Post natal blues

With animals you always have to expect the unexpected!
Nine days after her piglets had been born Aster gave us all a bit of a scare. She had an upset tum and retched up some bile a few times. She stopped eating! Not a mouthful passed her lips for more than 36 hours. By Wednesday evening we were worried. She just slept; stirring to suckle Barbie (yes! definitely two girls and a boy!), Joan and Lawrence but otherwise just lying there. Occasionally she'd get up, look in her bowl and then just walk off and go back to sleep. At shutting up time on Wednesday night I made a small bowl of gruel and she nibbled a handful before going back to sleep.

The piglets continued to behave as normal; sleeping, playing, trying to wake mum up!!!
Everything was just too much though.
Thursday morning before going off to market I mixed up another small bowl of gruel and stayed with her whilst she ate a little of it. In the afternoon we rang the vet. Who listened attentively and made some suggestions. Said to ring him next morning if she hadn't perked up.
Well -- that did it.
Thursday evening she ate up all the gruel.
Friday morning she ate up all the gruel at first breakfast. And second breakfast.
"There's nothing wrong with her" reported Linda later.... "Just a typical teenager wanting to sleep all day!"
"It was the mention of getting the vet out" said The Boss. "That made her better!".
Whatever it was, she is now fully back to normal and happily getting on with "Life with Piglets in the Barn."
Thinking of it, though, she did have a lot of upheaval in a short space of time - sent home from school, separated from her mate, no children to pet and play with her, the whole 'searching for a nest' disruption, an invasion of piglings,  constant demands for attention (and she hadn't had long enough at school to get to the lesson about the birds and the bees so how confusing was that?), changes in diet and lifestyle and - the most impossible bit to handle - absolutely no me-time anymore....... What's a girl to do but shut down for a few days?
A clearer case of post piglet blues would be hard to find.....

8 days later

 Aster's first 8 days of motherhood have largely been spent as you see above. She's the first of our sows to farrow indoors and it has been a learning curve for us as much as Aster. She's got quite used to us popping in to watch or have a few words and rather likes to have her back or ears scratched.  Most of the time the family spend asleep, either with the piglets lying nose to tail between Mum's snout and the wall or tucked up in or under a nest of straw. They suckle frequently, briefly and - with no need to argue about, or fight over, which teat to use - very quietly. They are altogether very quiet ,  perhaps because there are so few of them or maybe it is the result of being away from the rest of the herd. Will this continue or will they grow to be as rumbustious as all our other piglets I wonder?

In the last few days they have begun investigating their world and venture further and longer away from Mum. The quietest grunt from her though and they scamper quickly back. They've already discovered a place where they can crawl under the hurdles and get away from mum so I imagine in a couple of  weeks they'll be exploring the rest of the barn. That'll be fun. In the meantime they have been named.
"I'd like to call the little girl Joan after my friend who passed away today" said Linda reflectively last Thursday. "She'd be amused to have a pig named after her!"
"We'll have to name one of the boys Darby then!" said The Boss "And the other one can be Lawrence after the school" I added.
Trouble is we're not sure if it's 2 girls and 1 boy or the other way round so Darby could well turn out to be Darbie ...... time will tell.....

Honour satisfied

 It was a grand day for a competition. The dog knew something was up when I packed the shooting bag with essentials for the day - spare lead, water, chewstick treats...... Keenly jumped in the car and off we went. The hosts laid on bacon rolls and tea for breakfast. There was a general air of nervousness about the place. One or two of our team members were verging on panic and went off to "have a heart to heart" with their canine companions.
Our opponents arrived. "Oh No" the dog and I both thought when we saw him. "They've called in Real Professionals". For there he was - Rory the Trainer. No pressure then. During the briefing we were reminded that this was a Fun Day and 'serious competitive behaviour' would be frowned on! Worse still, He-the-Trainer was on the Gundog team that our spaniel team were paired against. So he'd be able to witness our every move.  That would be fun. We did have one Labrador on our team, Troy, who was handled by a junior champion but the others were all Cockers.

 There were four sets of tests, each involving two retrieves marked out of 10 and team members ran alternately - ie One of them followed by one of us. The first test was a marked retrieve followed by a blind retrieve. Scenting conditions were very poor. Gunner easily picked the first (10 points) but deviated towards the gun for the second - which, in fact, was in the same place as the first. Given corrective instructions he was straight on it (7 /10). The second test consisted of three hidden dummies; a shot was fired and the dog had to be sent to 'find' first one and then a second. The dog lost one point on the first but scored 10 on the second. Third test was a dummy into the pond and then a dummy thrown to an accompanying shot beyond the pond. With one exception, all the dogs 'saw' the second dummy fall in the reeds at the edge of the pond.  It was made more difficult because once the dog rounded the side of the pond he was out of sight to the handler. Gunner scored 10 on the water retrieve but took a while to be handled out of the reeds and back round the corner to be sent back for the second - 5/10. "Honest, persistant dog" commented the judge. The final test was two marked retrieves - in each case a dummy thrown to an accompanying gun shot. The BGiatW scored a full house for those. "Nothing wrong with the Dog" commented the judge. Rory-the-trainer was complimentary in his own way as he explained to those about him that this was the dog that he didn't think "would amount to much" when he first saw him and who had proved him wrong ever since! High praise indeed. (He and his labrador scored a total of 74/80 so we were not far behind him!!! Well done the Dog!!!)

So although our team came last, Gunner came home with a certificate for the best dog (71/80) in a non-winning team! Not bad for his first competitive attempt. The handler came home with a prize too (a bottle of wine)! After lunch - generously provided by our hosts - a dummy throwing competition was staged whilst the scores were added up. Competitors had to throw 5 dummies into a dustbin from a marked distance - and yours truly scored 4/5 and won! "I'll expect the same accuracy tomorrow!" remarked our Shooting Instructor - he who had roped us into this competition in the first place!
Honour was satisfied all round....

Testing times

"Your dog any good at retrieving?" asked the Shooting Instructor a month back.
"Does everything he's asked" I replied.
"We've a friendly competition against the United Lincolnshire Gundog Club in a month or so. We're short of spaniels. Want to come along?" (Who said Mug?)
So, tomorrow is the day and we're off to help fly the flag for spaniels. The ULGC is all labradors. So the fighting spirit is roused. WE all know a spaniel is worth 10 Labs any day (On the other hand, Labador people will tell you that a Labrador is born half trained whereas a spaniel dies half trained.....). Of course we'll win then.
So we had a bit of a practice this afternoon.
Maybe we won't win.
Some of our team mates are a little keen.... on doing their own thing..... "Retrieve? Out of season you know" I think a few of the Cockers were saying. "WATER! GREAT! No. Definitely nothing on land. All in water!" as they ignored the bank dummies and headed straight for water...... Had to avert The Bestest Gundog's eyes. Can't have him learning their faults!
He was a star. I've fed him speed bubbles for dinner - that'll make him a shooting star then?

...a Crowd

Here's proud mum at mid-day resting with her own little crowd........ 

Asteroid in search of a nest

 "There's a pig outside the window!" exclaimed The Boss after lunch. I'd just finished bottling up Loganberry Jam and was en route to whipping the cream for the frozen gooseberry fool; my mind was fully occupied with such mundane kitchen matters - and The Bestest Gundog in all The World whom I'd had to leave at the Vet's just before lunch for what turned out to be extraction of grass seeds from his two front paws - so I was totally nonplussed by his words. More precisely, they just didn't register!!
"There's a pig outside the kitchen window!" he repeated, getting to his feet - definitely a sign of something serious. So I switched my focus and sure enough looking up at me from the other side of the window was our very pregnant little Asteroid. I hastened after The Boss who, ignoring the pig, was moving speedily towards the barn to find out how and where she had managed to get out. Very logical but not my first thought........ For a while I watched the pig who mooched here and there as if looking for something.

 Ignoring my attempts to cajole her where I wanted her to go, she trotted off in the direction of her mate Truffle - snout down, intent and preoccupied. I joined The Boss who was securing the pen in the barn. Then we tried to round up our wanderer. To no avail. She was too quick and too focused on her concerns to pander to our wishes. Time to call in reinforcements!
Luckily Tony was home and responded to my plea for help with a prompt: "I'm already on my way." It took him only ten minutes but in that time Aster had trotted around the yard, into the orchard, round the chickens' pen in the field, along the bank, inspected Rocco's old stable and then back up to Ginger and Mangal - perhaps thinking they would have the answers she sought.
Good choice for her. Better choice for us because it's a relatively easily enclosed area and we were able to funnel her into the trailer which Tony had deftly backed up as close as possible.  She eagerly stuck her snout in all the fresh straw:
"That's what she was looking for" said The Boss "More nesting material!".
Tony then drove her back round to the barn and, after such Big Adventures, she was visibly relieved to be home. At least she trotted determinedly off the trailer as if pleased to be back where she started!
"Better give her lots more bedding" advised The Boss.
A sack of shavings and another bale of straw went in. She had a good snout around and then went in search of water.

After much cooling and wallowing she had a bit of a lie-down - just to regroup her thoughts I suppose. Then she set about the serious business of nesting.
"Let's leave her to it and go and have a cooling drink." I suggested. And off we went.
At tea time, an hour or so later, she was still doing the housework.
I checked again at 6 o'clock and still nothing.
But by the time I went to shut up the nursery chicks unmistakeable sounds of piglets suckling and mum gruntling were coming from the barn. Quiet as I could I crept closer. However, clever young Aster had built such a deep nest I could see only the top of her back. After several minutes I'd seen two piglets pop up for air or a top level teat .... how many, if any, others there are, I have no way of knowing. With her being a young first time mother there was no way I wanted to startle her in any way. We'll all just have to be patient.

Welcome noise

 The stable barn is resounding again with the sound of swallows frantically feeding their young. This time the nest looks secure and is in the centre of the roof above Ritz's stable door. Earlier this week, whilst eating dinner one evening, The Boss and I were entertained by another family of swallows swooping and swirling above and about the lawn outside the kitchen window. Clearly the adults were teaching their young the rudiments of maneouvring and fly-catching around natural hazards like trees and buildings. The constant chirruping and balletic antics of these birds surely encapsulate all that is joyous about a warm summers' day?

Meanwhile, out in the Poultry nursery the four bantam chicks have doubled in size, the solitary duckling and his mum have been totally accepted into their little flock (where another of the bantams is now busily 'sitting' on a nest of eggs) and out in the Buff's pen the mother hen and duck are still proudly parenting their little brood of one chick and three ducklings. Luckily the latter are all pale yellow so neither Hen nor Duck notice any difference or, if they do, it matters not to them. Every morning when I open their little house the welcome noise as they all tumble out together brings a smile to my face.