Introducing our correspondent - Carol Ogborn
Hello. Since I’m new to the Countryside blog I thought a few lines of introduction might not go amiss. I live in the New Forest and have done so for many years. I certainly won’t see twenty one again but I cannot do anything but live with that. I still work full-time, am a grandmother of three with another on the way and fairly live and breathe animals of all sorts.
I used to farm on a small scale, sheep and cattle, and pigs in the early days, but pressure of only having rented land finally got the better of me. I still have a few chickens and an odd ewe. Strangely, I miss it still, despite the winter weather, the lifting of heavy machinery at haymaking time and the daily rounds of feeding and caring.
I have a Friesian horse who is known as ‘Barbie’ for all the obvious reasons, although that isn’t her proper name. She is a dear girl, if a little ditzy at times, and I was very lucky to have found her. I also have a largish mountain dog and have just acquired a puppy of the same breed, who will be known as Yogi and Boo. I show the dogs for fun and we seem to have done quite well. I like gardening, growing my own herbs for cooking and medicines, reading and all sorts of crafts, such as spinning, weaving and knitting. I occasionally carve or turn wood too!
I suspect any other information about me and mine will turn up over the course of the coming months.
Carol writes
…and we shall have snow,’ goes the saying and, it was right for most of the country over this weekend.
We were among the very lucky and had no snow, but we did have minus eight on Saturday morning. Needless to say all the water pipes were frozen, the ground was like concrete and even the dung was frozen to the stable floors. We eventually lost the cutting East wind which had been blowing for a couple of days, making outdoor tasks more than unpleasant, but it was still a battle to keep warm.
Apparently unconcerned by this, there are camelias and winter jasmine in flower, backing my assertion of last month that things were mad.
Driving along the other evening the tall, dead grasses lining the verges showed up like white skeletons of last autumn in the weak moonlight and the small amount of cloud made for a most attractive monochrome sky and I thought how beauty can be seen even in the depth of winter when all seems bleak.
Certainly some ‘twitchers’ I encountered yesterday thought so, since there they were, bundled up to the eyes in khaki balaclavas, combat trousers, thick coats and gloves, binoculars trained on a large fallen pine tree. I have no idea what they were ‘twitching’, but obviously something alien to the area as there were several of them. I was mischievously tempted to walk that way with the dogs but did refrain. As a keen bird watcher myself I find ‘twitching’ very odd. Usually the ever-growing numbers of people who gather to sight the visitor succeed only in driving it away. I have known this happen on a number of occasions and never make hurried phone calls to summon others in case that is the result. I have managed to spot several of the rarer visitors in that way, perhaps the most rewarding being a fairly exhausted hoopoe once.
My small garden birds descend like locusts onto the feed nets everyday. It is quite a comical performance, with sparrows scolding, great tits pecking and blue tits hopping around feeding whilst everyone else is arguing. The robins and blackbirds clean up from the floor, and it is a great regret that the dogs prevent the floor feeders I had. They seem to assume they are 4 legged birds and eat all the sunflower and other seeds I used to put out, with not very pleasant results for their stomachs!
So if you are short of a bit of cheer this winter weather, hang up some bird feeders for a happy and beautiful bit of viewing.
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