Lambing officially finished at eleven this morning with ... yet another set of triplets. That's three out of four giving a grand total of eleven lambs this year - enough for a football team (or soccer, if you're from the left side of the pond)

Here's one of the latest arrivals - barely two hours old - learning the joys of a good nuzzle.

Here's one of the older triplets demonstrating how useful mother's are - especially when the hay net is just out of reach.

It doesn't take lambs long to realise that the warmest, most comfortable bed is their mother's fleece. In a month's time most of our ewes are going to have lamb hair:)

And finally we have a lamb demonstrating what the best dressed lambs are wearing this year - thigh high brown boots with matching eye and nose markings.

For the interested, the lambs are Suffolk crosses - a Suffolk ram crossed with a 'sheep of the region'.

Tags: animals, baby, cute, lambs, sheep, suffolk

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Bird Flu: Mystery and Mayhem	Feb. 6th, 2007 @ 11:07 am

With the first major outbreak of bird flu in England, the British public are reacting to the crisis in traditional style - i.e. throwing themselves under buses and running screaming from the supermarket should a turkey be sighted.

The media haven't helped. Live broadcasts every hour from the 'bird flu' farm in Suffolk, news helicopters following lorries laden with turkey carcasses on their death journey to the special disposal plant, tabloid headlines of "IT'S BEHIND YOU!"

But while the panic rages on pages 1,2,3,4,5 and 7, very little seems to be said about the real mystery - how did the turkeys become infected in the first place?

The turkey farm in question is a factory farm with purpose built sheds that are supposed to be 'bio secure.' And bio secure means no contact with outside wildlife. I know - we had to do the same last year when bird flu hit France. Everyone in France - even if you had only one chicken scratching about your yard - had to bring their chickens inside for six weeks and house them - making sure that no wild birds or mice could gain entry. Every hole was blocked or covered with chicken wire.

So how did bird flu get into a bio secure unit?

The fact that the bird flu was contained - only one of the seventeen sheds was affected - makes it unlikely that the shed was defective. The first theory was that bird flu must have entered the wild population. But there's an RSPB bird sanctuary two miles away. An open-to-the-elements, any-bird-can-drop-in site monitored by experts. They've seen no evidence of bird flu. No one has.

The second theory tends to the fanciful. A 'Typhoid Mary' wild bird who shows no symptoms of bird flu just happened to be flying past the turkey shed door when it was being opened and - you guessed it - turned his beak towards the door and coughed.

A third theory sounds more plausible. The Suffolk bird flu strain has been identified as identical to the strain found in Hungary last month. So, with migrant workers being heavily used in UK farming, could a worker have spread the disease via his clothes from Hungary to Britain?

But, if so, and with such huge media interest, why hasn't anyone tracked down a human connection between the farm and Hungary?

Now we move into true detective territory. Could the bird flu have been introduced deliberately?

But who? Animal liberationists? Factory farms are traditional ALF targets. But they'd tend to go for the owners rather than the turkeys. Terrorists? A possibility - any attack on the food supply is high profile, long lasting and potentially economically crippling. Take the foot and mouth outbreak a few years back. Millions of animals slaughtered, thousands of farms quarantined, travel restricted, tourism decimated, billions of pounds paid out in compensation.

Let's hope it really was the 'Typhoid Mary' pigeon.

Tags: bird, flu, humor, humour, suffolk, turkeys

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