Wetterfront

The title is your German homework for today.
Please submit your work by 18:00 GMT.

By the time we finished our late afternoon walk the clouds from the west had brought us yet another hail and snow shower. The walk was fine until we turned to head back and were faced with the slight wind which made the wind chill temperature -7°C.

Had planned to whack away a whole series of Back Blips today but suddenly Johannes and his partner, the owners of the dog I mentioned yesterday turned up and we had a long hour or two chat. They had actually come to deliver some equipment we needed but of course, the discussion was all about Friday's events.

Learnt an awful lot more about the very difficult balancing act the "professional" hunters have when training dogs for their work. In 2016 there were around 264,000 reported vehicle accidents involving wild animals with a cost to insurance companies of €682million. That is 720 a day and averaging €2,500 per collision.

I often wonder why they pay to have the hunting rights and then take on the responsibility to provide 24/7/365 "search" service, repair or compensate farmers and forestry owners for damage caused to fields and young trees. It's not because they get rich from the meat. In fact, all the hunters I know are calling for their quotas of animals they are legally obliged to shoot, to be reduced.

While they are both publicly taking it very pragmatically, it is clear that it is hitting them very hard. I hope talking about it helped a little to get it out of the system.

I hadn't realized they have recently moved. We had been actively trying to find them a home more suitable to their lifestyles, both employed by the state forestry but with several dogs and often guest dogs in training. Even if they take the dogs to their daytime workplace, not many people want renters with animals. They have to rent as they could be required to move to any of the other state forestry offices anywhere in Bavaria (and Bavaria is the size of Eire).

Nice Blip connection: when they went to see the property they now have and were sure they would not get it, the conversation somehow got around to people they knew in the area and it transpired the owner was one I bliped on 9th December 2014 and had had a 45-minute dog/horse walk back then. She could still remember the event and said to Johannes that I had taken a picture and said I needed it for a diary. Now Johannes can tell her she did get a Blip appearance,

So maybe Blip helped them to get the house! Johannes tries to read my Blip when possible so as to try and keep his school English ticking over. As he said today, forestry is probably the only profession where English isn't used daily. His as yet unfilled dream is to spend a week hunting in Scotland. The shooting as such less than experiencing the whole countryside and atmosphere. We don't have pheasants, partridges, grouse, nor the large tracts of roadless wild countryside. Just like MrB, he gets his kick being out living and feeling nature.