Milking at 7
Just an observation…
This week’s Farmer’s Weekly noted that cows that choose their milking times tend to prefer 12 – 3 am and avoid 3 – 5 am – the latter not an unusual start time on larger farms.
As some readers might have noticed, I haven’t been in the habit of rousing the cows at 4:30 am or 2:30 pm. I have my reasons for that, too many to expound. Start with a) laziness and b) heat avoidant and you’ve got the morning and evening time deviances covered 
In fact, for most of the year I fetched the cows at sunrise and sunset. That got round the problem of the fact that every clock I put in the cowshed got tinkered with by the ghost and there were too many fun jobs around to down tools before dark… but anyway:
The cows’ morning routine was to lie around until daylight – about half an hour before the sun appeared to the horizon, usually between 5 – 6 depending on the time of the year. Then they’d get up and spend half an hour to an hour grazing. If I hadn’t turned up at the gate by an hour after daylight they started walking home for milking.
The days that I had to go and get them early they were content enough if they were at the ‘getting up to graze’ stage (though I’m sure they would have preferred the time to give the paddock a final trim, and the grass quality next round would probably have preferred it too), but if I had to get them up…
boy, could those cows sulk!
Cows apparently have excellent night vision. I apparently have very good night vision so far as people go, but it’s not as good as a cow’s.
So, it is a full mooon tonight. But 21 surprised me on the wander back to her paddock by stopping and turning towards the gateway a paddock too soon. But she realised her mistake, and continued on.
Now it’s a new farm to both of us, and I still have to count the paddocks to figure which is her gate (until I realised that I just had to look and see which fence I’d hung the reel on) but the gates are two-wire affairs continuing a 2-wire fence – yet she knew it was a gate and could see well enough to realise it was closed. I couldn’t see those wires in the dark.
Mind you, she was closer to it than I was.
And she didn’t see the wires of her real gate strung right across the race till the last second.
I’d be embarassed to admit how many times over the years I’ve lost the way out of a paddock in thick fog. (Okay, maybe three or four). Never seen the cattle trying to find their way along the fencelines to a gate because of dark or fog.
