Thursday 17 June 2010

Here come the girls!

The girls now seriously outnumber the boys at Banceithin. Girls 10 Boys 3. And that’s before the queen bee and her thousands of female worker bees have arrived!

Our Oxford Sandy & Black weaners arrived from Kidwelly at 9 o’clock this morning. If the early morning “look at me, I’m laying” squawks of the chickens didn’t wake our guests in Hen Ffermdy, then the “oh my gawd, what the hell’s happening to me” squeals of the piglets would surely have done the job. Like little children, the piglets had nodded off in the back of the van during the journey, but being grabbed by the leg, jabbed in the neck with a needle, and dumped into a strange wooden ark, was an awakening of the rudest kind. A few minutes later, exhausted by this experience, all four fell fast asleep.

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An hour later, the sleepy heads emerged into the sunlight. One was rather reluctant and stayed in bed while the others started rootling around the ark. This earned her the name Harriet, after a certain teenager who came to stay in Cwt Mochyn at Banceithin.

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Next up is Alice. She’s more ginger than all the rest, and was the first to venture away from the ark.

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And then we have Ally (blonde face, white bottom) and Davina (black patch on each eye & a half white bottom), who were so busy grunting and rootling for food by the ark that they failed to notice that Alice and Harriet had left them.

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Now all four of them are rootling and grunting contentedly. In fact I’ve hardly seen their little faces yet as it’s been snout down since they arrived. From left to right, in the picture below, we have Davina, Harriet, Ally and Alice.

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So far they’ve stuck together, following the fence line around their run, which has so far withstood the pressure of four wriggly piglet bodies wedged up against it. Eventually this system led them to their water trough. Alice promptly climbed in for a bath, filling the trough, displacing most of the water and leaving nothing but dregs of dirty bath water for her sisters to drink. The sun is shining again today, so I’m off to Lampeter to buy some sun-cream for my new piggy girlfriends – afterall, it’s never too early for a girl to start looking after her skin!

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