A Job for All Seasons

by Phyllida Barstow

  Unless sheep spend a proportion of each day on a hard surface like concrete, their hoofs grow surprisingly fast and often very unevenly, with most lameness resulting from dirt or gravel working into the gap that develops between overgrown horn and the quick.

  All sheep are quick to learn to follow a bucket of feed, and my rule is never to try to cheat with an empty bucket, for a small flock is so much more easily led than driven. But before picking up the lure to bring the flock into the farmyard, I make sure that the gates are already open, the pens in position, and long troughs prepared to receive the contents of the bucket, because any form of hold-up may provoke some suspicious old ewe at the back to conclude that you mean mischief.

  This is when the expensive handling gear – sheeted hurdles, guillotine gate and so on – that I bought way back when we acquired our first ewes, really comes into its own. Sorting out the culls who must be sent to market, from the ewes for breeding, has to be done objectively, with no room for sentimentality over dear old favourites who are past their prime, and you need to examine each separately. Gates, hurdles, and swing doors all slot together, and building the most convenient layout with the available equipment is as enjoyable as playing with outsize Meccano.

  I usually construct a narrow race that accommodates three ewes at once, with the guillotine at one end. This is raised and lowered by a rope and pulley, so one can drive the sheep from behind and let it down as soon as three are in position. At the other end of the race is a sliding gate, so animals can be let through singly into a smaller pen, and this in turn gives onto another sliding gate attached to the drafting barrier, which swings to and fro to direct breeding ewes and culls into separate enclosures.

  There is a separate triangular pen for treating any sheep that needs it, and this has an adjustable neck-clamp gate to hold her still while the solo handler is busy reading ear-tags, checking udders (very important), and grappling with fiddly syringes, needles and marker sprays which have an infuriating habit of dropping into any available mud. Only when every breeding ewe candidate has been identified, examined, wormed, and foot-trimmed can she be considered ready for the impatient ram.

  After so many months of idleness, he will probably be on the fat side, but no sooner has he entered the ewes’ field and caught their fascinating scent than he will go into overdrive. No need to tell him to stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood: with his head thrown back and nostrils flaring, he looks like a representation of Lust from a medieval Book of Hours.

  The excited ewes then crowd together and he disappears into the midst of them. There follows a lot of skipping and chasing, shoving, and mock charges until he sorts out who is and who is not ready for his attentions, and at this point I stroll away and leave him to it.

  Three weeks later he will have slimmed down dramatically. If he still cosies up to one particular ewe or another, you can be fairly sure he has not finished his business, but by the end of a month he will probably lie a little apart from his harem, and will not mind returning to the bachelor life once more.

  The next three months are a peaceful period for the shepherd. Provided they were in good condition when tupped, the ewes will do well on grass alone until Christmas, and only if hard weather cracks in after New Year’s Day will you need to add hay and a little flaked maize and oats to their rations, taking care not to overdo the extra feed, because a fluctuating level of nutrition – either too much or too little – may cause a pregnant ewe to develop the horrible condition of pregnancy toxaemia, when the lambs growing inside her make over-heavy demands on her body reserves, so that her own fat breaks down into toxins, in effect poisoning her.

  What you are aiming at is a steady level of condition during this stage of gestation, with the ewes neither starving nor bloated, and this depends a good deal on the weather and how much grass is available. Hungry ewes are not slow to make their wishes clear, but once you start putting out even the smallest amount of extra feed daily, you have to continue or face a barrage of complaint every time you are spotted carrying a bucket. Some eyes are always on the watch, and when you have no vast acreage in which to disappear, whichever ewe is currently playing spotter in the flock will quickly alert her mates to your presence. Since continuous bleating at close quarters is extraordinarily wearing, it is worth being sure the extra grub is really needed before beginning to dole it out.

  These early to mid stages of pregnancy are an agreeable, undemanding interlude when I find myself leaning on gates a good deal, idly watching from a distance as the expectant ladies alternate their routine perambulations with little lie-downs in favoured spots – against a sunny bank, perhaps, or with their spreading backs propped against the trunks of trees – but all too soon the final six weeks before lambing are on us, and there is work to be done.

  Any first-lamber must be given two doses of Heptovac P Plus vaccine to protect her against the worst of the ovine clostridial diseases. These are subcutaneous jabs, far more tricky than the straightforward, bang-’em-in-the-bum intramuscular type, and countless times I have shot the dose into my own thumb, or out on the other side of the raised fold of skin, rather than into the layer beneath it, thereby wasting the vaccine, but suffering no ill effect, which is curious when you consider how many deadly diseases are incorporated in that tiny 2ml dose. The jabs for first-time mothers are meant to be administered a month apart, with the second one a fortnight before lambing. At the same time the old-stagers will need a booster jab to reactivate their immunity and pass it on to their lambs. Since the vaccine doesn’t keep for more than two months, you ought to work backwards from the expected first lambing date, six weeks for the first-time mothers, then a month’s interval, and finally, a fortnight before lambing for all the pregnant ewes.

  It sounds simple enough, but even so I have often let the first date slip past me without remembering it, thus bringing the two jabs closer together than the recommended interval. Fortunately this seems to make no difference to their effectiveness.

  Up to this time, the unborn lambs have been hardly growing – not with the embryonic diapause of bears and badgers, for sheep are superficial central implanters – but nevertheless Nature has programmed them to use a similar strategy, in order to ensure that their offspring are born in the most favourable possible conditions as the weather grows warmer and food is plentiful. Six weeks before lambing, however, the foetuses begin to grow rapidly, and this is when the ewes need high protein cubes to boost their body reserves, though again you have to be careful not to overdo it: starting with a mere half-pound of cubes apiece, and gradually working up to three or four pounds per head per day, divided into two meals to prevent acidosis.

  Then there is such shoving and pushing, such scrimmaging and butting round the troughs as they use shoulders and horns to secure a decent helping, that an agile dog could run along the line of broad backs without disturbing them. To avoid being trampled or biffed about I take care to dole out the feed from the other side of the fence. A couple of minutes, and it is all gone; the last cubes chased into the corners and greedily licked out, while some knowing old ladies go to the length of turning the troughs upside down in case the odd escapee has rolled underneath. Waste not, want not, is the motto as the ewes meander away to settle down for another long, refreshing nap.

  As their waistlines expand to truly frightening proportions, dozing takes up more and more of the day, and you begin to worry that they are going to collapse as they lumber about the field. Twice, indeed, I have known ewes so heavily burdened that for the last ten days they were unable to stand up at all. One eventually gave birth to live triplets, and recovered the use of her legs; the other had two dead and one live lamb, but had become so lopsided that she could not stand to suckle him. On the other hand, a lively two-year-old ewe whom I thought had a week to go, surprised us by emerging from the shelter of a hedge one frosty March morning, trailing what looked like a white wave at her heels.

  ‘What’s she got – twins?’ I asked, as Duff drew back the
curtains and picked up the binoculars we keep on the windowsill.

  ‘Two, three, four… Good lord, it’s a whole platoon!’ he said in disbelief, ‘and they all look fine.’

  That ewe brought them all up, too, with only minimal help from me in the form of extra rations and lamb pellets as soon as they were old enough to nibble them, and family discipline was exemplary. Instead of wandering off on their own or larking about with their contemporaries, all her lambs stuck close together, and the faintest bleat brought the whole bunch rushing to her side, desperate not to miss a chance to suckle. Though she looked perfectly well and never went ‘poor,’ I think the strain on her constitution must have been considerable, because for the rest of her breeding life she only produced one lamb at a time.

  Twins are the norm, which is lucky because from every point of view two is the most satisfactory number for a ewe to rear. A teat apiece, so less opportunity for one side to go unused; no queuing at the milk bar, as the weakest of a set of triplets is obliged to; and no over-fat single to outstrip his fellows in development and reach sexual maturity before the rest.

  But this is getting ahead of myself. The next and most dramatic landmark in the whole shepherding cycle is the arrival of the lambs themselves. This involves a certain amount of stage management, reconfiguring the barns and sheds for maximum convenience and security. The first step is to collect all available interlocking hurdles, some of which will have been used for other purposes since last year’s lambing, and may be found moonlighting as barriers to stop ram lambs butting the horsebox, for example, blocking a weak place in a hedge, or encircling some hazard such as a cesspit.

  When all the hurdles I possess have been recalled to their duty and stacked in the lambing shed, I build half a dozen pens, anchored to ‘eyes’ set in the wall, and line the lower half of each with paper feed sacks tied to the bars with bindertwine, in order to give each ewe a little world into which her neighbour cannot peer.

  Next I seek out the component parts of the Adopter Box – the simple but indispensable aid to fostering spare triplets on to ewes with singles. It is constructed from four sheets of strong plywood with open hooks at each corner into which bars are inserted to hold them in a square. The front sheet has folding doors which close to leave a narrow arch which can be closed round the ewe’s neck, leaving her head sticking outside. Sidebars hold her securely in position, able to stand or lie, but quite unable to see behind her, or distinguish whether it is her own lamb or an interloper suckling in the box.

  Some ewes accept this arrangement equably, while others throw themselves from side to side as they try to evict the foster lamb, but it is worth persevering with the adoption for four or five days, so both the lambs smell identical, before tentatively allowing the ewe to see her mysteriously augmented family.

  This is always an anxious moment, and if she stamps, lowers her head threateningly, or shows any other sign that she has not accepted the foster lamb, one has to step in smartly, push her back into the adopter box, and wait a few more days before trying again. However sticky she may be to begin with, a foster mother makes a very much better job of rearing an orphan than any human can with a bottle or self-feeding unit, not only because she watches out for her offspring all the time instead of once every four hours, but also teaches by example all the life-skills it is going to require.

  Once pens and adopter box are strawed down and ready for use, the period of maximum anxiety begins, and to counter it I check over the contents of the lambing bucket. This is rather wider and shallower than a normal bucket, and has a segmented canvas lining with pockets of various shapes and sizes in which to keep all the useful small bits and pieces of equipment I am likely to need: surgical gloves, short and long; lubricant jelly; lambing rope; needles, syringes, and in-date LA broad-spectrum antibiotic, coloured spray, thermometer, scissors, pen and notebook, elastrator and rubber rings, tags and pincers, and so on. Last but not least piece of essential equipment is the Snare, a loop of soft plastic wire that can be threaded behind the ears of an emerging lamb, and soft Lambing Ropes to secure and pull forward its legs.

  Compulsively I read and re-read my battered old book about lambing, with its graphic illustrations of every mispresentation and awkward tangle of legs and heads that the shepherd is ever likely to encounter, plus calm, clear advice on how to correct them.

  Despite knowing perfectly well that most ewes give birth unassisted, reading about these potential disasters always makes me cold with apprehension. What if this is the year when everything goes wrong? Lambing is rather like flying a passenger plane: 95% boredom and 5% panic. You watch and wait for hours while nothing happens, then suddenly a great many things happen very quickly, and if you make the wrong decision then, one or more lambs and possibly the ewe may die. The thought comes between me and my sleep, so that ears are constantly on the alert for unusual noises from the sheep-shed for fear of missing those few vital moments.

  When action is imminent, however, the signs are clear enough. First and most reliable is an uncharacteristic reluctance to come to the feeding-trough. Instead of bustling up when she hears the rattle of cubes in the bucket, and digging in among her mates, the ewe in question simply looks after them and turns away like an anorexic teenager disgusted by naked greed. This is your moment to separate her from the rest of the flock and gently drive her into a prepared pen.

  She may settle down at once with a sigh of relief, which probably means the birth is still several hours away; or she may go round and round the pen, digging up the bedding, glancing at her sides, lying down, getting up again and showing similar signs of restlessness. This is when it is useful to have the pen partially screened, because while testing its boundaries, she may take a fancy to the lamb in the next-door pen – an interest its mother is likely to resent, and the last thing you want is two embattled ewes butting one another through the bars.

  Constant supervision is not necessary at this stage of proceedings, and may even be counter-productive. I often think that ewes prefer to see as little of humans as possible while engaged in the very private process of giving birth, and deliberately time delivery to coincide with dawn. A couple of quick checks on progress at 11pm and 5am keeps the single-handed shepherd up to speed without too much night-time disturbance, and it is a joyful bonus if the dawn check reveals a couple of fluffy newcomers in the pen.

  If things are going wrong, however, decision-time looms, and this is where a head-torch becomes invaluable. The lamb should be positioned like a diver, with the forefeet just in advance of its nose, but unless you have a good light it is surprisingly difficult to be sure exactly what is emerging once the dark, balloon-like waterbag has ruptured. The head is easy to recognise, but is there one tiny hoof or two just under the chin? And are those hoofs the right way round? Do they, in fact, belong with that particular head?

  There is only one way to find out. On with gloves, slather them with jelly, and carefully work your fingers past the head, on down the neck and sharply angled shoulder-bone to the leg, making sure they are connected all the way, first on one side and then the other. If one leg is bent back, you must push the head into the uterus again, locate the bent leg and bring it forward and then, if the lamb still refuses to budge, pull the loop of cord through the handle of the Y-shaped ‘lambing instrument,’ and fit it behind the lamb’s ears, wedging its chin and hoofs into the angle at the top of the handle. Then, keeping a good grip on the loose end of cord at the bottom of the handle, pull steadily towards the ewe’s back feet, and the lamb should emerge as naturally as possible. Quickly clear the nose and mouth from the enveloping membrane and, as soon as it takes a breath, put it right by the ewe’s head so that she can lick it dry.

  If the lamb is floppy and doesn’t breathe immediately, urgent resuscitation actions include tickling its nostrils with a straw, pouring cold water into its ear or, if this fails, picking it up by the hind legs and swinging it vigorously to and fro can kickstart it into life. There is usually a pause
of twenty minutes or so before the birth of the next lamb, and during this time the ewe will be very busy cleaning up her firstborn, encouraging it to get up and suckle, and talking to it non-stop in a whole range of pianissimo grunts and bleats before a new series of contractions turn her thoughts inward again.

  Birth is a strenuous business, and it is always a marvel to me how a ewe can produce three or even four lambs in a small pen without trampling or over-lying any of them. Somehow she manages to avoid damaging these fragile newborns, (who must be more resilient than they look) and any notion of giving the family more room to manoeuvre must be firmly resisted. The closer they are during the first hours of life, the better they will bond, for if even a few feet separate the ewe from her lamb, she will suspect it belongs elsewhere and may even attack it.

  Another common mis-presentation which needs speedy assistance is when, as expected, you see two hoofs appear, but instead of a nose they are accompanied a small white tail. More careful inspection reveals that the lamb is the wrong way round, and the best thing to do is grip tail and both hind legs firmly, and draw out the lamb in one swift horizontal movement – swift, because if you delay it will suffocate as soon as the umbilical cord is ruptured.

  Both leg-back and posterior presentation are easy enough for a relatively inexpert shepherd to manage – keep calm, think it out, use a head-torch, gloves, and plenty of lubricating jelly – but when it comes to anything really challenging like a breech presentation, for example, or a tangle of limbs and heads which are hard to identify, I find the best thing is to recognise my limitations and call the vet. An expensive option, but one always learns something from watching the pro sort out a problem which, minutes earlier, might have seemed beyond resolution. Over-all the saving in life justifies the call-out fee.

  All these possible hazards make lambing sound more difficult than it really is because, as I said, most ewes cope fine on their own. They are also far better than any human at knowing what their lambs need in the way of food and shelter. Cuddled up against mum’s back or flank, extremes of temperature, rain, or wind scarcely trouble them at all, and though I like to have the capacity to bring the whole flock under cover when the weather is really severe, I leave the door open for them to go in and out when they want to.