A baby at last!

After weeks and weeks of wondering where Elif's baby had got to . . . . Is she really pregnant or just getting amazingly fat? . . . . . This morning, without fuss, she gave birth to a female cria

Within a couple of hours, the baby (as yet un-named) was staggering round and working out how to suckle from her mother. More pictures later, and video of the baby's antics.

Normal

Oh dear. Another three weeks have passed without a blog entry. Shame on us! Excuses this time? A week's visit from Simon's Mum and Dad, followed by a stint of time helping my sister and bro-in-law to renovate their village house in time for a tenancy arrangement starting on 15 October.

Simon's parents got the usual Welcome to the Roquetaillade Llama-and-Chicken Experience, albeit without the llama walking activity.

Valentine overcame his misgivings about approaching big metal things containing strangers to eat a little snack from Simon's Mum's hand out of the landrover...

...and Capucine astounded us by taking her first ever piece of hand-fed carrot from his Dad, despite the ominous presence of an unusual big stick.


As is often the case when we have visitors, we found ourselves looking at our surroundings with holiday eyes, taking some time just to sit and enjoy the sunshine and the views, and to really appreciate the loveliness of October in this climate. However, the family visits are over for the time being (more planned for November), and for the moment things are back to normal.

Normal? Now there's an interesting concept.

According to Ellen Goodman, (no, I don't know who she is either...)

"Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it."

I guess, not so long ago, that was sort of Normal for us too. And, to friends and colleagues still fully enagaged in the life we left behind, our current Normal wouldn't seem normal at all. Our days now consist of a limited range of repetitive activities involving the care, feeding and cleaning of our animals (and of ourselves). We rarely use the car, we wear the same old stuff day in, day out (not much change there, come to think of it...), and we are at home pretty much all the time, when we're not out with the animals.

Life is simple and, well, ordinary. It seems hard to think of anything to write about when every day is so similar to the one before.

The most notable event of the last week was the discovery last Sunday morning of a gaping, two-metre-wide hole in the fence of the Breeders' field, just in front of the field shelter. Simon had gone over to the Rough Land to visit the Walkers, and I had done my usual morning stuff with the Breeders. I noticed Fatma's halter was missing, and assumed she had managed to pull it off whilst foraging through the fence for a delicious bit of ash tree on the other side - it was quite loose after all. I thought little more of it, until I carried a fresh bale of hay up to the shelter, turned round to admire the view back to the village, and saw a big space where the fence should have been.

Someone had cut the wire grill in a big L shape and bent back the fencing, leaving the field open straight on to the road. It took me a while to actually believe what I was seeing. After all - the llamas were all present and correct, and behaving quite normally. Putting the fact of the hole together with the fact of the missing halter, I constructed in my imagination a scenario of attempted animal theft, in which Fatma had managed to evade capture by wriggling out of her halter - and for once I was thankful that llamas can be so hard to catch. But why (or indeed how) anyone would try to steal llamas by cutting the fence, and pulling them down a steep bank on to the road, instead of just opening the gate, baffled me.

Needless to say, I effected a hasty repair, tying the fencing together with the baler twine I'd just removed from the hay, and called Simon on his mobile with the interesting news. Cunningly hiding his disappointment that I wasn't ringing to inform him of an impending llama birth behind his normal, run-of-the-mill crisis-response tone, Simon formulated a well-considered plan of action. "Stay there, I'm coming."

Luckily we still had a bit of a roll of fencing left in the garage, so we collected all the neccessary bits and bobs and returned to replace the damaged panel. Of course it took longer than we expected - all our careful tensioning of the whole length of the road-side fence had depended on the integrity of the fencing wire - but we managed an adequate fix that looked almost as good as new. Clearly the llamas were in no hurry to go walkabout (not even Capucine, who regularly pokes her head through the fence to eat, just like Ana used to do), so I was not really concerned that they would escape. I just didn't want any sharp bits where their foraging necks might be leaning.

A later conversation with our neighbour resulted in the dogmatic verdict that it wasn't attempted theft, but was a personal attack by a crazy, jealous person who wanted to cause us difficulty and the expense of the repair. Apparently, the same thing had happened to them when they used to keep horses on the land, although they had suffered more, because the horses had actually got out, and had to be rounded up from the road. They advised us to take photos of the damage and to report it to the gendarmarie.

Too late for the photos, and, we decided, not much point in reporting it. Best to just ignore it and try not to get paranoid. I figured that causing a fuss would probably give the perpetrator something to watch and enjoy, and that the zen thing to do would be to forgive and forget, and carry on as normal with a friendly smile for everyone we come across. Of course the paranoia sneeks in now and then, followed by a cascade of negative thinking in which everyone in the village hates and resents us, and will not cease to hound and harrass us until we give up and leave, with our sad and sorry outsiders' tails hanging dejectedly between our immigrant legs.

But a week has gone by. All is Quiet on the Western Front, and the paranoia is fading away in the mid-October sunshine. Our training activities with the Walkers continue with gradually increasing levels of challenge. We now often take Valentine and Ana out together, as Duc seems quite happy to spend a little bit of time on his own. He is very much the leader of their little herd, and as such has developed a bit of a Man-Alone demeanour, often to be found grazing apart from the other two, and a bit higher up the hill.

And in attempting to close the gap toward the goal of bringing the llamas right into the village, Simon has begun walking Duc and Valentine along a track that circles just outside the boundary of habitation, in full view of the children cavorting noisily on the tiny play area next to the village hall, and of the variously stationed platoon of barking dogs that inhabit our end of the village. This route also brings them into full view of the Breeders, who watch with curiousity and wariness from their splendid vantage point higher up the road. Pedro, in particular, watches the progress of these upstart threats to his herd dominance with a rigid posture and unwavering gaze, following the direction of their walking long after they have actually disappeared from sight.

The mysterious cause of Elif's increase in size remains to be determined. Still no offspring. Still no diminishing of her appetite.

Always at the front of the queue to get into the shelter with the fresh hay....









...and always the one with her nose in the bag looking for any remaining morsels of breakfast, when the others have accepted that it really is "All Gone".

I'm still uncertain as to whether I should be feeding her up in preparation for an impending birth, or putting her on a diet to lose the flab. Either way, it's so hard to resist those big brown eyes when she gets up close with her warm breath on my face, and looks hopefully toward the food bag when I'm zipping it up, as if to say, " Just one more mouthful....go on....pleeeease."

Things That Have(n't) Happened.

I am currently in the process of writing a review of our first six months in the Land of the Free Fruit and Vegetables. However, as I launched into the third wordy paragraph (of the introduction!), I realised it would be some time before the undertaking would be complete, and that, if it was to include any incidental detail of the daily funandhilarity of our present existence, it would end up being so long that no one would ever bother to read it. So I thought I'd better do a short update just to let y'all know we're still here, and we still care.

Things that have happened recently:

• Naughty Chicken has started laying eggs (at last!) and yesterday was our first ever Four Egg Day. I am already going off scrambled eggs on toast.
• Naughty Chicken has got into the vegetable garden, necessitating the hasty construction of a chicken-proof barrier above the garden wall. At the time this happened, I was convinced she was terrorising me, as she flew/jumped over the wall after chasing (well, hastily following) me all around the garden and up to the gate. Simon manfully dragged himself out of his Sunday morning lie-in to catch her and return her to the main garden. As he turned his back to walk away, congratulating himself on a chicken-catching job well done, she promptly flew/jumped back over the wall again, trumpeting smugly to herself, as she headed for those delicious baby lettuces, laid out in neat little breakfast-shaped rows. Naughty and Persistent Chicken.
• Naughty Chicken has escaped from the garden, and was found today browsing contentedly in the adjacent overgrown land of a neighbour, in the company of a large black and white cat. Having so far failed to clarify her exact escape route, we have not yet sealed the breach. Instead we are trying to make the home garden a more compelling place-to-be, through the provision of tasty bowls of leak and potato soup (of which we can - and do - make vast quantities). Naughty, Persistent and Greedy Chicken.
• Pedro has become happily accustomed to having his halter fitted, and is getting used to being led around inside the field on his lead, in preparation for stepping out with us into the big, bad world. He seems more like a big, soft, woolly teddy-bear every day.
• Capucine has eaten some carrot-peel from the ground in the catch-pen. Not a big deal I hear you mutter - but the implication of this is that we can now start encouraging her to eat pieces of carrot from our hands, and then we will be able to use hand-fed treats to reinforce any behaviours we want her to learn. Bring on the burning hoops!
• Pedro and Fatma are still mating with a depressing degree of regularlty. Nice for Pedro, I'm sure. Not so good for us, the ever-hopeful owners of a llama-breeding business. Unless Fatma happens to be one of those unusual females that continue to tolerate mating even when pregnant, there will not be any more little ones running around their feet within the next twelve months at least.
• We have conducted our first fully French, non-family visit to the llamas. Following a phone call last Monday from a french lady asking if she could bring a group of school children to feed the llamas, we duly escorted 7 small children, between 3 and 6 years of age (5 french, one belgian and one german) and 2 staff members of their out-of-school club, to see and feed both groups of our llamas. We even rounded off the event by walking Valentine part of the way back to the village with them. Cue lots of photo opportunities of cute little children with bemused llamas. Unfortunately, it wasn't our camera! (Next time....)
• Simon has signed up for a proper French Conversation course, through the AVF (Accueil des Villes de France) and in doing so has managed to volunteer his services as an IT know-it-all to assist with their computer classes, and to volunteer our llamas as a venue for outings organised by the AVF for the many and varied groups of newcomers to the area, who avail themselves of the organisation's services.

Things that haven't happened recently:

• Elif has not had her baby. We had expected her to give birth some time in August. She is getting bigger and bigger, but shows no signs of popping just yet. Given what is going on with Fatma and Pedro, we can see how easy it is to be mistaken about when a llama has become pregnant. We are hoping that Mike and Suzanne were just a bit out with the dates. I am hoping that Elif's huge belly is not simply the result of the extra rations of concentrate food I've been giving her for the last couple of months in the belief that she was pregnant and in need of more protein. Pregnant or obese? Only time will tell.
• We have not bought any land. The long saga of the 8 hectares we were going to buy, and the wine & cereal-growing farmer who also wanted the land, and all the bureaucratic shenanegans with SAFER, has finally reached a conclusion. Having frantically put in a last-minute (literally), official, all-in-french, (slogged-over for 10 hours and proof-read by a french neighbour) request to be considered as candidates for the purchase of the land through SAFER, we ended up coming to an amicable agreement with the farmer. We agreed to withdraw our application, thus leaving him free to buy it all and to continue to develop his cereal-growing business, on the understanding that we could continue to keep our llamas on the Rough Land for at least two years, while he helps us to find a suitable alternative. He has also agreed that, when we find some land, he will clear the space for the fencing for us, using his tractor and various other items of heavy-and-very-useful-machinery. So he gets his land, the previous owner gets his money, and we get to continue to live (cost-free) on the goodwill of others.
• I have not signed up for anything. No French lessons for me. No opening-my-mouth and getting-roped-in for helping in social or work-type activities (except of course to assist Simon when his preemptive folly bears fruit). No meeting groups of other English immigrants for afternoons stumbling though woefully inadequate conversations in something-like-french-with-terrible-accents. I will stay at home with the Internet and a french dictionary, and teach myself enough to get by in all the social contact I want. Which isn't much.
• I have not overcome my feather phobia. But it's getting better. And I have stopped running away from Naughty Chicken.
• I have not finished the Pooh Corner map of Llamaland. Maybe I will. Maybe I won't.

PS This is a little note to Mike in response to his comment on our blog of 21 August.
"Sorry mate, Duc and Valentine are not for sale (to you or to anyone). They're part of the family, and we need them to teach all the young-llamas-to-come everything they know. You can't have custody, but you can have visiting rights whenever you want!"

What day is it?

It really struck me this week, that days have lost their importance. Val said something about a "Monday morning feeling", and my first reaction was "Is it Monday then?"

The routine of our life centres around the various animals - and in some senses they are more demanding than work ever was. Although the breeding llamas would wait for a few hours for their morning feed, there's no way we could miss out a day. The chickens are impatient to be let out when it gets light - and I feel absolutely obliged to get up, put on wellies and go down to them. And at the end of the day, they need to be closed in when the sun sets . . . . .

I never miss a day going to the walking llamas, although I do allow myself the 'luxury' of sometimes not going till the afternoon. I guess they would be fine without a visit one day, and they do have plenty of food so they aren't dependent in the same way as the breeders. But I know that llamas are very much creatures of routine (going to the same position for their food bucket, pausing each time at the same point on a walk because they can see back to the 'home' field, using a fixed toilet area) and we get drawn into the same patterns.

In fact, I am coming to the conclusion that humans and other animals are most comfortable when life has routines. We now are 'closer to nature' in that our routines are determined by the rising and setting of the sun, and in the longer term by the seasons, rather than by the 'artificial' constructs of work etc. I suppose that perhaps I am happier now because it's not the arbitrary decision of someone else that rules my life . . . . but the equally arbitrary patterns of the universe.

Days of the week have nothing to do with nature. I'm rather glad I don't have to think differently about Mondays. Mind you, it would be nice sometimes to just have a day off.

Hunting chickens!

Each, Peach, Pear, Plum....

This is a blog about plums.




Plum is a nice-sounding word. Like 'plump', round and cosy without being fat. And if you say it lots of times quite fast, it sounds like a small, naughty elephant running down a mossy corridor.




I like plums. Red ones, yellow ones, big ones, small ones, sweet ones. Even sour ones. They are a happy, easy-going sort of fruit. They grow in cool wet countries (we had some random damson trees in the garden in Derby), and they grow especially well in the countryside around here. At this time of year, every time you go for a walk, you will find some smiling at you from the hedgerows and laughing heartily as they perlump onto the road in front of you.

Our plum story started quite early this year, when the scarey cherry tree on the Rough Land, that we thought would poison our llamas, turned out to be an inoffensive, and actually quite likeable plum tree.


Strange plums to be sure - the size of a large cherry, with very dark red skin, and yellow inside, ripening too late to be a cherry, and yet too early to be a plum.











However, to go back to the beginning....

Being responsible (and inexperienced) llama keepers, we made it our business to read up on all the possible hazards to llamas that the land we are using might hold. The list seemed endless.

Our initial fears about poisoning from broom pods led us into weeks of back-breaking work trying to rid our first lot of land of the broom in which it was enveloped. However, it turns out that llamas are not the least bit interested in broom, even when there is absolutely nothing else around to eat.

Then we worried about buttercups and acorns. I think we've seen one buttercup in our field, and there won't be any acorns - the llamas have eaten all the oak trees!

No sign so far of any ragwort (although it's surprising how many other yellow weeds, with daisy-like flowers and lobed leaves, hang around in the wild pretending to be the paranoia-inducing culprit).

And then we came upon the big cherry tree on the Rough Land.

Now the sight of the cherry tree filled us with mixed feelings. With the hottest part of the year on the horizon, the llamas were sorely in need of a big tree to provide a decent amount of shade from the 36 degree sun. But the thought that one mouthful of wilting cherry leaf at the end of the summer could kill a full-grown llama like (actually, very like) a cyanide pill, gave us serious cause for concern.

We decided to lop off the lowest branches which I figured were within easy llama-chomping reach (very carefully disposing of the wilting off-cuts, way away, out of llama browsing range), and postpone any serious tree-felling, until we knew whether the llamas would actually show any interest in eating the remaining bits of reachable tree. Apparently, all parts of the tree could be poisonous, but the stones, and the wilted leaves would be the deadliest.

We waited and watched. And although initially all the llamas seemed quite oblivious to it, we noticed Duc's interest in the lowest branches growing, along with the small round fruits which were developing in profuse clusters throughout the tree.

By the end of June, Duc was up to his old standing-on-hind-legs-like-a-circus-horse tricks, and deftly removing the ripening fruits for a crunchy snack between grass-and-blackthorn meals.

I began to panic - imagining we would return the following day to find Duc an inert heap below the deadly cherry tree. Simon simply refused to accept that this could possibly be an issue, and willed the tree to just NOT BE A CHERRY TREE. He found a very red, juicy-looking little specimen and bit into it. "This is a plum", he stated triumphantly, in that 'I'm always right' sort of voice he has. "But it looks like a cherry", I countered, "It has cherry bark, and cherry leaves, and those small red things look like cherries to me". "That may be so, my dear, but it tastes like a plum."

And so it did. But, unable to identify the species, I figured it was probably some weird freaky plum-cherry, that would still cause serious illness if not death. And now, Duc's antics were beginning to bring down tasty morsels for Valentine and Ana to snuffle up from the ground. For my own peace of mind we needed to act.

Which is how Simon came to be up a ladder, surrounded by greedy llamas, picking cherryplums, while I stood below holding the ladder and trying to catch the errant fruits that escaped Simon's grasp, before vast quantities were gobbled up by the four-legged vacuum cleaners.

















It is also how we managed to fill our freezer with many kilos of small, (and very hard to stone) plums for a rainy November's day making jam, and how we discovered, in the end, that llamas do not die from eating plum stones.










And so to August....when the REAL plum harvest begins.

There is a lovely orchard just off a track in the hillside near us, that is bursting with a profusion of fruits, and which we have never yet seen tended by anyone. Which is to say that, although we see that the ground below the trees is hoed and cleared of weeds, and we see CDs hung in the branches (presumably to keep away the birds), and lately we have seen bags of garlic hung like talismanic garlands around the necks of some of the smaller trees, we have never yet, in all our six years of visiting the orchard in our walks, seen anyone there. And no one ever seems to pick the fruit - which grows beautifully, (even in the years when early weather conditions result in a poor harvest across the region of particular fruits like apricots or cherries), and which simply falls to the ground in untouched pools of abundance.

We have never taken any of this fruit because, although it seems that much, if not all of it will be simply left to rot, taking it without being able to ask someone's permission to do so just feels plain wrong. And of course, I always feel as if someone (probably very tiny and ethereal) is watching us from the covered darkness of the wild land that surrounds the orchard. But while the fruit did not find its way into our mouths, it certainly found its way into our dreams.

So when we first thought that we would be buying 8 hectares of land, we fantasized about using an acre of it to plant an orchard of our own. We debated which fruit we would grow, and researched which varieties would grow best in this climate. We checked out the price of young trees for planting, and the price of the necessary tools to prepare the land. And when we realised we would not be getting the land after all (more details to follow....), I had a real sense of disappointment that we would have nowhere to create our own orchard, to provide the sweeter elements of our self-sufficient life-style. Tomatoes, lettuces and peppers are easy to grow in a little back-garden plot, but fruit trees need so much more space.

But now I understand what it means to let the Universe provide. We do not need to grow our own orchard because we are actually living in the middle of a very big one.

Walking down the tracks and lanes that radiate into the hills from the village, there is fruit for free wherever you look. The cherries are all finished, as are most of the apricots , but there are apples, pears, (and apples that taste like pears) figs, medlars, blackberries, elderberries, grapes (from wild, escaped vines) almonds, walnuts and plums, plums, PLUMS. The hardest thing to learn is how to walk past a wild tree, overflowing with fruit, and NOT stop to pick a few bag-loads to take home.

Last week, when we had family visitors here to assist, we netted a trawl of more than 10 kilos of big, fat, purple plums from one track-side tree. But since we already have loads ready for jam-making, these have been turned into a delicious stewed-fruit desert, frozen in meal-sized portions, to be eaten at our leisure with ice cream or creme fraiche. And there are still more out there, calling to us from the hedgerows..."Pick me. Eat me..." This all brings to mind a book I used to read my children in the late eighties (by Margaret Mahy, I think) called JAM. I am sure we could easily end up with more than enough plums to fill our bellies (and our dreams) between now and the beginning of next year's harvest. When we can of course start all over again.

And I am also pleased to report that llamas suffer no ill effects whatsoever from plum-munching, and that Duc, having a very particular liking for for the juicy treats, can sniff one out at 20 metres. When out for a little ramble as part of his walking training, he has learnt where all the plums trees are along the various routes, and he starts scanning the ground for fallen bounty as soon as we approach the spot. I wondered whether there could be a special use for a plum-hunting llama, along the lines of those truffle-hunting pigs. I guess not. Nevertheless, it is a joy to behold him using his dextrous lips to gently pick up a full, ripe plum from the ground, squish it resolutely between his teeth and hard palate exactly as his head draws level with Simon's, and to smugly crunch the stone to nothingness as Simon wipes the sprayed juice from his hair.

Walking with llamas

Llama walking is a strange art. You can read loads about the principles in books and on the web. However, there seems to be no real substitute for trying to be 'in tune' with your own llamas.

When you are out with a single llama, this is much easier than when you have a group. The lone llama and you form a pair – and to walk successfully you must communicate with each other. I find this means I must watch and listen to the llama, and I also speak to him/her. As a result, I often go for quite long walks without seeing very much of the landscape. I tend to scan the area ahead, trying to anticipate anything that might alarm the llama.

Then I spend a lot of time actually looking at the llama, watching where they are watching, and taking note of how they are holding their ears. I'm really not sure that their hearing is very acute (and I have sometimes had to make quite a lot of noise to attract their attention from 40 or 50 metres) but if their ears are forward and erect it's a good sign that the walk is stimulating without being frightening!

Their eyesight is certainly pretty good – and if they are staring into the distance, you can almost always spot something of significance if you look carefully in the same direction. Of course, 'significant' to a llama is not the same as to a human, and it sometimes takes a bit of working out to decide what it is that's holding their attention.

Llamas are generally very cooperative. The lead is there mostly as a guide – and generally is not used to restrain the animal. There are, of course, times when the llama tries to pull away – almost invariably when they are scared. You know you are succeeding in keeping your llama calm, and in communicating with them, when you can walk along with the lead hanging down in a slack curve between you and the llama. Adam shows this well with Valentine, who tends to be rather over-enthusiastic when walking. We are still working on getting him to stay in the correct position that Adam has achieved here (i.e. head alongside the leader, with body behind).

Of course, things get more complicated when you walk llamas in a group. Over the last week, we've had a chance to practice this as Claire and Adam have provided two extra pairs of (very capable) hands.

We had previously been walking no more than two llamas at once. As Ana is the least experienced, we've tended to take her out with either Duc or Valentine. And, because Ana is the youngest, and lowest status, she has always been following her older companion

Now we've had a chance to experiment with different combinations of people and llamas. And among other things, we've learned:

• Duc doesn't like having people walking behind him. Presumably, he finds it hard to keep an eye on where the possible threat might be?
  
• Despite this, Duc – as the most 'senior' of the three – likes to lead when there are other llamas out walking. This might explain why he was rather a handful at first when he was being led by Pete the other week.
  

Get it right, and it all goes very smoothly