Crampton is a social media sensation: she has accounts on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Here she offers many entertaining anecdotes about the history of her animals (many of them rescued, as Bodacious was).
Crampton is also a beautiful writer, a natural storyteller, using adjectives to paint a scene and describe her animals.
I can well imagine that there are many readers who might not immediately see the appeal of a farm memoir. But Crampton has so much to say, and so many really interesting stories to tell. Her life has been full of incident, and she's had many careers, all of which add up to a really interesting book.
The many fans of All Creatures Great and Small will love this book, too. But its appeal is really broader than that because it's really an adventure story. It's Bodacious' story about his adventures on the farm, but it's also the story of how Suzanna took over a very small farm and made it work. I think this book will appeal to many people, and is a perfect gift, especially for friends and relatives who are recovering from illness.
She tells the story of how she came to adopt Bodacious, who was a street cat and was then knocking about a novelty toilet seat shop (how many stories feature a novelty toilet seat shop?). And it's the story of the pony Marco Polo, an incredibly feisty sojourner who escaped the dog food factory, was rescued by a farmer, and adopted by Crampton. I have many favorite stories from this book, but I find something special in Crampton's account of visiting with a hornbill. Crampton recounts her experience encountering exotic animals in Indonesia where she worked for a wildlife charity. Bodacious explains:
"The Shepherd loves birds and often tells me the story of her favorite breakfast companion in Southeast Asia, a hornbill. (Incidentally, I'd like to mention that my egg-makers (chickens) originated in Asia. Wild egg-makers came from rain-forests and were the first to be domesticated and bred. They became the many varieties of egg-maker that we have today.) While the Shepherd was working for a wildlife charity in Southeast Asia, one of her jobs was to make a photographic record of the exercises that were needed to rehabilitate baby orangutans who had been taken into captivity ..and were crippled from having been fed incorrect foods in human homes. This rehabilitation center was in Indonesia on the island of Java. It was essentially a kind of gentle physiotherapy for these poor primates.
"Every morning at breakfast The Shepherd's companion was a beautiful strange-looking jungle bird called a hornbill.. a young male Knobbed Hornbill, sporting a black feathered body, which he held in an upright way, much like the Indian Runner duck ..
"He would sit on the table while she ate breakfast and would ask for some of her fruit salad of grapes, mangoes, and freshly picked bananas. This clever hornbill knew a soft touch when he saw one. The animal-loving Shepherd caved in so easily. She fed him one piece of fruit at a time from her bowl until he'd had his fill. After he'd taken the last piece he would clasp it in his magnificent beak and swallow it. Then he would toss his head, regurgitate the morsel of fruit unblemished and, with another small toss of his head, thoughtfully place the grape or piece of mango between the outmost tips of his ungainly beak to give it back to the Shepherd. She had to accept politely his regurgitated gift. Once the gift had been accepted, the hornbill would then grasp her hand gently in his large beak and hold it while she finished the rest of her breakfast one-handed. Once finished, she would stroke the back of the hornbill's soft feathery head."
Certainly Crampton is an animal-lover, but, as this anecdote demonstrates, she has a very gentle spirit that is a huge part of her appeal.
Crampton organizes the book by chapters for each of the months of the year, and sprinkles it with farm lore and information about the value and practice of regenerative farming. Regenerative farming is, essentially, practices to preserve and enrich soil as a part of every-day farming practice. For Crampton, this includes spreading on her fields a hay-and-dung mixture left when she cleans out the sheep sheds. It also includes planting a variety of grasses and other plants to enrich the soil of her fields and to improve the diet of her sheep.
