Transhumance, a romantic term, has to do with the mass migration of livestock, especially sheep, over long distances. My actual experience is limited to carrying odorous creatures behind the Land Cruiser and moving from one field to another when I was much younger.
Nowadays, without a step-up facility for the elderly, you can hardly drive any type of car. Time has passed.
I can still remember the overwhelming scent of a thick wool coat. It’s unbearable to think.
While traveling, I met the sheep people and their grace who were concerned about their suspicions. After cutting the hair, some lay down on a lump of wool and robbed 40 winks. I heard of one of Kelly’s men who slept in his wonderful wool shop in bad weather.
I came across transhumance as a spectacle of admirable animal grazing in Spain and Portugal, and last week a reader in Southern France sent me an image of a large train of cut sheep passing through the village. rice field.
The word itself means that livestock move from one pasture to another each season. This was previously seen more often in old Ireland, but now car transport is working.
It still occupies most of the rural life of mainland Europe, where animals are guided by shepherds and obedient dogs to travel through towns and countryside, looking for rest areas for grass and water along the way.
When I entered Mies, long ago, to my surprise, I came across a large number of sheep while traveling patiently on public roads. By a miracle, two men and two dogs moved a large stream of dust and beasts to the village and continued to move to hills a few miles away.
In the village of Montpeyroux, France, in the Hérault-Oxitani region, 1,000 sheep are neatly trimmed after a haircut, a blue ribbon rings a bell on the neck, delights children and strains adults about the fate of roadside flowers. rice field.
By nightfall, the masses had reached an oasis of grazing and water, long training to cool pastures away from the scorching lowlands on a historic journey that had little change over the centuries. I took a rest at the Odyssey.
*****
The last words of a recent lovely linnet with a scarlet forehead and flashing chest (the reader image sent by E MacEochaigh from Waterford could not be reproduced for technical reasons) and the “green” of Irish history. A romantic connection with Napoleon, the “Muneaka Hiwa”.
Thanks to Cork’s Damian Boyd and Claire’s Kieran Dillon’s kind letters, postponing expert advice to Birdwatch Ireland’s Neil Hatch that “Green Linnet” is an outdated term for Green Finch. To do. Both are members of the Finch family, but they are not closely related — Twite is close to the linnet — and there are many linnets around the world. For example, Yemen linnet.
