The last cutie of the season

Well here he is, the last lamb addition of the year... Bisto, and isn't he cute.
We watched as his mum , Nippy gave birth to him yesterday ( you can see her in the background of one of the pics)
Bisto will be weaned ,then put up for sale, as we already have one Pitt Island Ram lamb to replace Skippy. Any offers will be considered...

We are extremely happy with our lambing this season as all the ewe's have produced without problems. And all are proving to be excellent mothers.

Holiday japes

Saturday evening here and we are getting into the flow of being on holiday. Even Chantelle is off! Deeply chilled with the occasional outbreak of fighting is how I'd describe the atmosphere right now. Boys have been out and about doing their things so enjoying some downtime with the vid.
Stuey and I are just back from our Challenge walk. It is the second in a series, started off last year with Eric's trip along the beach from Te Paki to the Cape. Stuart finishes at primary this year and we decided to walk from Ahipara to Herekino. Eric took a keen interest in the plans to make sure that Stuart didn't have an easier time that him! I think that in the balance Stuart had a tougher walk. For one thing we were not on a recognised walkway, so there was not always a path to follow. Our decison on which way to go led us into some tricky situations at times. The low point for me would have to be crawling through chest high kikyu grass to climb out of a bay onto a headland, struggling to move forward whilst my feet filled up with stinky bog water and Stuart urged me to get a move on because his feet were getting wet. The funny (?) thing was that when we dragged ourselves to higher ground we realised that there was a car track going all round the back of the headland that we had spent 1 1/2 hours negotiating!
On the plus side we had good weather, saw some sights and places that few others round here will have seen. We camped out wild for 2 nights, ate some wild food - rock cod, mussels crab and winkles. We had nothing but pleasantness from the people we met which was a relief as some of the blokes at College had suggested that we were heading into bandit territory.
We walked out today and decided to follow the vehicle route off the beach instead of going out along the coast. It took a lot longer than I was expecting and involved climbing from sea level to 200m and then back down again. We were both pretty stuffed when Chantelle drove into sight by Rangikohu Marae.
The icing on the cake - apart from the coffee, iced bun and pork bone she'd thoughtfully brought us as a snack, was that Nippy went into labour as soon as we got home and gave birth to a beautiful chocolate ram lamb in front of our eyes.
Pictures of all the above to follow.

What Eric has been getting up to

And yet more lambs

One of our ewes is called Survivor, because she is the last remaining ewe out of the 6 that we started off with. We culled out her fellow girls one by one as they were so difficult to work with. Survivor also survived the only case of flystrike that we have encountered so far. So we know she has staying power.

I knew that she must be close to lambing last Friday because she did not come to me when I went to feed the nuts out. She had selected a rather inappropriate (to my eyes) place to lamb on Stewart Island. It is overgrown and boggy over there, but there must have been something that she liked because she had pushed out triplets by lunch-time. 2 ewes and a ram. Fortunately Chantelle had been keeping an eye on proceedings because one of the lambs had fallen into the ditch.

Now a week later all are doing well and we have a 100% survival rate. Touch wood!

There is one ewe - a Pitt Island called Nippy, who might yet lamb. She is a 1 year old ewe - a hogget - and they normally lamb later than their older kin. We did actually catch Skippy mating with her a few months ago, so she might be pregnant. The Pitt Island's do not tend to have as many lambs as the larger white breeds.

We are consequently very pleased with our first lambing season. We have had to intervene hardly at all and yet have a whole field full of lambs. Either we are doing something right, or we have been very lucky.

Other news: Illness has been the dominant news this week. Paddy was up and puking on Sunday night, Eric was down with it Thursday and Friday, I have been fighting it all week and finally succumbed last night when I got in from school. Chantelle has been off for the last 2 days as well. Stuart is the only one to escape - so far.

Patrick qualified for the cross country champion ships in Houhora but came home limping with his knee in a bandage because he had twisted it.

Overseas visitors who went as far as Cape Reinga will be interested to hear that the last 19km of road from Waitiki Landing is to be tar-sealed. There was a bit of a spat at the dawn service on Monday as the work was blessed by the kaumatua from the Ngati Kuri tribe on whose lands the road runs. Other Maori were there to protest against the road-works saying it would ruin a very spiritual place. The Cape is the most northern part of New Zealand that can be easily visited and is believed to be the departure place for souls going to the ancestral homeland of Hawaiiki. I can see that there is a conflict between a place being spiritual and having several tour buses of foreign tourists stopping off every day. This sort of conflict is nothing new though and English cathedrals find some balance between tourism and spirituality.

The solution at the Cape was for the local Maori elders to tell the protestors to go back to where they came from (which wasn't local!) and get on with finishng the road.

It just so happens that some of the Ngati Kuri children attend Te Hapua school and are having some of their lessons delivered by video-conference by various teachers at Kaitaia College, one of whom happens to be me. This week the Educational Review Office has been looking at this pilot project with a view to rolling it out in other remote areas. I have been observed delivering a lesson by VC, doing a face-to-face lesson, and I had a meeting with the review team after school on Thursday. It was all a lot less threatening than I had expected, and it was different from my last experience of ERO at the College, when they were doing a regular audit. So Ngati Kuri may be the northern-most tribe, living 2 hours from the big city in Kaitaia, but they have shown themselves well able to embrace new ideas to their advantage.

Final news for those interested in our feathered friends is that the Kuaka are on their way back to New Zealand. They are the bar-tailed godwits that migrate to Alaska to breed during our winter and fly back for the NZ summer round about now. Last Autumn a number of Kuaka were fitted with transmitters and then were satellite tracked as they flew north. The first one has just arrived back. Here is a fantastic website that shows you where they have been for the last 6 months. http://www.werc.usgs.gov/sattrack/shorebirds/overall.html