Summer always slips slowly and seamlessly into autumn. Other seasons can crash against one another, with a late snowstorm in the middle of May or a seductively mild spell during February, but the month of September is always benign and gentle. If there is such a thing as a quiet time in a mixed practice, it is in early autumn. The cattle are still outside, enjoying the last of the grass, and the lambs have grown and are ready for market.
There are, however, some weird veterinary conditions that appear only in autumn – odd diseases that do not occur at any other time of year, and have you scratching your head, until you remember, ‘Ah yes, autumn.’ Rye grass staggers is the best example. It is a rare and peculiar neurological disease, which causes grazing cattle to run backwards – actually backwards. Harvest mites, those tiny orange and intensely itchy clusters found between dogs’ toes or on cats’ ears, are only ever seen at the end of August, and ‘fog fever’, a toxic type of pneumonia, only occurs in autumn when cattle are turned out onto the last flush of grass before winter.
Many of the farms around Thirsk grow cereals, mainly wheat and barley, which turn golden through the summer, and are harvested in the autumn. Much of this is then used to feed cattle. These cattle have been born and reared on the uplands of Northumberland or Scotland and then sold as ‘stores’ at the cattle markets in Hexham, Wooler or Bentham. It is common for farmers to buy a hundred head of these store cattle and feed them, lavishly and lovingly, on the barley that they have grown over the summer. It is a simple system and it works well, but is fraught with the risk of pneumonia. The young cattle are moved to new and unfamiliar surroundings, brought indoors and possibly also mixed with animals that have come from other farms, all at the time when the temperature is dropping and the damp autumn mists are descending on the Vale of York. This is the perfect cocktail for respiratory disease, so as autumn progresses, we are kept busy, injecting cattle to save their precious and delicate lungs from the ravaging effects of pneumonia.
But still, it is a beautiful time of year and my favourite time of year. A quiet tranquility settles over the countryside, as all its growing and flowering and producing is done for another year.