The dairy cows are grazing in the meadow next to our garden.
They’re mostly the local brown-and-white (NRF – norsk rød fe), or they’re black-and-white (Frisian), but there’s also this one. It looks French to me:
Topsy’s not crazy about cows. Undaunted that it’s never once worked, she makes little rushes at them to scare them away:
They have velvet coats:
These two seemed particularly fond of one another:
The wild roses are out:
A Bad Guide 
Do the kye live indoors in winter?
Yes. This lot gets bussed in for the summer. They used to be from next door, where the crown prince lives, but he couldn’t cope with 120 cows. God knows how he’s going to cope with 4.5 million people. I was told that cows don’t mind being outside in the snow, but they just can’t find their hay. I don’t know if that’s true.
Topsy may not be crazy about cows, but we here would love them as neighbours. Better than the lethal traffic. (Run over by a daft motorist just nigh the house three months ago, still allegedly in recovery.)
I don’t know about that. I recently read a piece in the Guardian, written by a cow herd who had been run over by a cow. He said it was like being hit by a car. They had to take him to hospital in a helicopter because the cow sat on him. It all sounded jolly painful, but he recovered.
Did Keats have anything to say about cows, Tom?
When I was a boy hay was beginning to be replaced by silage locally. But you could also feed the kye with straw, because oat straw has decent food value. In winter you gave them plenty of turnips – we could taste the result in our school milk.
(Every now and then I’d read of some English traveller into 18th century Scotland shaking his head at the misery of a land where cattle and horses were fed with straw. Such twits clearly didn’t understand the difference from wheat straw, which has negligible food value. Probably that was my first glimmer of an understanding that essentially everything said by literary types about the management of agricultural land and woodland is ignorant tripe.)
I didn’t know cows could eat oat straw, and I’m not even a literary type.
I don’t like milk from cows who have been eating clover.
Yes, Artur, I can see how that would be a bit of a bother, being sat upon by a cow herd. The vehicle that hit me was a VW Jetta, perhaps about the same weight as an individual cow, somewhat less than a herd. Made of metal however, a problematic detail, and traveling at 40 mph. No helicopter but scraped up from the street unconscious and hemorrhaging with complex lacerations to the head (partial cranial avulsion — one hadn’t known it was possible to be half-scalped) and then a mad ambulance ride through the night to the Trauma Centre in Oakland, for surgery and the beginning of a currently still ongoing chapter in the life which might have been skipped without any complaint from me.
As to master Keats and cows, doubtless he would have encountered one or two about the fields of Enfield or the ponds of Hampstead, but the most notable confrontation appears to have occurred at the British Museum and involved that “heifer lowing at the skies” made famous in the Grecian Urn ode.
That heifer being made of stone would have been even heftier than a VW Jetta I reckon.
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.
(One senses the pastoral milieu to be more literary than factual.)
Straw or hay? WiPe says:
“Oat straw is prized by cattle and horse producers as bedding, due to its soft, relatively dust-free, and absorbent nature. The straw can also be used for making corn dollies. Tied in a muslin bag, oat straw was used to soften bath water.”
corn dolly
>Empty
I’ve visited a farm of Holstein cows in Asturias where there are latex mattresses for bedding.
Maybe modern oat straw is less nutritious than once it was, but you really could use it In Olden Times as fodder: wheat straw was fit only for bedding. So you got animals eating oat straw, and bedding on cut heather in Scotland, and doubtless elsewhere. Barley straw, I gather, was intermediate in food value. What’s done with it nowadays I don’t know.
If you bed your herd on latex, how do you treat your manure?
>Dearieme
The mattresses aren’t too large and there is a drain in the rear:
http://www.westfalia.com/uk%5C/en/bu/farm-equipment/barn_equipment/Cow_Comfort/freestalls/Beds/softmats/default.aspx
Thank you for the corn dollies, Ø.
Jesús, do you think this latex mattress system is better than straw? With our goats, the straw reacts with the droppings to provide warmth. I can’t imagine eating straw myself, but I’ve never seen oat straw.
Tom, thank you for that. I suppose Keats wasn’t a country boy, but even so I bet he liked cows. As you say, I’m sure there were still cows in Hampstead in those days. There are still cows in Richmond today.
The man who was hit by a cow was then sat on by her. Here is the article. I do hope you’re better soon. I think you ought to start wearing a crash helmet outdoors.
Do you usually have bulls together with the cows? And if so, have you seen them being more aggressive than the females, or than the castrated males? The little experience I had with bovines suggests that, usually, the “fearsome” bulls are no more a threat than the rest of the herd, even if you are dressed in red. There might be some (particularly urbanised) urban legend in this.
I’ve never seen any bulls around here. I think bulls may be available only on a rent-a-bull basis nowadays. Coming from Spain, perhaps Jesús knows more about whether bulls are really fierce or not. It’s a very good question.
Back to the latex: what I mean is that the dung/straw mixture used to be heaped and left to become less “hot” before it was used on the fields. I assume that the straw played some useful role in this maturing: it would certainly help to improve the structure of the soil. How is the dung used when it’s washed off the latex? It occurs to me that I’ve no idea how farmers use a slurry of cowshit. Does it need treatment or maturing before it’s spread? It’s just too long since I lived surrounded by mixed farming: I’m out of date.
>A.J.P. Crown
I don’t know if latex is better than straw. Obviously, like Dearieme says, the straw is used to make manure and it’s in the heap when it ferments. A curiosity on this matter.-the father of one friend put into manure heap lots of days the handmade “gazpachera” * (a kind of big mortar) that he had made by Holm oak wood for curing it (he said).
* Here you can see a similar one: http://en.todocoleccion.net/antiguo-mortero-cuenco-gazpachera-madera-encina-maja-o-mano-preciosa-hecha-artesanalmente~x26656608 They are less used since we have mixer: the “gazpacho” was then too laborious. Nevertheless, I testify the dish is delicious made into this receptacle.
>Siganus Sutor
I think bulls are a bit more aggressive but they aren’t normally when they are in a herd. Anyway, it depends. For example I knew a woman who was killed by a “normal” cow. She fed everyday it but she didn’t realize sometimes a cow with a newborn baby can be dangerous.
As for red color, it seems the movement is more important. In fact, the matador’s cape is pink. Although it’s not sensible to confess that, today is a holiday here (actually all week; St. John is our patron) and I’m going to see a bullfight at 7:30: only a matador with six “victorinos”, the fiercest bulls in Spain.
Attractive photos here.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2166528/Rare-blue-night-shining-clouds-pictured-dusk-Edinburghs-landmark-rail-bridge.html
Best sentence fragment: as the skies cleared after a week of storms. I hope that’s heading this way.
I’ve always liked the Forth railway bridge. It reminds me subliminally of the lid of a biscuit tin and of the biscuits underneath. And of Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps.
Nice pictures. I’ll look out for the clouds. I didn’t know about them.
I’ve always liked the Forth railway bridge
I remember that crossing that bridge made a lot of noise, so much that you would wonder whether the train would fall in the sea below. (Incidentally, I’m not sure there are “sea cows” (i.e. vaches de mer in English. I’ll have to check.)
Jesús, thanks for the tip about the colour red and the colour pink. I will give away my pink shirt I think. But expressions like “agiter le chiffon rouge” or “like a red rag to a bull” should be banned altogether.
There are sea cows in English, but perhaps not in the Firth of Fourth. One kind was wiped out by humans in the 1700s. The fictional Stephen Maturin mentions that sad story here in a funny way.
Forth, dammit
I suppose I’ll have to read those books since everybody likes them so much. Are you still in the south of France, Ø?
Sig, do you have sea cows or manatees or anything like that in Mauritius?
I got back last night, and am now in the south of Massachusetts with my wife and kids. Trading one lovely kind of seashore (limestone hills, scrubby pines, rocky beach, and bright blue water) for another (vines, marshes, mud, sandy beach).
>Siganus Sutor
I’ve just found this article about the color red:
http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=1926-07311-001
It seems someone investigated it some years ago.
Most recently, this Spanish research team concluded that violet and blue colors are more recommended for our shirts:
http://www.journals.elsevierhealth.com/periodicals/applan/article/0168-1591(89)90110-X/abstract
There were dugongs in Mauritius when the Dutch arrived there in the early 1600s. Vice admiral Van Warwick said sea cows were grazing the sea grass without any fear, and that females were breastfeeding babies held against their chest. I’m not sure the French saw anything like this when they arrived on the island in the early 1700s.
A blogging friend came to Mauritius (and stayed at our place for some days) partly because she had enjoyed reading O’Brian’s ‘The Mauritius Command’.
Today among the vines and marshes I awoke before the rest of the household (not counting the cat, who come to think of it was the reason I woke up–walking on my abdomen as I lay in bed). I came downstairs and fed her, then stepped into the next room and came face to face with a large family of turkeys. Well, I mean, they weren’t in the house, but they were right on the other side of a glass sliding door. The nine or ten young ones went flying into the woods, while the parents stalked around on the grass staring at me from time to time; I imagined them saying “Don’t worry, kids, I’ve got your backs”. After a while they disappered into the woods, too. The cat missed the whole thing.
How fantastic. I didn’t know there were families of turkeys just hanging around outside like that. Have you ever seen anything like it before? Is it a New England thing? Do they live in the woods? I wonder how the cat would have reacted.
Oh well, here they are. Did they look like this?
Nobody was doing a peacock-like display, but yes. It’s not unusual to see them around here these days, maybe by the side of the road, or crossing the road, but I have never seen them so close up.
A couple of years ago we had a large flock of turkeys wandering our neighborhood and often inspecting our lawn for edibles; we haven’t seen them in a while, but the other day I saw a couple of turkeys on the street, so at least they haven’t all been wiped out.
You lucky people. The last time a pheasant visited our garden she mooched around a little, stood still for a while, and died.
We had a fox visit us like that, and die of scabies. It was looking for somewhere warm.
I had no idea about these turkeys. I’ve never heard of that before.
the other day I saw a couple of turkeys on the street
What, like out shopping? I’d love to see turkeys wandering around!
A couple of weeks ago a colleague and I were driving along the coast when we came past a family of swans walking quietly along the road. A couple of hundred meters down the road my colleague stopped the car to see what would happen when they met a woman walking along the road in the opposite direction. She caught sight of them on a hundred meters’ distance, kept walking for a while, possibly hoping they would flee, but then turned around and walked quickly back towards us. Swans are nasty when they feel threatened. Sound sense for a swan, probably.
During my week in France I surprised what I think may have been a grouse. I was just strolling/limping through the woods–smallish oaks and pines, with what we thought were cicadas buzzing all around, out of sight–no doubt humming a little tune to myself or mumbling about mathematics or wondering what my poor blistered feet would think of taking yet another hike to the calanque, when something about as big as a turkey but without such a long neck exploded out of the underbrush and put an end to my reverie.
We had a fox visit us like that
It’s time to look again at the Goldenacre link, I think. I’m sure that the paragraph on local wildlife is out of date by now–it hasn’t changed in a couple of years–but I’m so glad that it hasn’t been yanked out of there by someone saying “that’s not how we do things at Wikipedia”!
Thanks, I’d forgotten that Goldenacre description. It tells you so much more than a photograph could.
I thought grouse – rype, in Norwegian – were very small birds. Are they comparable to a turkey? Yes, it says: Størrelsen er 38-41 cm og de veier 450-700 gram. They’re bigger than I’d thought.
Heavens! Grouse are heavily built like other Galliformes such as chickens. They range in length from 31 cm (12 in) to 95 cm (37 in), in weight from 0.3 kg (11 oz) to 6.5 kg (14 lb).
Why didn’t the swan woman just pass by on the other side of the road? Or was it very narrow?
I love the idea that Goldenacre is unchanging.
Jeeves rescues Bertie Wooster and a cabinet minister from a swan.
I recently learned that English grouse is a wider term than Norwegian rype. Grouse is also used for (in our view) completely different beasts: storfugl, orrfugl and jerpe.
Oh, bad link. Grouse!
For some reason I didn’t see what happened exactly at the moment when the lady turned away from the swans, but I think the male may have started waving its wings to warn her off..
It was a normal Norwegian country road. Wide enough for two cars to meet, but not wide enough to mark separate lanes.
Storfugl – “big bird” – what happened, could no one think of a better name?
They could. Two names. The male is a tiur and the female is a røy.
Where I used to live in Seattle was just down an avenue from the Woodland Park Zoo (which now has the Jimi Hendrix memorial zebra and butterfly viewing compound – not thought of then). This zoo has always had (maybe all zoos have?) free-ranging fowl of all sorts. And it was not at all unusual to find a peacock wandering down the avenue I had to cross to go to school. The odd golden pheasant…
The screech of the peafowl was early embedded in my brain.
Curiously, at my second-longest youthful residence, we were just down the road from a strange bird sanctuary/farm. And on our rural road peacocks would appear perched on mailboxes and golden pheasants wandered in our front gardens. It was a great privilege. I’m a sucker for glamourous birds.
Guinea fowl are amazing – ran into a herd of them in Mallorca once.
And of course, my stork obsession…
Local news: I’m glad to see that exams are still taken seriously.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2167685/Isobel-Cohen-sits-Cambridge-final-exams-28-HOURS-giving-birth-child–gets-First.html
I was surprised to read about a turkey-sized bird in the woods of Southern France (or anywhere in France), but that was probably a grand tétras, a mountain bird that I have heard of but never seen.
To my knowledge, the only grouse I have ever seen were in British Columbia (Western Canada), birds about the size of a pigeon, known as “fool hens” because of their apparent indifference to automobile traffic. In spite of that, it was rare to see any of them dead on rural roads – roadkill there consisted mostly of porcupines (very slow movers) and the occasional rabbit. I have also heard of the ptarmigan, a type of grouse that becomes white in the winter, but I have never seen one and don’t know how big it is.
cows and bulls: Having grown up in a cow-raising area (for milk) I always heard that bulls are not particularly aggressive when kept in meadows along with cows. The ancestors of these animals were herd creatures, like bison. I think that they must be unhappy and stressed while isolated, and the males become aggressive then.
agiter le chiffon rouge (lit. ‘wave the red rag’) must be a literal translation from English, not a traditional French phrase. There are many such translations nowadays which people use without being conscious of their foreign origin.
And le grand tétras is our tiur, Swedish tjäder. The French and Scandinavian names would seem to be related in some way, but the French looks unferench enough to be a modern loan from the scientific term which in turn might be based on Scandinavian. It’s curious that the English name is capercaille, unmistakenly French.
Note also that the capercaille has the Latin surname urogallus, based on Germanic Auerhühn “Capercaille”, a false friend of orrhane “Black Grouse”, while the black grouse is Tetrao tetrix..
German Auerhühn, I mean.
Trond: the English name is capercaille, unmistakenly French
Not to a French person. You are thinking of caille ‘quail’, but see below for the i before the final e, and caper does not mean anything in French.
In any case, Wikipedia has another explanation, to my mind more convincing:
—The Western Capercaillie (Tetrao urogallus), also known as the Wood Grouse, Heather Cock or Capercaillie [play /ˌkæpərˈkeɪli/], is the largest member of the grouse family. … this species’ name is derived from the Gaelic capull coille, meaning “horse of the woods”.—
That name may refer to (some of) the distinctive vocalizations of the male capercaillie during courtship. Heather Cock is an exact equivalent and probably a direct translation of Fr coq de bruyère.
According to the TLFI (French online dictionary), tétras is an adaptation of Latin tetrao, itself an adaptation of a Greek word . It is quite likely that the Latin word (attested in Pliny) remained a learned, scientific one, since its popular, spoken evolution into French would probably have ended up beginning in terr….
What I saw was probably not quite as big as I said. It’s like a fish story; the creature grows with the telling.
Youtubes of grouse.
m-l: You are thinking of caille ‘quail’, but see below for the i before the final e, and caper does not mean anything in French.
Oh, caillie. That’s much more scottishish. Add reading to the list of skills I don’t have. I figured that the first element was either onomatopoietic or dialectal or semi-nativized from Latin capri.
That last youtube is the black grouse. I liked the “mellow” best, at about 2 mins.
I haven’t had time to look into this before now: The correspondance of the Greek and Scandinavian forms looks almost too good to be true, so I suspected some learned wordplay. But all points to a true cognate:
No. tiur < ON þiðurr and Sw, tjäder < OSw þiæþur. Following Bjorvand & Lindeman these seem to come from þedura < þeþurá-, which can be compared to Greek tétraks “some sort of fowel”, MIr. tethra “(maybe) raven”, Lith. tetervà “black grouse (female)”, Lat. teteris, OPr tatarwis, Ru. téterev all “black grouse (male)”, OInd tittirá- “partridge”, all pointing back to a reduplicated stem *tet(e)r-.
This is generally taken to be onomatopoietic, but need not be. B&L point to Chantraine who sees it as an intensive-iterative reduplication “chatter” from *ter- “speak”, presumably applied to fowl for their mating play. This verb has reflexes in diverse branches including Germanic *þiþéron- > Ic. þiðra “touch, groom”, Sw. dial. tedra “be naughty (of children)”, No. dial. tidrande “vivatious”.
If you visit the Art Contrarian blog and scroll down through today’s post, you’ll find two items of goat stuff.
http://artcontrarian.blogspot.co.uk/
So, English **theather (rhyming with feather. leather and weather) for those of you planning to rebuld the English language from Germanic roots.
We’ve had that goats grazing on the roof stuff before. I don’t get it, they don’t normally eat grass. Grass is cows, horses & sheep.
Mavbe they seed with a mixture of grass and goatherb?