Shearing over, and a pause for breath - so a perfect time to take a week out and travel to Iceland. While here is not the place to wax lyrical about how wonderful the scenery was, how awesome the glaciers and volcanic geology, and...ooop, just did...this is a farm blog.
The Icelandic sheep were ubiquitous - small and hardy, seemingly as happy to be grazing beside a road as on a cliff face or the volcanic beaches. Lambing was well over, and each mum had two rapidly growing charges.
While there were cattle, mostly dairy as far as we could tell, another staple of the Icelandic diet (look away now if you are squeamish) is horse (along with various other things foreign to our palate, such as whale and reindeer). I can categorically state that we most probably did not eat horse burger (and I am most definitely lying - when in Rome...).
We were probably the only two tourists who stopped to watch haymaking (coming soon back at home) and looked longingly at the über-cool combined baling and wrapping rig that the local bóndi (that's yer real Icelandic for farmer, that is) was using to store away his winter feed.
However, some of the tractors were a bit small.
The official line is that we did not flirt with other sheepdogs (please, please don't tell Sonny!)
The bird life was amazing, and each field had territories of redshank, whimbrel, snipe, plover, godwit, redwing - the dawn chorus was the space-invader sound that snipe wings make as they fly about, with a background of wader calls and skylark singing. I say dawn chorus - given it was light all night, a 5-6am peak in activity was probaby just habit.
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| Black-tailed godwit, long-tailed duck, red-necked phalarope, Slavonian grebe, whimbrel, black guillemot |
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| An eider mother and her chicks |
