Thank you to everyone who showed up for our Scilly Billy Goat naming ceremony! We had an awesome turnout to welcome our new Scilly Billy Kids into the grazing herd with around 70 people joining throughout the event to say "hi". And a special thank you to Five Island Academy's Y3 class who came along to learn all about how goats can help our islands.

Officially named by our special guests from Running Dog Theatre, Fergus and Gorse are happy, healthy, and very playful. Our four older goats - Fenton, Fabio, Bramley, and Simon - have been showing them the ropes and keeping them in order and on the job.

Josh from the Running Dog Theatre company said:

"We felt honoured to be able to help introduce St Mary's newest Scilly Billy's to the rest of the herd and act as celebrant at the auspicious ocassion. 

We'd spent the week working with community groups to welcome the new Billy's to Scilly and were delighted to be able to read out some limerick's written by members of the U3A and Memory as well debuting a joint composition with Five Island Academy's Y3's titled "Song of the Scilly Billy Goat Kid Ranger".

We hope that the new goats settle in to their new life on Scilly and we look forward to working with them again in the future!"

If you visit our Scilly Billies you might notice they're not kept in by fences. This is because we are using 'Nofence' collars to keep them within an area. These collars are completely safe and used for a wide range of livestock with very different levels depending on the animal wearing it.

The idea of these collars is to train the animals to keep inside a boundary by responding to sounds from their collars when they start to cross a line we've set. The audio warning is a scale of tones, which starts at a low pitch and rises gradually as the animal moves through the boundary zone. If the whole scale has been played, a harmless, mild, but effective electric pulse will be given. The animal then learns to recognise the audio warning and turns around to avoid the electric pulse.

All our adult goats have learned how to work with the collars, and they're not bothered one bit.