenty of time to contemplate the environment and interact with the animals. The chickens are very well settled, and have established their new routines. Max is loving the new house, with the freedom its surroundings offer him. And the cats seem to have adjusted to new ownership. Two of them – nameless except for descriptors “Big” and “Little” – come in and out of the house with a relaxed propietorial air. The other cat, as yet completely nameless and in danger of becoming known as “Other Cat”, seems much more wary. She seems to be spending a lot of time in the barn, and I’ve decided that she must prefer it to the house.

Hang on! What’s she got in her mouth? Has she caught a mouse? Closer inspection shows that she is, in fact, walking around carrying a kitten. Where the hell did that come from? No, that’s obvious . . .  The real question has to be “Are there any more?” Don’t cats have kittens in large numbers? Time to explore the barn, I think!

I have yet to explore the whole of the upper floor of the barn. It contains loads of old hay, both in bales and spread across the floor. This means that you can’t actually see the floor, which gives a false sense of security, as looking up from the ground floor shows that large areas of the upper floor are made of twigs laid between the beams. Ignoring the possibility that I might tumble through in a dramatic chute of loose hay, I set off with my super-power torch in search of abandoned babies.

Now I know why the third cat has been spending so much time in the barn. At the far end, in a neat little nest between a bale and the barn wall, is a bundle of fur, which on closer inspection turns out to be two kittens. The mother has followed me and settles down in the nest with her three babies.

Three kittens arrive

Oh well, at least we have a name for the third cat. Henceforth she will be called Mother Cat . . . .

I make sure that there is food and water for Mother Cat, and check the nest frequently through the rest of the day. All seems to be well, and I leave them for the night confident that they are safe.

I went off to sleep very rapidly, but did not sleep well. Several times I thought I could hear the kittens, but thought this must have been a dream, as the wall to the barn is very thick. Suddenly, at about three o’clock, I realised that I actually could hear something. Light on, and search the room . . . . . I’m astonished to find I’ve been sharing the bed with a kitten! Val has two pillows on her side of the bed, and carefully hidden between them is a stripey bundle of mewing fur. So that’s what Mother Cat was doing walking around with a kitten in her mouth! Only I hadn’t realised that she had already transported one kitten, and I had found her with the second.

As I enter the barn, in dressing gown and wellies, carrying the noisy little bundle, Mother Cat greets me anxiously. I put the kitten into the nest, and she takes over for a clean and feed.

The next morning, Mother Cat sneaks past me into the bedroom. She’s straight on to the bed and looking under Val’s top pillow. I guess she remembers putting a kitten there, and is not sure that it’s the same one that she got back in the night. I’m sure she thinks I’ve taken one of her babies – and she comes back to check several times during the day. I can’t decide if this is clever of her, or really stupid?

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Fencing

Posted on 20 May, 2009 by Simon

Over the last two weeks, our fields have emerged from the overgrown land. As Val was going to be in the UK, and I had a million jobs to undertake around the house and the land, we decided to splash out and employ someone to erect the many hundreds of metres of fencing. Suzanne had told us about the farmer who kept sheep on their land before they bought the house. Apparently, to supplement his income, he undertook agricultural work. I rang his mobile, and he agreed to come round the following day.

It turns out that Jean-Pierre Lebrun is our next door neighbour but one. This means he lives the best part of a kilometre away, but he knows our house and land well. He readily agreed to do the work, and said he could start as soon as we liked. I agreed that he should come on the Monday after Val had left for England, and we would buy the necessary posts, wire, etc before he came.

Pretty much all fencing in this area is done with posts made of acacia. We had no idea what this wood was, but Jean-Pierre assured me that it was the best for the job – very hard, and resistant to rot for 30 years or more. In the past, it had been cut only in November and December, when the moon was waning . . . but nowadays it was all cut by big firms who didn’t care about quality . . . . .  I am beginning to realise that we are now living in very traditional rural France!

Acacia (actually this is false acacia, or the black locust tree) is not only hard, it’s very dense. This means that fence posts are heavy – so heavy that the 250 we needed weighed about two tons. Given that we also needed 7 large rolls of wire netting, 5 large galvanised steel gates and 5 huge wooden gate posts, even our horse box was not going to cope in one trip. We had to make two very strenuous visits to the local farming cooperative that has welcomed us as new members.

Exactly as promised, Jean-Pierre turned up on the Monday afternoon with his son Christopher and a large old tractor. Within minutes they were bashing in the first post, and things progressed at a speed I could never have approached. Their cheerful disregard for any health and safety concerns entertained and appalled me.

The first posts go in
Down by the stream
Under the shade of the oak trees
Some netting already
The back garden
Looking towards the smaller field
Top field

[Show as slideshow]

Jean-Pierre (and often Christopher, with one or two tractors) worked really hard for at least four hours each day for 10 days. They created order out of chaos, leaving two neatly fenced fields, just begging to be occupied. Although I had originally rather looked forward to doing the fencing myself, I have no regrets in having employed this pair.  They’ve done it much faster than I could have, and they’ve done a good job. Along the way, I’ve also had some very interesting and entertaining conversations. I’ve found out a lot about the house, the land, the village, and the two sets of previous owners. I’ve also realised how much easier it is to understand the French spoken around here!

It’s really beginning to feel like a farm . . . . as well as a home. Now all we need is the llamas!

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The Right Thing

Posted on 14 May, 2009 by Val

Well….

I expect you’re all wondering where we are, what we’re doing and why we haven’t put anything on the blog for such a long time. In fact, it’s been SUCH a long time since we posted anything, you could be forgiven for having got bored with repeatedly checking our site for non-existent updates, for losing interest in our comings and goings, and for eventually forgetting about us altogether.

I hope not. I already know that our new life in the Allier is going to provide us with plenty to write about for years to come – assuming, that is,  that we are not so busy that we can’t ever find time to write about it.

Actually, the reason we have not written anything since The Big Move, is less to do with our incredible degree of busyness, and more (nay…everything) to do with the fact that we STILL have not got an internet/phone service at our new house. Our internet service provider guarantees a transfer of services to a new address within three weeks of a house move, but we could only start the process at the point when the telephone line to the new house became available – which it didn’t till a week after we moved in, since that was when the previous owners’ line was eventually disconnected. Tomorrow it will be two weeks since we started the internet-ball rolling (including two bank holidays), and it looks like the three-week guarantee is more of a description of how long it will actually take, rather than a worst-case scenario (which is what we had initially, if somewhat naively, hoped).

So we are surviving with the occasional email check, courtesy of a plug-in mobile internet key-thing, which provides unreliable (on-off-on-off-off-on….), and v…e..r………y s..l…..o……w internet access on a good day, with a following wind, at vast expense. So blog-writing has not really been a feasible option.

I am, in fact, writing this explanatory post from the luxurious, internet-rich environment of my son’s house in England, where I am on a nine-day visit, timed optimistically to coincide with the due date of my grandaughter’s imminent birth. Simon, meanwhile, is back at the ranch, overseeing the installation of a Very Big Lot of perimeter fencing by a neighbouring farmer with a son full of enthusiam, and tractor front-loader full of heavy rocks, whilst simultaneously carrying out complex plumbing activities, clearing  acres of stinging nettles, and many kilos of indistinguishable rusted metal items that litter the yard and outbuildings, and caring for the chickens, cats, dog, house-plants, and newly-planted vegetable plot. He is a man of many talents.

Whilst some of you may feel that Simon has the rough end of the stick in this current scenario, I feel I must remonstrate. Apart from the fact that I am sure he is finding the daily implementation of his tasks a bloody sight easier, without me looking over his aching shoulder and interminably suggesting Better Ways of Doing Things, I know that he is thoroughly enjoying the bliss and solitude of our new abode. While I, on the other hand, struggle once again to come to terms with noisy, crowded, oppressive (and remarkably grey and chilly) English City life.

Instead of drifting off calmly into the Land of Nod, serenaded by the distant croaking of frogs and the white-noise whisper of crickets, I am kept awake at night by the nearby sounds of football-playing, obscenity-shouting youths, and unheeded burglar alarms. Instead of waking to the song of the nightingale in the great oak tree opposite the only front door (ours) within a 400 meter radius, I awake, unrested, to the clunking, brumming, click-clacking cacophony of people, cars, trucks and Very Many White Vans going about their rushy, busy daily business.

Yesterday, in a desperate desire to feed my craving for the great outdoors, I decided to mow my son’s very overgrown garden lawn. It took me ten minutes, and I didn’t even need to step off the concrete path to reach the back fence. The faceless windows of the neighbouring houses watched me the while, invoking such a sense of paranoid claustrophobia that I retreated hastily to the spurious safety of the thin-walled Inside.

I have indeed become a Country Mouse.

But, I am very happy to be seeing my lovely children, and will be very very happy indeed if I am also lucky enough to see my brand-new, shiney grandchild, before my return to the haven of peace that is my new home.

I love our new home. I love the space, and the peace, and the trees, and the birdsong. I love the green, green, green, and the tinkling of cowbells, and walking all the way around the house and its land without seeing a single soul.

I love the house with its wood-smokey, cobwebby cosiness, and the way it wraps me in soft black silence when I sleep at night. I love the heavy weight of the swallow-stirred barn air, like an empty church awaiting, and the dusty warm of the muffled attic, where the past and present tiptoe together in the slanting rays of sun leaking into the dimness through invisible spaces.

There is very, very much to do, and we will be working for a long time to return our small farm to the wholesome state it must once have enjoyed. But it will be a labour of love, and in moving to live in it, we have absolutely done The Right Thing.

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