Letters to the Editor - December 2007

Encouraging news on livestock

August’s article by Humphrey Phelps was excellent. I worked with a herd of British Friesians for ten years back in the 1950-1960s. They were animals one could take a pride in: high milk yielders by the commonsense standards of those days, when cows were also expected to produce a useful calf; the females, of course, mainly entered the dairy herd, and the males made useful steers for beef, popular with consumers because they were not too fat. The dairy cows were expected to live for several years, thus paying back the cost of rearing them for the two or more years before they had their first calf and started producing milk. The modern, absurdly high-yielding cow, generally a Holstein, so often skeletal and short-lived, is in my opinion a temporary aberration. In 2003 it was reported that UK cows averaged 3.1 lactations, and in the USA 2.2 lactations, i.e. culled under five years old. (Farmers’ Guardian, 7.2.03, p66-7).

Today more emphasis is starting to be placed on stamina and longevity, and the Beyond Calf Exports Stakeholders’ Forum is seeking a use in the UK for the surplus male dairy calf to avoid their being exported into veal systems banned on welfare grounds in the UK. (Veal crates are now banned in the EU, but the calves can be kept on slats without any bedding. Bedding is compulsory in the UK.) Set up by Compassion in World Farming and the RSPCA, organisations and groups taking part include the NFU, National Beef Association, Soil Association, DEFRA, English Beef and Lamb Executive, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose and the British Cattle Veterinary Association. This strikes me as one of the most encouraging alliances ever to be set up in livestock farming.

As for the WI organiser Mr Phelps heard praising the zero grazing system where the cattle, including the calves, never go outside, I totally agree with Mr Phelps and the young woman who spoke against the system. In fine weather, the animals should be outside getting exercise and sunlight, with shelter provided in wet or excessively hot or cold weather.

Joyce H Smith (Ms), by email

Spellbinding gymnastics with purpose

Two days ago I was entertained to the most dazzling display by a wild animal I have ever witnessed and all within a few feet. At about eight in the morning and looking through the garden window, I noticed the lawn was in need of a cut and was covered in a heavy dew following a cold night. Suddenly a weasel dashed out of the shrubbery and proceeded in almost a state of dementia to perform the most exquisite gymnastics, gyrations, pirouettes and cartwheels. I got the impression he was enjoying the exercise. The display lasted nonstop for about four minutes when he made his way back to the shrubbery to reappear half a minute later to give a repeat performance, slightly shorter but still spellbinding.

After three minutes he returned to the shrubbery only to come back after thirty seconds for a further display, just as hectic and exciting but for about two minutes before shaking himself vigorously and, with his coat glowing in the sunlight, he quietly walked away. I just wished I’d had company to share this wonderful experience but consider myself fortunate to have seen this fascinating display at close quarters.

I concluded this was a form of debugging by the animal. I think he gave himself a dust bath in the shrubbery each time and then his antics on the lawn were to get rid of any pests he had about his person. Perhaps a reader with more knowledge can tell me if I’m right. I had some years ago watched a female weasel take her young from one side of a lane to a new nest on the other side. Fascinating too was the sight of a school of about ten making their winding way through my shrubbery, obviously with some serious project in mind. I do have rabbits.

E R Huxtable, Chichester, West Sussex

Is deformity common in garden birds?

This spring, a great tit appeared on our bird-feeding window ledge with a deformed beak. Instead of the usual smallish beak, it had a large hooked bill about an inch long, making it look most distinctive. It had great difficulty feeding, although it seemed to be able to cope fairly well with a heap of cake crumbs each day. It often tried to attack the nut feeders but with little success and we feared for its survival. However, in September it continued to visit us, looking very healthy and now with a beak reduced to half its original size.

We are told by a friend that this deformity often occurs in game birds and it would be interesting to know just how common it is in garden birds. Many species have been missing from our garden this year although there has been an abundance of blackbirds – sadly, no thrushes, and no woodpeckers seen on our lawn for several months. However, there is a plethora of pigeons, and jays appear to have taken up residence nearby which I have previously not seen in the garden.

Bettine Gardner, Winchester

When cycling was a car-free pleasure

I was alive in the 1940s and old enough to observe and remember conditions then, so I can tell you the subject of November’s The Way We Were was an RAF leading aircraftsman. The uniform is quite correct and the badges on his sleeves indicate his rank. Policemen of that period wore proper helmets, or tin hats if necessary, and never forage caps. Policemen frequently used bicycles as a normal form of transport if they were not using their own two feet on their beats.

Perhaps I could suggest the possibility that the airman was either on a short spell of home leave and out for a recreational ride with his wife/girlfriend, who managed to obtain some film; or maybe he was stationed then at Blackbushe airfield, near Hartley Wintney (RAF during the war, private now) and out with a mate in a spare half-hour. I did once cycle round the area during the war and the roads were already properly surfaced so the pump must have been a relic of an earlier time.

And yes the roads were beautiful for cycling, quiet and peaceful and quite free of traffic. There was no supply of petrol for casual civilian outings; it was only available for essential purposes like doctors, farmers, emergency services, buses etc. One was only passed by the occasional convoy of military vehicles, all driven in a very disciplined manner. Bicycles were a much-used form of transport then for work and school as well as precious relaxation.

Mrs D D Hughes Gain, Kendal, Cumbria

Editor’s note: Of course it was a leading aircraftsman; we were referring to the figure of the bicycling bobby in the distance and should have made this clearer.

Mad impulse on a mole plough

During the war I worked first as a tractor driver, then as assistant district engineer in the Maldon area of the Essex War Agricultural Commiittee. The soil there is very heavy clay which became waterlogged in autumn and winter. To overcome this problem fields were ploughed in ‘stretches’ eight furrows wide, leaving an even, open furrow on either side. Later, mole draining was introduced. The mole plough consisted of a blade 2.5 to three feet in length with a ‘mole’ attached at the bottom. This was drawn through the soil on the ‘up slope’ by a Caterpillar D6, an International TD18 crawler tractor or a steam ploughing engine at suitable spacings across each field.

This particular year the weather was very hot, and where the mole plough had gone left wide open gaps across each field. I was harvesting wheat with Anne, a WLA girl, driving the Fordson tractor while I rode the binder. Around 5pm she left to catch a bus to her hostel. I carried on alone driving the tractor and occasionally glancing over my shoulder at the binder. I noticed that whenever the rib of the cast iron front wheel dropped into the gap left by the mole plough the tractor literally steered itself. A mad thought occurred to me. So, the next time wheel and gap lined up I left the tractor to its own devices and sat on the binder seat until almost to the headland when I resumed my seat on the tractor. I did that once only to satisfy my curiosity and to prove a point.

Peter H Rowe, Diss, Norfolk

No second chance for Mother Nature

During the Second World War, on the steep sided valley of the river Harbourne in South Devon, was a plantation of about twenty acres of larch and spruce trees. One day, two men arrived on bikes with axes tied to their crossbars and a bowsaw in a sack on their backs. No cars, tractors or chainsaws in those days; anyway they set about felling all the trees. All the local people from the village of Harbertonford came with old prams, wheelbarrows etc. to gather up all the trimmings to take home for fire lighting, as cooking was on open fires and stoves – no gas or electricity in the village in those days. After the trees were felled the men borrowed a mare carthorse with collar and chain and dragged the trees to the bottom of the slope by the road to be cut into lengths and loaded onto lorries to be taken away for pit props. Eventually the work was finished and the men left.

All through the following winter the site looked a mess – a great scar across the hillside – but come the spring Mother Nature quietly set about healing the wound. First a few ash and sycamore saplings began to appear. Brambles and then thorn bushes joined them but the miracle of all, to appear en masse, were simply hundreds of foxgloves all across the hillside reaching for the sky, waving in the breeze. Where, one wonders, had they all come from? The foxglove seed must have lain dormant for years and years and years.

But time passed and the foxgloves had their day and died down and the trees, shrubs and bushes took over. I never saw the foxgloves again. Forty years on, the site was cleared again; clear-felled this time with a gang of men with tractors, bulldozers and chainsaws who slashed and burned everything in sight. They did not give Mother Nature a second chance to do her thing. As soon as the new fir trees were planted and taken root more men came with hooded weed killer sprays to spray between the trees. I wonder if it will kill the foxglove seeds?

Now I am well past my three score years and ten I don’t suppose I shall be here to see it happen again.

Henry W J Harris, Totnes

Flibberty from Latimer to Walter Scott

Further to the discussion about ‘flibberty gibbet’ I have this explanation from www.worldwidewords.org: A frivolous, flighty, or excessively talkative person. This is a fine word to throw out, in the appropriate circumstances, though there’s a risk of tripping over all those syllables. That’s no doubt why it has had so many spellings. The original seems to have been recorded about 1450 as ‘fleper-gebet’, which may have been just an imitation of the sound of meaningless speech (‘babble’ and ‘yadda-yadda-yadda’ have similar origins). It started out to mean a gossip or chattering person, but quickly seems to have taken on the idea of a flighty or frivolous woman.

A century later it had become respectable enough for Bishop Latimer to use it in a sermon before King Edward VI, though he wrote it as ‘flybbergybe’. The modern spelling is due to Shakespeare, who borrowed it from one of the forty fiends listed in a book by Samuel Harsnet in 1603. In King Lear Edgar uses it for a demon or imp: ‘This is the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet. He gives the web and the pin, squints the eye, and makes the harelip; mildews the white wheat, and hurts the poor creature of earth’. There has been yet a third sense, taken from a character of Sir Walter Scott’s in Kenilworth, for a mischievous and flighty small child. But despite Shakespeare and Scott, the most usual sense is still the original one.

Chris Sandy by email

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