Once I saw the most beautiful bird of prey, a sparrowhawk, who had pursued a cheeky wren into the egg-makers’ house through their small door, so promptly became trapped inside instead. A clever wren escaped through a wren-sized gap in the egg-makers’ window, but the sparrowhawk wasn’t so lucky. The Shepherd heard a clucking commotion when we came near the house, a noisy flapping and banging on windows. I knew right away that something larger than normal was caught inside, so I remained outside happily while The Shepherd dived in to try and catch the brown-and-white speckled sparrowhawk with her bare hands. The quicker she caught it, the less damage it was likely to do to itself by panicking in the confines of the enclosed space with its rack of roosting poles and nest boxes. When The Shepherd finally caught it, she brought it into the farmhouse for all of us to admire its beauty and stunning big yellow eyes. I padded behind and demanded that she reprimand it for scaring my egg-makers, who had broken their eggs and left a big eggy mess soaking into the wood shavings on the floor of their house, with not a decent egg left for me to eat.
Several egg-makers usually disappear in April or May. If they haven’t been killed by a fox, they return in late May or June, leading troops of baby egg-makers behind them. They peck and chirp behind their mothers, who cluck around the yard, proudly showing off their newly hatched balls of multi-coloured fluff. I have to admit they can be quite sweet.
Mother egg-makers are very protective. I have seen them, wings out and spread feathers all fluffed up like a feather duster, chasing Ovenmitt across the yard, squawking and screaming at him to steer clear of their clutch of young. Ovenmitt has great respect for mother egg-makers, so much so that he will wait for me, The Shepherd or a canine to walk him past a mothering egg-maker. Even then he is very wary and if the egg-maker makes the slightest move towards him, even if only half fluffed up, Ovenmitt will skedaddle across the yard with his tail straight up in the air.
The Shepherd loves birds and often tells me the story of her favourite breakfast companion in Southeast Asia, a hornbill. (Incidentally, I’d like to mention to readers that my egg-makers originated in Asia. Wild egg-makers came from rainforests and were the first to be domesticated and bred. They became the many varieties of egg-maker that we have the world over today.) While The Shepherd was working for the wildlife charity in Southeast Asia, one of her jobs was to make a photographic record of the exercises that were needed to rehabilitate baby orangutans who had been taken into captivity by foolish humans and were crippled from having been fed incorrect foods in human homes. This rehabilitation centre was in Indonesia on the island of Java. It was essentially a kind of gentle physiotherapy for those poor primates. Every morning at breakfast The Shepherd’s companion was a beautiful strange-looking jungle bird called a hornbill, whom she has described to me. He was a young male Knobbed Hornbill, sporting a black feathered body, which he held in an upright way, much like the Indian Runner duck, whom some of you will know due to his or her long neck and distinctive run.
The Shepherd’s friend had a long feathery amber-coloured neck with beady eyes surrounded by pale blue skin, as if someone had smudged eyeshadow all around his eyes. His head actually looks like it was made up of an enormous beak, with a horn-like fixture on his crown that extended onto his huge bill. He waddle-walked around like a penguin and to get the measure of you, The Shepherd tells me, ‘He would turn his head from side to side to peer at you.’ But I still can’t imagine what he’d look like with the illogical hodgepodge collection of odd animal parts she described.
He would sit on the table next to her while she ate breakfast and would ask for some of her fruit salad of grapes, mangoes and freshly picked bananas. This clever hornbill knew a soft touch when he saw one. The animal-loving Shepherd caved in so easily. She fed him one piece of fruit at a time by hand from her bowl until he’d had his fill. After he had taken the last piece he would clasp it in his magnificent beak and swallow it. Then he would toss his head, regurgitate the morsel of fruit unblemished and, with another small toss of his head, thoughtfully place the grape or piece of mango between the outmost tips of his ungainly beak to give it back to The Shepherd. She had to accept politely his regurgitated gift. Once the gift had been accepted, the hornbill would then grasp her hand gently in his large beak and hold it while she finished the rest of her breakfast one-handed. Once finished, she would stroke the back of the hornbill’s soft feathery head. Honestly, if only I received anything like this same attention …
The one time that I have The Shepherd’s undivided attention is when we take one of our working walks over Black Sheep Farm in search of the best nettle patch to harvest. Wild nettles are a spring tonic for our farm’s grazers because their deep taproots pull all sorts of essential vitamins and minerals from our rich soil. Nettles are not foolish plants by any stretch of the imagination since they always choose the best, richest soil to grow in. Even when horses have a nice mineral lick, they will dig for nettle roots in winter. All our herbivores eat nettles once they are cut and left to dry for at least three days, which takes the sting out of them. The Shepherd cooks the nettles in stock made from the bones of home-cooked roast chicken.
I am always on hand when a chicken carcass is stripped before it is boiled into soup stock. We all stand about or sit in a row: Pepper, The Big Fellow, Bear, the new Puddlemaker, Miss Marley, Ovenmitt and I. We each wait our turn to get our morsel of chicken although I sometimes sink my claws into the hand that tenders the chicken morsel as it can be very slow coming round to my turn. It really is hard being a cat sometimes.
2
As March becomes April, The Shepherd keeps a close eye on the leaf buds as they swell on the oak and ash trees, since they are an age-old predictor of summer weather. This ditty surfaces every year, she tells me:
Oak before ash, we are in for a splash,
Ash before oak, we are in for a soak.
So every morning leaf buds are inspected and compared between these two species.
While daffodils still bloom in the fields, the grass, wild herbs and flowers really start to grow in the milder weather. The edges of the fields begin to prick out in many colours as the muddy month of March fades. The subtle pale greens of lords and ladies appear, celandine yellows the bottom of hedgerows with its rich egg-yoke flowers, while pale yellow primroses appear on banks and dog violets spread purple under trees, their colours deepening as the trees’ leaves unfurl and shadow them. The fields are covered in strong yellow dandelions all humming with bees and other pollinating insects as they have their first good feed on blossoms after a long winter’s hibernation. Cowslips burst up and out of their flat-lying leafy rosettes with pale yellow bells bobbing on any hint of wind. No longer are they picked to make cowslip wine, as they are a rare sight to behold in any quantity. Speedwell and vetches, blue and purple, add flashes of stippled colour through grasses as they flower. The Shepherd loves to eat vetch flowers as they taste like nutty flavoured green garden peas, and they add flavour and a beautiful colour to a fresh spring green salad. Rabbit food to me, but some humans are mad keen on their salad greens.
As flowers burst out and mild southwest winds blow in to warm the earth, young lambs frolic and cavort around trees or play a game of ‘King of the Log’ atop a fallen tree from a recent winter storm. I find the most transfixing to watch is a whole flock of lambs, who race to see who is fastest up a hilltop. They turn as if at an invisible marker, then with tails spinning like speed-inducing propellers, they race downhill in great leaps with a flourishing bouncing twist, which shows how healthy and happy they are.
Often