Bigger Button

Button and Stitch are growing. 500grams in a week - it does not sound like much, but that's a 10% increase in bodyweight.

A stitch, in time

Button and Stitch arrived on Monday.

Stitch, and most of Button

We'd been waiting all last week. Predictably, they arrived (...on the button...) just as I was getting on a plane to rainy London. The human family coped brilliantly, and got both started on feeding. Pep the vet came and gave them the all-clear. 


I weighed them yesterday - Button, the male, weighed 5kg, and Stitch the female, 4.5kg.

A Moving Jewel

He's like a moving jewel. Iridescent skin - beige, with a brown border - and a flickering curve of movement as he skitters away from me on the tiles in front of the house.

Chalcides striatus

His name - he's a skink - belies his beauty.

Bed Lamb

Thanks to an old bed from Ikea we've got a new maternity suite for the lambs:

Lambing shed luxury

I've copied the design from the excellent Tim Tyne, using eye bolts and a bamboo pole as a hinge. That way, if the sheep panics they only break a bamboo rod, and not the whole suite.

Thank you, Tim.

Sperm Tales

We're all pregnant!

Pep; the udder expert

Pep the Vet came up on Friday and scanned our six females. I mean, our six female sheep. All six are pregnant, with two due very soon, two due in 2 months and two in 3. 

One (see scanner photo) is giving birth to a bird…

A Sober Crofter Looks at the Thistle

‘A Scottish poet maun assume

The burden o’ his people’s doom,

And dee to brak’ their livin’ tomb.

Mony ha’e tried, but a’ ha’e failed.

Their sacrifice has nocht availed.

Upon the thistle they’re impaled.

You maun choose but gin ye’d see

Anither category ye

Maun tine your nationality.’

Crofter shows his cards

Hugh MacDiarmid, born Christopher Murray Grieve in 1892 in Langholm, Dumfriesshire, died Biggar 1978, excerpt from “A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle”