Oli booster

Ovelia Modale, better known as "Oli" needs a wee booster. His mum, Ballachulish has mastitis and so is only giving milk on one side. It's a messy business, feeding the wee one:

Mine's a pint

Enough!

Ovelia modiale, nou nascut

Ballachulish has given birth to a new Ripollesa lamb, born yesterday :

I've named her Ovelia Modiale in honour of my brother-out-of-law, Jonathan Jarrett whose paper* on the use of cows, sheep and possibly pigs as monetary units in 10th century Catalonia is a must read. Our tiny new lamb (3.8kg at birth, so small) probably is not yet worth a modius of grain, but I'll love her all the same.

Unfortunately when I explained to the residents at the Croft that we were calling her "Ovelia Modiale" they all, er, laughed. So she's to be called "Oli" for short. 

Difficult to imagine this animal currency really working. Here's an early manuscript from Catalonia, cerca 975 AD: 

Shopkeeper: Thank you ma'am. That will be three Bovo soldare and half an Ovelia modiale.
Customer: Half an Ovelia modiale? Not sure I've got the change. Just a moment while I fetch an axe...

Bloody business, shopping.


*Bovo Soldare: A Sacred Cow of Spanish Economic History Re-evaluated, in Naismith, Rory, Martin Allen, and Elina Screen, eds. Early Medieval Monetary History: Studies in Memory of Mark Blackburn. Studies in Early Medieval Britain and Ireland. Farnham, Surrey, UK ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2014.

The Woods go Dung

Turning over a new leaf

 The forest here grows very thick, so we've put the donkeys to work reducing the woods to, er, manure.

The woods go dung

Donkeys are efficient, but ruthless. They will strip the bark off anything small enough, and chew their way through almost everything else.

Barking mad

Arran loves it.

Jogging asses

I put Arran, Laialuing and Marguerita in a new field today. They loved it:

Salamander stroll

The Salamanders are back.

Baby, I'm on fire

The Fire Salamanders with the perfect double-barrelled name Salamandra salamandra, are migrating to their winter hibernation spots. That means they cross the track near the Croft, and yesterday I drove past (and hopefully not over) four salamanders on the way home. I had to move the Salamander in the photo because she was strolling across the track and would have been squished under my wheels.

I love the colours but also the signals that they give - of impending cold and of a healthy ecosystem; they won't live in areas that are polluted or unclean.

Roots to success

Quercus ilex, the Holm Oak, grows everywhere around the Croft.

A new leaf

It is an evergreen, and efficient at using the tough, dry moraine soil to extract nutrients. I know this because we just renewed an old cutting here at the Croft, and uncovered part of the root system of one tree. Here it is, three metres deep:

Roots to success

Even at this depth the roots are substantial:

Deep roots

These trees will be here long after we have gone

Furry annoying invader

We have an invader. And we think she's American. Yesterday she killed another chicken - Cheepy, one of our favourites. We had already lost two other chickens and a duck over the last couple of months.


Luckily, she left evidence:

Dark and deadly

This looks like American Mink (Neovison vison), according to Animal Tracks and Signs, the wonderful book by Preben Bang and Preben Dahlstrom.

So on Friday the lovely Agents Rurals Quico and Oriol came up and helped us lay a live trap.

This way, please

We've baited it with chicken and sardines - a feast for a mink - and we await results.