Autumn Leaves, Untempered Winds

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 932, 21 June 1957, Page 9

Autumn Leaves, Untempered Winds

by

SUNDOWNER

* MAY 25

AM glad, on general principles, that winter shearing is attracting the attention of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. It is good for farmers, and everyone else, to be under observation and criticism, and to be made to realise that they are. But I

am not hopeful that anything else will come of this investigation, and

not sure that I think anything should, Winter shearing will disappear when it is found, as I am sure it will be, to be bad business. It began because farmers noticed, or thought they did, that the odd sheep shorn out of season -a straggler, a fly-blown ewe, or an animal losing its wool following a sick-ness-got through the winter quite as well as the rest of the flock. From that it was an easy transition to the belief that it was better for ewes to be shorn before they lambed, since the lamb had then readier access to the udder, the mother kept cleaner, was less liable to be cast, and when a storm came was mote likely to seek shelter. It is a sound argument so far as it goes, but the Creator does not co-operate. Even when a shivering ewe does not dieand she seldom does if she gets enough to eat-she gives less milk, and is always threatening to die. She puts a menace into winter storms that they did not carry before, and instead of giving more wool by getting an earlier start she gives less through having to convert more grass into heat. Already some winter shearers have dropped the practice, and the others will follow when they find their incomes shrinking. Some humanitarian pressure in addition may speed the process, but it is not a question of cruelty fundamentally. Farmers are not cruel deliberately, and by comparison with other members of

the community they are not particularly guilty of unintentional cruelties. Na one who lives- on animals can afford to be cruel to them, and the intervention of the S.P.C.A. will: produce humanitarian results only if they are shown to be economic as well. The Society’s job is not to prove the farmer a brute but to show him that he is not a good business-man-and let him suppose that he has made the discovery himself. a * *

MAY 27

| HAVE never believed in frost as a landscape painter of autumn, whatever it can do in one colour later on. If I were a plant physiologist I might know the ingredients of pear red or chestnut bronze, but in my ignorance I can only enjoy them. It is, however,

clear that trost has nothing to do with them this year, since there has

not been a single frost so far-the nasturtiums are still growing and even flowering-and yet I have never, as far as I can remember, seen warmer, richer, or more varied colours on my ‘trees. It is true that the best colours I have ever seen in my life were in landscapes subject to severe frostsEngland and the United States-but I think the colour was independent of the frosts; appeared in spite of them and not because of them. Frost kills leaves too quickly to give them time to colour; blackens and shrivels them almost at once to a general drabness. Though I am not excited by autumn as I am by spring, its glories are less deceptive and less elusive. If it is fine in the morning there is a good chance that it will be fine all day, but whether it is or is not there is not the spring risk that the bends will seize the thermometer. In any case, rain does not kill the colours. Trees that gleam in

the sun glow in twilight and fog, and are, in fact, most magical then, whatever stage autumn has reached. It is wind, and not rain or cold, from which the leaves suffer most, but even wind, even such a gale as we had a fortnight ago, has this year left leaves enough everywhere for the pageant to continue, or rather given us two pageants by cutting autumn in halves. I know that another gale will end everything, but I will sigh when that gale comes, and not now when the only leaf I can see moving is on the top of a cherry tree and has just lost a waxeye’s two ounces. ba a bd

JUNE 4

MY brother told me today that one of his neighbours had a ewe that lived for 19 years before she was crowned in a creek. She was a halfbred (probably Lincoln-Merino), with a black patch on one side of her head which made her readily identifiable

year by year. She spent her whole life on tustocks. with only fern

ahd tutu for variety, and manuka for shelter; and that, I suspect, is the healthiest country in the world for sheep with Merino ancestors. But we seldom know how long sheep would live if they were left to die of natural causes. We kill most of the males before they are mature, and the females before they are six. One of my pets is approaching seven, and is showing no signs of age. The others are either four or five, and still quite young in appearance and temperament. They get precisely the same food and the same treatment as the decrepit old ' thines I sometimes biv ©

at Addington and follow at a discreet distance when I send them back with their lambs. Those old girls, though they are sold to me as five-year-olds, never ‘look younger than between 12 and 20. As for my pets, I have given up trying to discover why they are always’ so much fatter, fresher, and better covered than. flock sheep of the-same age fed in the same paddocks. I know that it> is partly psychology — contentment and the absence of fear; but that is not a_ sufficient explanation. They should be a little behind flock sheep in general instead of a little ahead of them, since those are Teared on their mothers’ milk and get a _ better start. For a month or two they. usually are. Then they move ahead, and are never again overtaken. Wise formers. of course don’t keep pets, and therefore have no knowledge to pass on. ; s