I keep hearing the expression "green drought". Locally, we are seeing good grass growth due to some well-timed rain, but the underlying soil is very dry. It'll only take a few hot days and it will all dry up fast.

Its a mixed blessing....we need our hay paddock to start to dry. We are due for hay-making in the next week or so. But in the grazing paddocks I worry about how much feed there is for the sheep. (We have too many sheep just at the moment. The unplanned births in August are now coming back to bite us, and we will be short of feed after Christmas if we don't do something about it. I am doing something about it.....)

One of my neighbours has too many cows. They have cropped the paddocks to a lawn, and are looking a bit thin.

So why would my sheep force their way through the fence into that paddock? Its not a great fence, but its tensioned wire and barbed wire, with meshed wire clipped to it and also tensioned. When we first moved in there was a ground wire that had rusted out, but I replaced that and reclipped the mesh to it, so it should be good enough. It takes an effort to push through it.

But this morning when I went for a walk with the dogs I could hear a sheep wailing. It was one of the newer sheep, 9 months old, big as a Labrador. As my sheep mooched from one paddock to the next the outlier/troublemaker sheep followed along the fence, in the neighbour's paddock. Wailing, constantly.

The same thing happened a month ago. There's a gate between my place and the neighbour. That time, I opened the gate, walked into the neighbour's paddock and steered the sheep towards the gate. There was some frustration in that this whether seemed unable to see the open gate, and would bolt every time I "cornered" him near the gate. It took a few goes.

So I took the long-game approach with this sheep. I went through the gate and walked about half a kilometre in a huge loop to get in front of her. Eventually she worked out I was now ahead of her and turned back towards the corner of the properties, where the open gate waited. She bolted, ran to the corner, ignored the open gate and ran back, along the fence. She could see me continuing to plod towards her. She ran back and forth, between me and the gate, as the gap narrowed.

I could see she was gearing up for a charge. I was expecting her to try and run along the fence and and outpace me and make a bolt for the other end of the paddock, and I picked up the pace to block her off. Instead, she sped up, leapt into the air and like a high-jumper, gracefully curved between the top two strained bared wire lines. Incredibly athletic, amazing to see.

Then she ran the length of that paddock, head first into the closed gate, and fell on the ground stunned, legs kicking like a dying blowfly. Not quite as poetic.