We went to a farm this past weekend where one of the number of buildings dotted around the area is a piggery. It was there that we saw these adorable piglets suckling.

The second photograph here is actually a close-up crop of the first photograph. This way you can clearly see what caught our attention, namely that the nearest piglet is still attached to its umbilical cord indicating that the little critter must have been born only shortly before we saw this.

As you can see, yellow material from the afterbirth is still covering its body.

The sight of the piglet hustling and bustling its way in among its siblings to suckle from its mother seemed like a small miracle.

We noticed another pig in a nearby stall in the piggery. As you can observe here, it looked so contented that we simply had to take its photograph.

Pig Facts
As we read in the piggery, a female who has had no pigs before is called a gilt. This is differentiated from the term sow, which indicates a female who has had piglets.

The gestation period for all pigs is three months, three weeks, and three days – which is quite a nifty number to remember, as I hope you will agree.

The weather has been changeable – first sunny, then rain, then some sun again and then more rain – all in one day. Then in the late afternoon the sun came out again and we went for a walk in Middleton Wood, which is near Ilkley in North Yorkshire.

The woods were carpeted with bluebells, which looked especially attractive with the sun slanting through the trees in the late afternoon.

For a close-up photograph of an English bluebell showing how the flowers all grow on one side of the stem, see our bluebell article here. In contrast, the flowers of the Spanish bluebell grow all around the stem, so the plant grows upright.

We will be adding these photographs to our ecard collection within the next week.

This photograph of ours has been featured in the 2010 issue of the Yorkshire Dales National Park Visitor Guide, which is published by the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority. The publication is distributed throughout the region and is available at tourist information offices and local libraries, as well as at the National Park centers.

The photograph shows David Wellock at Hurries Farm in the Yorkshire Dales National Park helping one of his ewes to bond with its newborn lambs. David and Wendy Hoare run the farm where they raise Aberdeen Angus cattle as well as rearing sheep.

We saw the lambs being born only a few minutes before we took this photograph, and in fact we spent an hour or more there, taking a whole series of photographs showing the whole gentle business of birth from beginning to end.

The sheep in the background of the photograph are all expectant mothers, so the hormones in the barn are quite heady. Therefore, the farmer encourages the mother sheep to get close to her offspring so that she gets the correct smell. Then she will bond with them properly.

The ewes were all sired on the same day so the farmer knows that if he brings them all into the barn, he can watch over them all as they give birth over a very short period of a day or two.

It’s a tough and tense few days for the farmer.

The Guide In Print And Online
The National Park Visitor Guide gives details of the events taking place in the Yorkshire Dales National Park, events that include walks, talks, and courses, as well as farm visits.

As well as the print version, there is also an online version – so if you want to catch up on what there is to see and do, click the link for the details: Yorkshire Dales National Park Guide 2010.

You can read more about our visit to Hurries Farm in this article, and I suggest you take a look to get a more complete picture of life at Hurries Farm.