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I tend to check the Sheep first thing in the…

I tend to check the Sheep first thing in the morning by using the webam, when I reset the cameras from the nighttime views. It is now a habit with them being fenced in around the lake. I keep my hand on the controller, as soon as I see them I move the camera around to make sure that there are not any Herons on the lake, after the fish. I took it that the Sheep were where they should be, and kept the camera moving, only stopping when I saw that the electric fence had been pulled down. I could see a number of the Sheep around the lake, so we went and got the Horses feed ready, believing that they were all around the lake. After getting the Horses in, we went to the lake with a feed bag to shake, to get the Sheep to follow us back to the area where they should be. When we got to where we thought they were the six Texel’s were missing. They must have got out over the Leet, and through the hedge onto the farm lane, as they did last time, that made me electric fence them in.

We checked to see if the Sheep were in the Horses field, as that is where we found them last time. No such luck, so I walked down the farm lane to make sure that they were not in our field across the road, at the end of the lane. We could see by the Sheep droppings that they had gone that way, but they were not in the field. With the Foot and Mouth restrictions I had to find them as soon as possible, or I could be in trouble with the Ministry if they had left the boundaries of Denbury. We went back and got our car, to drive around to see if we could find them. We went to the Common first, as the obvious straight direction from the lane was that way. They were not there. We drove about to all the other places that they may have gone. After three quarters of an hour driving about with out seeing any Sheep, let alone ours, I decided to go back to the farm. I would need to phone our neighbour’s to see if any of them had seen our Sheep. If they still could not be found I would have to phone the Ministry.

As we drove back down the lane, I caught a glance of a Sheep on the Holiday Cottages lawns at first I thought that it was the ones that had not escaped. On a second look it was the Texels. They must have turned back instead of going up the farm lane to the road. As soon as we started to shake the feed bag they followed to a stable that I intended to shut them in. Dolly and Minty followed me into the stable, the other four were a bit to wise and ran in the opposite direction. No way was we going to get them into a stable easily, so we put them back in the area around the field.

Unfortunately what we did see on the road, only a few yards from the end of our lane, was a dead Badger Cub. Where we found it, it must have been from our Sett. I checked it over as best I could, it did look as if it had been run over by a vehicle of some sort. Most farmers will not slow down for a Badger, and of coarse it is not unknown for people who shoot Badgers to dump them away from where they had been shot. But it was not so with this one.

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