Sept2014_MT MEE NEWS

By Ian Wells

Coming up on the Mountain, we have the Savoyard Singers concert on the 14th of this month (there are probably still tickets available from Kay – 5498 2104 or Joyce – 5498  2270).

 

On the strength of a confident BOM forecast, I write in breathless expectation of worthwhile rain over the coming weekend.  If it does materialize it will be very welcome for farmer and gardener alike.  I don’t think that I have ever seen so many really poor cattle paddocked on our Mountain.  Without some early remission of the dry, there will be some beasties struggling to survive.  It seems that supplementary feeds, especially hay, are now priced beyond all reason, and are almost unobtainable anyway.

When dealing with cattle on eaten-out pasture, please remember that your average grown cow or steer needs a minimum of 10kg of good quality hay daily–about 13kg if it is feeding a calf.  In plain terms, to simply maintain body weight think of a requirement of about half a bale per head each day.  And then think about how you might achieve that and still stay on talking terms with the bank manager.

If the rain fails to deliver, and if at the same time the All Blacks beat the Wallabies for the Bledisloe, it will be a dark weekend indeed!

Sunday 9th November will be ‘Proms’ day, with the usual wonderful performance by the Sunshine Coast Symphony Orchestra.  Since the retirement of Adrian King this great outfit is conducted by Donna McMahon, while Chrissy Davis continues as Concertmaster.  As Donna promised me this very morning, “You will be swooning at the beauty of Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’, roused by the excitement of Holst’s ‘Mars’ and singing along with the old favourites like ‘Jerusalem’, ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘Old Lang Syne’.”  (There will be plenty more on this concert in the October Grapevine, but keep the date free now!)

And we finish our entertainment year on December 21st with another taste of the annual Woodford Folk Festival.  Chloe Goodyear is already picking out some of the top Australian and international artists who will be appearing at the Festival, to give us a foretaste over a drink and a bite of supper.  Yes, that was quite a night last year!

The drafts of the Council and Governmental Draft Regional Plans have passed by the Mountain almost unnoticed.  Time will tell whether or not we should have paid more attention, but it is quite clear that Mt Mee desperately needs some sort of community forum and voice to deal properly with such things.  Hall Committee has discussed this, and is likely to call a public meeting with a view to setting up some sort of formal community association, if that is what people want.

Talking of cattle again, this is the time to be thinking of Mrs Boophilus microplus, the lady of the ubiquitous cattle tick family, because this is the time to be managing the coming season’s ticks  – in fact it is almost too late.

One often hears “Gee, the ticks are bad aren’t they!”  The fact is that ticks can’t fly, they can’t walk, and for practical purposes they aren’t spread by wildlife.  The ticks on our livestock are the ticks that we have bred ourselves.  The tick lifecycle in SE Queensland begins anew each spring.  The trick of successful tick management is to understand that lifecycle and to nip it in the bud.

Larval ticks crawl on to cattle from grass blades. The females attach and begin feeding.  Three or four days later the larvae moult their hard outer coats and become nymphs, which feed for another four to seven days before moulting again to become young adults.  The young adult females slowly engorge, and mate with wandering males before dropping off and beginning egg laying – usually somewhere between 18 and 35 days after attachment and most commonly at about days 21 or 22.

It is at those moults that the tick is susceptible to the modern ‘tick development inhibitors’, such as “Acatak” and “Wintix”    Unlike the dips and sprays such as “Taktic”, the development inhibitors are not ‘poisons’ in the usual sense, but simply prevent the moult from taking place.  So the affected tick can’t mature, can’t breed and it dies a harmless old age.

Every female tick can lay between 3000 and 5000 eggs daily for between 10 days and three weeks!  The eggs hatch into free living larvae after two to twelve or so weeks, depending on temperature and moisture.  They can survive on the grass for three months or more, again depending on temperature and moisture.

That’s where your ticks came from!

But wait!  During a SE Queensland late autumn and winter, few of the dropping ticks are fertile, and few of the larvae already on ground can handle the cold and dry.  Nearly all die, leaving just a very few to begin the new cycle.  And we can stop them from breeding up in the spring with a treatment with one of the tick development inhibitors (such as Acatak, Wintik etc) that are effective for up to three months.  The trick is to do that first treatment while the cattle still seem tick free – and that for us is about Ekka time.

So get in to it now.  You could well have some very happy cattle that need only one more treatment before Christmas and perhaps a macrocyclic lactone endectocide (eg ivermectin)  touch-up in the autumn to clear out both ticks and worms.

Thus endeth today’s lesson. (You can take the man out of the DPI but you can’t take the DPI out of the man!)

Good luck!