Just to get everyone up to speed: I'm back home in Dorset and, yesterday, was back at my work placement at The Hedge Project. Manpower was needed as this was round up day. We have a herd of cows that are let out to graze on various sites, including Holt Heath, Sopley (near Hurn airport) and Ebblake, which is a patch of forestry commission land near Verwood.
The cows graze these patches and this has many ecological benefits if the correct amount of grazing is allowed (see http://www.wildlifetrusts.org/conservationgrazing). The trouble is that, with these sites a good few miles apart, the cows have to be transported there and back. This has to be done via a trailer. Think of the smallest space that you could fit four cows into and you've got an idea of what the trailer involves. The trailer has to be small, and the cows crammed in for their own safety, basically. You can't put seatbelts on them but, if you're a cow, another cow crammed in right next to you works pretty well as an airbag in an emergency. Now, considering that it's hard enough persuading people to act in their own best interests, cows are not much different. They don't particularly want to go into the trailer and weigh over a tonne, which makes persuading them quite difficult. But then there's the fact that they all have to be rounded up in the first place.
Ebblake is a forestry commission site, as I mentioned, and as such is mostly pine forest, plus a marsh and some very thick scrubby new growth pine and birch. All in all a very primeval looking place, and not at all ideal for a cattle round up. In one corner was a gate, next to a corral, which is a pen specifically for putting cows into. The site itself was a large rectangle with a barbed wire fence surrounding it, and we could be pretty certain that they were inside that.
In fact, as we arrived, we could see them up a path in the distance and, when we were all ready to go, a rattle of a feed bucket and the round up call (basically 'yeeeeeeeeeeeeep') had the whole herd trotting towards us. I had been warned that the round up 'could take an hour, could take five hours' and, one time, took three weeks. Everything was just looking good for the 'one hour' end of this spectrum when one cow, a British White who appears to be the matriarch of the group, got spooked and ran off into the woods, taking most of the herd with her. Two had successfully been got into the corral and were standing there with a 'wait, what the hell's going on?' expression while the rest bolted.
Now cows are all about gentle persuasion. Especially these ones, which are easily spooked and so we had to locate where they'd got to and then for a line behind them, gently persuading them forward. Our team consisted of Dale (who's cows they were) Kayleigh, David, Callum, Mark (I think? sorry) and myself, all armed with 'cow persuasion sticks', or 1m lengths of blue pvc piping.
Now, persuading them forward was easier said then done. We located them on the far side of the scrubby bit of woodland and, with the fence at one end of our line, ushered them forward. You'd think that eight cows would be easy to locate in these circumstances but you'd be wrong. In the densest bit of the woods, you had to really move to keep them in site and, out of site of each other, we had to keep talking so the others would know what we were doing.
Long story short, everything got a bit complicated in there and I ended up tailing three cows, the British White and a Devon Red and her calf*, while the rest of the herd emerged ended up a few hundred metres to the left of me, luckily with most of the rest of our team tailing them. They seemed to be getting on just fine, with the cows on the path and heading towards the coral, so I continued tailing my cows as they meandered back through the woods.
The path that I mentioned ran in a sort of crescent shape from one gate to another, and the cows and I relocated each other by one of these gates. By now, the rest of the herd were in the corral and were not feeling particularly happy about it. The big British White that I had been following began bellowing back at them and then, taking the Devon Red and the calf with her, began ambling up the path towards them. At this point, I couldn't believe my luck. After all this effort and fumbling around in the undergrowth, they were just going to amble right up to where we want them.
And they did. I'd phoned ahead to warn as a four of the cows were being persuaded into the trailer. This had just been completed when my three turned up. Then came the final, intensely nerve wracking, bit of getting the final three into the corral without either spooking them or loosing any of the others.
This was completed, the cows were loaded and delivered to our other site at Sopley, several miles away, where they were put out to pasture while we spent the rest of the day pulling ragwort.
There they wandered around, getting know their new pasture and eyeing us suspiciously as we passed.
*A joke based on the Northern Ireland accent: Three cows in a field, which one's on holiday? The one with the wee calf.
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