June  

4 – Woodpeckers and nuthatch at feeder.

5 – Volunteers from the Northumberland Archaeological Group walked the Big Field. Most important find was a Neolithic leaf-shaped flint arrowhead circa 3500BC.

6 – Walked with the dogs to Rock Rose bank at the back of the hill. So called because of the bright yellow flowers that come at this time of year. Pretty and delicate, they like a dry-ish habitat. Also saw bugle, yellow pimpernel, primroses and the pink wood cranesbill, all lovers of wetter ground.  

The men who came to ring the dippers back in May, returned to ring swallows. They chanced upon song thrush and mistle thrush young, and ringed them too. To set the record straight they were not from the RSPB but from the Natural History Society of Northumbria, based at the Hancock Museum in Newcastle. Sent them down to the old clipping shed to find swallows. They nest there year after year.

9 – White heads of cotton-grass dotted across the Heather Shank. Reminds me of high hills walks, with its liking for wet peaty soils and blanket bogs.  Field burns filled with yellow mimulus, often known as monkey flower. A close relative, but with orange flowers and not as tall, grows exclusively in the Breamish Valley, close to the river.

12 – Watched the female greater spotted woodpecker feeding one of her young. Easily distinguished by the red colouring on the front of its head (rather than the back which identifies the adult male) it sat in the tree waiting for mother to feed it with peanuts.

14 – Clipped the in-bye blackface and Mule ewes today. How the lambs have grown! Same team sheared 304 sheep in about three hours, very good going.

Taking sheep back to the haugh saw two oystercatcher chicks with parent bird beside the river. Plumage is greyer than the adult bird, but their mannerisms, the scuttled walk and the tilted head, are exactly the same.

15 – Young woodpecker feeding itself on nuts. A comical sight followed. It left the feeder and hung onto the bottom of a duvet cover on the washing line. After a few seconds, blowing to and fro, it flew off.

Other sightings made by husband Johnny were a bullfinch, quite unusual at Ingram, and a red squirrel, running from the farmyard to the holiday cottage.

16 – Dead blackface ewe on the hill. Stuck on her back. The hill is “looked” morning and night but this happens.

17 – Visit by children from Monkseaton Middle School, near Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Only one or two, if any, had been on a farm before. Talked to all 100 of them in the yard about the sheep and cattle, and our work on the farm during the year. The boys, as always, were most interested in the quad bike. Showed them a shorn fleece, nobody was awfully keen to touch, and explained why shepherds walk with a crook. It was the school’s eighth visit to the farm as part of geography studies.

A wren is nesting in the chassis of Jim’s 4x4. Either she sat tight on the two journeys to Wooler and Berwick or else waited for the vehicle to return! 

19 – Went across to the coast to meet friends for lunch. Bamburgh, with its impressive castle, was busy, as always, at the weekend. Returned home to find Millie, the peahen, had hatched four chicks.  Peacock-lings as we call them! The chicks are very delicate. They cannot tolerate rain and are susceptible to disease. Some years they survive, others they don’t. Put the family in the garden hut and fed them with chick crumbs mixed with chopped hard-boiled egg and digestive biscuits, a tried and tested recipe. We have three peahens, mother and two daughters, and Dennis, our lovely Indian Blue peacock.

20 – Took Yasoo and the collies to round up two ewes and their lambs from a neighbour’s field. Both had evaded the clipping! Managed to get them “shed off” from the other sheep, not easy, and returned home. Full marks to horse and dogs.

21 – Dead chick this morning but others seem fine. Another peahen appeared with two chicks. Oh dear. Wonder what I’m going to do with them all. She’d nested on the big round bales in the back shed. Put them into an empty stable and hard boiled more eggs.

23 – Very blustery, wet, squally day. Electronic tagging of in-bye sheep postponed.

Teens of swallows and house martins “on the wing” in the Show Field, feeding on insects. 

Sightings this week include a hedgehog, the first for a long while, two roe deer, a buck and a doe, in the river at Brandon Ford. Of birds, the young woodpeckers continue to enjoy peanuts, and a spotted flycatcher is quite interested in an old nest site at the farmhouse. Blackbird sitting on three eggs in the tool shed, her nest well camouflaged behind a coil of barbed wire, assorted tools, and stuff on the workbench. 

26 – The newly refurbished National Park Information centre opened today, minus the long awaited archaeological exhibition that it not yet finished. The exhibition will feature some of the amazing artefacts unearthed on Ingram Farm over the past ten years.

27 – Silage making started today, Sunday. Three grass fields cut by a big tractor and mower.

28 – Up at 4.10. Busy day ahead. Took Yasoo to bring in sheep, tagging going ahead today. Our sheep are included in a pilot scheme aimed at ironing out any problems before electronic tagging becomes compulsory in 2008. All on account of traceability. The eartags are individually numbered and have a tiny metal coil in one end. The numbers show up on a “reader” when it is run across the tag.

Fencer Ken arrived to hang new drive gates and accidentally sliced a water pipe. Plumber called out but no one could locate the right stopcock. Nowhere in Alnwick had the right fittings. Finally got them in Newcastle. Our lovely spring water gushed across the road for several hours and, of course, no one had any water. Needless to say we all now know where the stopcock is! 

Moved sheep to and fro pens in between continual comings and goings of tractors and grass filled trailers to the silage pit. Our neighbours, the Woods, who farm at Prendwick, supply the men and an array of machinery to do the job. Should take just two days to clear the fields.

A forage harvester chops the mown grass and blows it into high-sided trailers; they tip it into the silage pits where it is rolled, packed down tight, to exclude the air. Finally the pits are sheeted with black plastic, weighted down by tyres. The silage is fed to the cattle in the winter.  

All going well until early evening, then the forage harvester broke down. Amongst the day’s happenings Johnny had a farm visit, students from Newcastle University, in conjunction with the National Park.

29 – Roe deer suckling a very young fawn. Spotted by Jim on his morning round. Silage operation at a standstill. New part needed. Rare sighting of a redstart at Brandon.

30 – Sold ten prime lambs at Wooler market. The first batch to go away this year, they averaged 42.5 kilos and sold for £47 each, a good bit less than last year. Hugh brought the elderly forage harvester out of retirement. It worked for a while but broke down tonight.