Flehmening...

Another full on day...

As usual, I dropped Alex at the station, and then took Rosie for a brisk post-breakfast walk. Since Gemma died she's started to howl when Pete and I are out, but she does this less if she's been exercised before we go. I left just after nine for a meeting in Horncastle to discuss botanical recording for a proposed Fen Flora, and drove up through fog-shrouded fens - it could easily have been November!

While we were meeting the sun started to break through, and by the time I was ready to drive back it was really quite pleasant. So I returned via Sleaford and stopped off near Rippingale to do an hour or so of botanical recording in an under-worked tetrad. I had planned to walk a number of public footpaths, but most of them went straight through arable fields and were intensely boring, so I wandered the back lanes instead, which had some surprisingly good verges, with sweet violets, cowslips, common knapweed and meadow vetchling.

I was going to return to the car via a footpath that crossed some grass fields, but when I got to the stile there was a sign saying 'Bull in Field'. I don't usually let bulls worry me, and continued on my way, but the whole herd showed quite a lot of interest in me and I decided that as I was alone, with a nearly brand new camera, I'd make a tactical retreat.

Once I was safely on the other side of the gate I spent a bit of time watching the herd. There were some very cute calves and a varied range of cows, but the bull was truly a magnificent beast. Having done a bit of research I believe he's a polled Limousin, a highly muscled beef breed originating from the Limousin and Marche regions of France. This breed has become very popular in the UK because of the low birth weight of the calves (ease of calving), the high feed conversion efficiency and the ability to produce lean tender meat. The bulls are often favoured for cross-breeding. I think this bull was actually very placid, and in many ways I was more worried about the cows, who can be very protective of their calves.

In this image I've managed to capture the bull assessing the state of oestrus of the black cow in front of him. The flehmen response, also called flehmening, is a particular type of curling of the lips in ungulates and many other mammals, which facilitates the transfer of odorant chemicals into the vomeronasal organ. In the flehmen reaction, animals draw back their lips in a manner that makes them appear to be "grimacing". The pose, which is adopted when examining scents left by other animals of the same species, helps expose the vomeronasal organ and draws scent molecules back toward it. This behavior allows animals to detect odours, for example from urine, of other members of their species and to determine several factors, including the presence or absence of oestrus, the physiological state of the animal, and how long ago the animal passed by.

This particular response is most recognizable in stallions when smelling the urine of a mare in heat, but many cat owners will also recognise it, when a cat is smelling the urine of another that may have trespassed on its territory.