With almost constant rain since the end of September you have to wonder are we in line for another drought year.

I checked out how much rain fell at Sherkin Island. In the first two months of 2020 there was more rainfall than the period from January to March 2019. That’s over 20% of the mean rainfall experienced at our nearest weather station.

When I got the calculator out, I noticed the rainfall from last September to the end of February was almost 6in more than the corresponding six months from late 2018 onwards.

With that much rain out of the way for the year, it’s something I’ll keep in the back of my mind when planning the grazing year.

During a small break in the weather, I let half of the yearling heifers out last week but their comrades will be indoors for another while yet.

They all got their BDGP tags and, because heifer numbers were low, there were a dozen bulls tagged as well.

While they were out, we ran them up on the scales and their weights were on target. Given our cow size, I was happy enough with a range of 430kg to 500kg, with most of them coming up on 11 months to a year.

While there’s a big leap in the workload, I enjoy calving time.

It’s like a football match at times, ups and downs, plenty surprises, joy and heartache and plenty times where you need to have a cool head when it’s easier not to.

Every calving season there are moments when you are kicking yourself over something that went wrong and then you realise it’s outside the back door and you move on.

There’s hardly a dozen calved at the time of writing but all the above have been experienced already. There’s been a steady start to the main run of calving, with the heifers leading the way.

A surprise set of twins, albeit with one dead, from a heifer that looked for a while like she might not be in calf and a single from another who looked odds-on to have twins. Another had a dead calf and, to top it, put the womb out as well.

As they are put in a group and are fairly calm, there’s a bit of calf sharing going on so, for now, the heifer is back with the calved ones and if a calf latches on, all well and good. She’ll go to grass with them anyway so she’s no load.

We’d always calve a good proportion of heifers and they can be funny to watch at times. Our policy of not breeding from heifers with temperament issues makes them easy to work with and, while they are OK with us, they still have their own pecking order.

They’ve pretty much been a group since they were weanlings and most are together since they were calves but there’ s a few chiefs among them.

One in particular has an awful sense of entitlement and anytime I’ve put any extra heifers in the calving shed she feels the need to be an enforcer and give them a good belting.

Harmless enough, but frustrating if you have the shed bedded and in minutes it gets thrashed up and dirtied. The heifer in question is a daughter of one of the leader cows in the herd so she didn’t lick that attitude off the ground.

Entitlement can be a terrible thing.