July 24

Good news! We found a new home for our wee 10 month old heifer Pumpkin and she is now on the island of Carna in loch Sunart. Carna is a very special place. It’s a conservation island with a few holiday houses (that come with their own small boat). Cows were brought on specifically to assist with habitat recovery as it was felt the island would benefit from large herbivore impact. Nine heifers came across by boat and have been allowed to roam freely over the island which is over 200 hectares of woodlands, moor, hills and bogs and lots of shoreline. The Carna cows have had lots of contact with visitors and are very friendly and have needed no medical treatment other than regular checks by a vet. Amazingly, despite no wormers or spot-on insecticide and without being fed in the winter, they’ve never had fluke, intestinal parasites or lice and don’t seem too troubled by ticks. They are also some of the biggest, strongest animals of their breed you will ever find scoring high in condition even at the end of a long winter. This might be because the unrestricted grazing allows them to find and eat medicinal plants like willow and bog myrtle or even seaweed, or perhaps because the deer population has been carefully managed and kept so low, that parasites are not being brought on to the island – or maybe just because these cows aren’t on a perpetual cycle of once a year calving. Who knows? What’s clear is that they are very happy healthy animals. They have their own paths through the island’s dense vegetation, even to the top, which is over 150m above sea level and are particularly muscular from all the hill climbing. New patches of grass are also appearing amidst the bracken as a result of their positive impact.

When we first bought the croft, Alasdair took me to Carna to show me the cows there in the hope of persuading me to keep cows at Rhemore, and it worked. We decided to get the same breed – a hardy hybrid cross of Highland and Whitebred Shorthorn.

The original plan on Carna was to breed, but circumstances proved difficult during Covid and it hasn’t been possible. There was one unexpected calf not long after the heifers arrived, but the animals weren’t yet hefted to the land, which is extremely rough terrain, and the calf fell into a ravine and died at a few months old – a tragedy which everyone involved in the island felt quite keenly.

This has meant the existing herd have not seen another cow since their arrival five or six years ago, so we didn’t know quite what to expect when we took Pumpkin across to join them. We decided we would stay over on the island just to see how she settled in. The most important advice we had, was to make sure our calf could see the other cows as soon as she arrived. But this wasn’t an issue. We had to wait to unload her as the tide was a too far in and in this time the Carna cows smelled something and filed down to the beach then stood by the trailer waiting, interested. They were led by the cow who had lost her calf, and you couldn’t help wonder whether she hoped it was her little one returning as when Pumpkin was finally released the mother cow looked somewhat disappointed when she smelled the young heifer and didn’t recognise the scent.

It’s hard to know whether this is us anthropomorphising human emotions onto that long since bereaved cow as we humans are easily prone to doing … but we all independently felt the same thing at the time without saying.

The other heifers approached Pumpkin with a tender caution although they were clearly quite excited. They quickly surrounded her and led her away showing her some tasty birch to munch on, and immediately accepting her into the herd with lots of nuzzling and licking. There was something profoundly lovely about it and everyone there was moved. Pumpkin struggled a little; she wasn’t quite weaned and kept coming back to the shore, looking for her mother and mooing. But it didn’t take long before she had a new family of elderly matrons to make a fuss of her.

Back at the croft, her mother Poppy was noticeably depressed for a few days but she is soon due a new calf and has also recovered. The whole experience has reinforced my love of cows, how distinctive each one is in their personality and the strength of the relationships they have with each other. It’s lovely seeing our herd of mixed ages with each other, especially in the half hour before dusk when they play and roll around in the dust. They are such intelligent emotional creatures I can understand why when most rural families had a house cow they would have felt a part of the family.

So Pumpkin will live out her days on Carna and, hopefully, for the next few years all of our new heifer calves will join her there to replace the old existing stock. Alasdair visits regularly as an ecological consultant so we will see them often to catch up and Andy and Alison Jackson already give us regular updates on Pumpkin’s progress. We know she’s going to have a good life and contribute to the conservation of an amazing island.