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Published: September 27th 2016
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So after a few weeks I can say that I have enough to tell again to write a few pages full of my daily buisness, gosh I am interesting :P
WARNING: lots of talk about ponies coming!
So past weeks have been a lot of working at the reserve. I have gotten the task of taking care of the 2 ponies of the reserve! The 2 ladies are called Kilda and Soay (pronounce like Soway). Soay is a moody bitch when she wants to be and there have been numerous moments already where she pulled me with her just to get to that extra nice bit of grass, stubborn much?! Kilda is a bit less experienced, sweet but naughty when she has to be caught in the field, luckily Nadine here is smarter than a highland pony and with a bit of feed she is easily coaxed towards the headcollar. What I basically do after that is give them a good brush in the stables, put on the saddle and tailstrap. (no tailstrap for Soay yet, she is trying to escape it if you walk with her like that, and will walk away uncontrollable and
I have some very sore toes to learn from that XD) Then take them for a walk with the headcollar on and take a path around the farmhouse to give them exercise.
Soay already had practiced with a few deer on her back but that didn’t leave her with good experiences, so with both her and Kilda we had to start from the very beginning. They luckily already react well on dead deer and smell on blood. I practiced with them on both those aspects, proved it was harder for me to get used to touching and carrying dead hairy animals than for the ponies! Oh, but I have attended a butchering of the deer already, not really different from dissecting the piglets at Human and Animal science course now you talk about it J
But the promising results are ready to be viewed in the pictures I added. What a bit of horse-nuts can’t do! The hardest thing yet proved to be to try and get the deer on their back, as I learned that the ponies don’t like to be saddled in the field alongside the deer (whoops, should have realized ^_^’).
So next time we will try and do the same, only at the stables. I will keep you updated on that!
So, I finally made some progress with my research, rejoice! It ended up being quite difficult to organize bird watching moments and the reserve was in need of someone doing monitoring on moths. So I have spent a few afternoon’s fixing moth-traps, as apparently electric appliances don’t like to be kept out in the open and loosing batteries so I had to look for everything again. But eventually both of the traps were working fine and I even caught 4 moths already!
….
Oh well you got to start somewhere right? :P
I am planning on placing the traps on a few varied spots with differences in vegetation. And eventually compare the results with older researches on moths that have been done in the previous years and hopefully find a pattern!
Next to all this we have been out and about the reserve to mow, repair, and shovel stuff. There is always something to do. I helped mow one of
the big fields next to the horses and believe me, after that I had a look that was thoroughly hulk-worthy! Luckily for the showers and a washing machine I was quickly my pale self again. Oh and during a maintenance walk for the path that took a large part of the morning I took such nice and beautiful pictures of the scenery, I will add them in the attached pics.
AAannndd now over to the first trip I made! I visited the one and only Rose Burn last weekend and we had a lovely time! Train journey was a different story as clearly the highland trains aren’t as frequent and reliable as in the Netherlands (yes even after all the complaining that we, dutch people, do). She just moved to a town close to where she studies and we did some shopping together and just had a relaxing time. And I got my first encounter with a British ice-cream van! And yes, they are as creepy as you can imagine. They belch out a huge high pitched tune audible over the whole town and basically just drive at every street corner for the kids to see. I
will keep to the Dutch ice-cream shops with tons of choice for now 😉.
So this were basically the most important things that I have already experienced for the past weeks. Alongside a lot of Netflix-watching evenings and beer pong in the weekends, I also made friends with Jax, a 5 month Labrador mix. And he is the goofiest pup ever, obviously second to our one and only puppy baby Abel 😉 I need to find a picture of Jax and me but that will come in due time! Currently I am situated in Beinn Eigh (pronounce like Bén ay) for the week as there is a deerstalking training week going on in Creagh Megaidh. The Stag rutting season has started as well and the midges are almost gone! So definitely more to tell next time and should hopefully finally hear the Stags roar myself soon.
But for now it is just very, very , very wet weather so I stay nice and cosy inside for the evening!
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