Proper snow today along with some bitter winds and the only animals to be out the entire day were the geese. Their feathering must provide some serious insulation! All the shelters and sheds ended the day with some snow inside them, either because of the direction they face (north or east) or because the wind below it in though the Yorkshire boarding. The name for the current weather is in fact The Beast from the East!!! It is very fine snow and it is literally getting everywhere. At the moment it is all very dry but when it does eventually melt, it is probably going to leave a lot of 'damp'!!
By the end of the day we had a good couple of inches on the ground with some places being deeper due to drift. After feeding we checked out the shelters again and found that the top 4-acre one was really full of snow. By this point most of the sheep had serious amounts of snow on their backs too and we realised that if they stayed in their shelter, those amounts would only increase. We thus moved the sheep into the 3-acre where the shelters face north and as such weren’t getting quite so much snow drifting in and we let the alpacas into the Cow Pad. As we type this, the snow has eased a bit but the wind is very strong and it is VERY VERY cold…. We are confident all the animals should be okay though and are very glad that we don’t have any young stock around at the moment. Plenty of people up and down the country have already lambed and kidded and there are a lot of heat lamps on the go at the moment!!