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
