by Sally Urwin
Steve offers to help and tries to rock the white car out of the snowdrift as the woman spins the wheels and revs the engine. Eventually, with three of us pushing, we manage to shove the car back onto the road.
The lady thanks us profusely and climbs back into her car.
‘Right,’ says Steve. ‘Let’s try and get to the bloody shops.’
Eventually we reach the village, get the prescription, buy the essentials and start the long trip home.
The drifts at the side of the road are huge, towering over field gates and stone walls. It’s difficult to see where the road ends and the verge begins, and as we slither along we pass a council gritter and snowplough working overtime to clear the side roads.
The oil tanker has disappeared when we reach the corner before our farm, with only massive dark wheel ruts showing where a couple of tractors have dragged it out of the ditch. We finally reach home and I do the rounds of the neighbouring houses, passing out groceries and medicines. It’s taken us almost all day to do a simple shopping run.
We’ve only been snowed in for three days, but it still shows how fast the country grinds to a halt, especially out here in the sticks.
Sunday 18th March
The snow is still deep and it’s still very cold.
We seem to be feeding most of the local wildlife as well as our farm animals. I’ve spotted three deer feeding at our outside hay stations. They bound off as soon as they see Mavis the dog, but judging by the jumble of deer hoofprints in the snow, they must be creeping back in the evening to feed alongside our flock.
In our sheds and stables there’s a multitude of small birds trying to keep warm. I can see tiny wrens flitting in and out of miniscule cracks in the stone walls of the shed, a line of dun-brown sparrows and glossy black starlings roosting on our wooden beams and a bevy of chirpy blackbirds hunting for seed around our hay and straw bales. Strangely there are no pigeons. I wonder where they’re hiding out?
Every time we feed the sheep a flock of pheasants and a family of little plump partridge appear to quickly gobble up leftover sheep nuts. I carry out some of last year’s wheat seed to them and they gather around my feet when I dribble it in the snow. They must be so hungry, as they’re never usually this tame.
If the snow wasn’t so deep I’d walk down to the wood to see what was going on. I wonder how our badger and foxes are managing in the cold.
Thursday 22nd March
Finally a bit of sun, and our snow starts to disappear.
I decide to walk down to our wood. The sun goes in as I pass under the branches of the beech trees at the boundary and all at once it feels wet, damp and cold. There’s ice and slimy leaves underfoot and no berries on the trees, stripped by the hungry birds. I wade into one of our streams, which is very deep and clear, as the silt and sand has been swept away by the thaw waters. I can tell where the floodwaters have reached by the swathes of dead grass and branches left on the riverbank – sometimes up to a metre above the stream level.
I haul myself out of the water, slipping a little on the sticky mud, and then take a swift walk back along the stubble field, with clods of grey clay clinging to the soles of my welly boots. I have a quick stop to examine some animal prints that look very like the track of a badger – five pad prints with claw marks clearly visible in the soft soil by the field edge. I hope very much that our sett has survived in the Arctic weather.
I wash the mud from my boots in the deep pool below the ash tree at the perimeter of the wood. I’ve never seen the water so clear and cold. There’s no sign of the tiny fish I often spot in the summer. Instead plenty of white snail shells are dotted around the mud and on top of the slippy rocks.
Saturday 24th March
The floodwaters have gone and it’s much drier today, so we’re planning to move all the pregnant ewes from the fields outside to join their flockmates inside the lambing shed.
Mavis helps us gather the sheep in the field and moves them towards the gate. They trot smartly up the lane and pour into the building that will be their home for the next few weeks. One ewe even manages a bounce and a kick in the air.
Most of them are very visibly pregnant. Many of them have that unmistakeable pre-lambing shape, when you can see the lambs lying low down in their bellies on either side of their spine. One or two of the sheep are already ‘bagging up’, when their udders start to fill with milk, which is a sign that they are going to give birth very soon.
Bertha the ewe is still huge, but Hatty the ewe is absolutely gigantic. She’s a big sheep anyway, and she’s been scanned as triplets. She waddles when she walks, and is still around four weeks off her due date. I’ve been sneaking her the odd extra sheep nut, and now she’s as friendly as a pet dog. She follows me around the shed, panting a bit with her extra weight, and sticking her nose hopefully into my trouser pocket.
‘Stop feeding her extra,’ says Steve when he realises what I’m doing. ‘She’s so big anyway that she’ll explode before she’s ready to lamb!’
Hatty hopefully inspects every bucket and investigates each pocket for sheep nuts. She’s got a lovely smiling face, a bristly chin and marvellous fluffy black ears that stick out horizontally from her head. I sit down in the straw with her and she sinks down on her belly, poking one leg out to get comfortable. She makes a heartfelt sigh.
‘Please don’t explode,’ I whisper softly to her and scratch the underside of her neck. Her ears flop out and she starts to chew her cud. I could honestly sit here all evening, chatting to Hatty and relaxing in the straw.
Spring
In spring, the weather (hopefully) starts to pick up just as our lambing season begins. Lambing lasts all through April and May, and is a crucial part of the year for us; our farm profit relies on us producing lots of healthy lambs that, once weaned and fully grown, will then be sold in the autumn. It’s also time to start drilling the rest of our crops and spreading fertiliser on those already in the ground.
Sunday 25th March
Steve is drilling a field with barley. The seed comes in huge bags and is bright red. He pours it into the drill, calibrates the machine so that it will be planted at the correct level, and sets off into the front thirteen acres. I ride with him in the girlfriend seat for a couple of rotations around the fields. It’s a bit faster than ploughing, but there seems to be much more fiddling around with the onboard computer to ensure that the seeds are drilled into the ground at the correct depth and number.
I climb back down and wander off to do my own thing. At lunch time my phone pings with a forlorn text message asking for a cup of tea and a sandwich. I can feel generations of farmers’ wives frowning as I wait at the top of the field for the tractor and then throw up a meagre lunch of a sausage roll, a can of Coke and a Crunchie. Steve nods his thanks and slams the door, already moving in a wide circle back into the drill line. He’ll drive with one hand and eat with the other.
By the end of the day he’s managed to get all the barley into the ground. It’s a huge relief. The only bits he has left to roll today are the headlands, which are the sections at the top of each field. It only takes half a day and then he’s down from the tractor, and in a great mood. It seems to be a constant rush or struggle with the weather, but we’ve had dry days for a day or two, which has made a huge difference. Now all we can do is wait for the crops to ripen.
Tuesday 27th March
No one has started lambing yet. There’s still nothing happening. I sit in the shed and stare at the ewes, and they all calmly stare back. Most of them are lying down and happily chewing their cud. It’s fascinating and almost hypnotic to watch. At first the sheep makes a few convulsive swallows, and you can clearly see a lump of half-digested grass travel up her throat until it pops into her mouth. Then her lower jaw starts to grind, round and round in circles, as she crushes the grass into a thick paste, which is swallowed again with a look of benign contentment.
Some of the ewes carrying triplets are so big that they find it uncomfortable to lie dow
n. They shift their weight from side to side, grunting. Mrs Snuff is so large that she’s resorted to sitting like a dog, with her front feet stuck out in front, propping herself into an upright position.
I have a lot of sympathy. When I was pregnant with my babies, I remember that feeling well. I had so little room at the end that I had constant indigestion and just couldn’t get comfortable to go to sleep.
There’s a lot of snoring and farting. The ewes spend much of the day fast asleep, conserving their energy.
Wednesday 28th March
Still no lambs. I’m getting twitchy and impatient.
I’ve just bought a new box for all our medical supplies, such as antibiotics and painkillers. I spend my time organising them. New ‘sharps’ or needles in one side, bottles of medicine in the other. I make many cups of tea with my new urn, leaf through my lambing book and find an old garden chair to sit on while I scan the sheep.
‘Don’t watch them,’ says Steve. ‘You’ll put them off. It’s like boiling a kettle. If you watch it, it takes ages.’
I’ve taken to lurking around the shed, and nonchalantly watching the sheep out of the corner of my eye to see if anyone’s labour has started.
Thursday 29th March
Still nothing lambing.
When we fed everyone this morning, one ewe had droopy ears and wouldn’t come to the trough.
‘Aw man, it looks like twin lamb,’ says Steve, climbing over the gate to get to his medical supplies.
Twin lamb is another name for pregnancy toxaemia. When a ewe is carrying twins or triplets and she’s not managing to eat enough feed, she starts to draw on her own fat reserves. This releases ketones that can poison the ewe and her lambs. Sometimes lambs are born blind.
There’s no definite cure, but we rely on injecting the ewe quickly with warmed-up calcium borogluconate under the skin, plus a shot of multivitamins. Our ewe also gets a drench (drink) of sugar syrup and electrolytes to try and increase her energy levels.
They don’t always recover, but since we’ve caught this mother early, we’re hopeful that she might pick up.
Friday 30th March
The ewe is looking a bit better. We keep dosing and drenching her to make sure she improves. We’re desperate not to lose any sheep, especially at this stage of lambing.
This evening she’s sitting up in a hospital pen munching on haylage with her ears flicking backwards and forwards. It looks like she’ll recover now, but we’re keeping an eye on her, just to make sure.
Saturday 31st March
Finally! Last night about 11 p.m., Mrs Snuff went into labour. Her lambs are a little bit early, as we didn’t expect her to go into labour for another day or so.
She delivered all three lambs by herself, and they are tiny black-and-brown-speckledy triplets. Mrs Snuff is a Suffolk cross (so she has black legs and a black head) and her lambs have lovely big brown and black splotches across their backs and stomachs.
We quickly get her into a pen and string up a heat lamp for the lambs. This will keep them warm and toasty. Steve then tube-feeds all three with artificial colostrum milk. It’ll just help to keep their stomachs full and make them strong enough to feed themselves. None were standing when we left last night, but this morning two of the lambs were up and about and nosing under Mrs Snuff for her milk. The littlest was warm but hadn’t stood up yet, so we gave him another tummy full of colostrum, just to try and give him a bit of strength.
Mrs Snuff is a great mum. She’s very protective and has licked each lamb clean from nose to tail. She stamps her foot to warn Sumo the farm cat to keep away. Sumo is on the hunt for afterbirth, which he drags away to feast on in another corner of the barn. Disgusting …
Monday 2nd April
I’m checking the ewes every morning at 6 a.m., then every 2–3 hours until 9 p.m. Steve does the night shift from 9 p.m. onwards. He still hasn’t found another job and we’re horribly skint, but at least it means I’m not doing the entire lambing on my own.
Lambing inside a shed has many benefits: it’s warmer for the ewes and it’s easier to check the flock and spot if a mother needs help in giving birth. We used to lamb the entire flock out in the fields, but Steve found the late-night shifts much harder, and the ewes would wander off to the edges of the field to give birth, and in the dark we often didn’t spot if they needed help.
Lambing inside does have one major problem, however.
When she’s about to give birth, an expectant ewe will remove herself from the flock and go to a quieter place, further away from her mates. She can’t do this in a shed, and although our sheep have plenty of space, this lack of ‘separation’ from the rest of the pregnant ewes means that she’s more at risk of other ewes ‘pinching’ her lambs. The sheep are naturally jammed full of oxytocin hormone at this point, and it sometimes makes them believe they’ve given birth when they haven’t.
One ewe will give birth, and another ewe will nip in and start mothering and licking her newly born lamb. These ‘false mothers’ convince themselves that this is their lamb, and they become very attached. Once another ewe has licked a lamb, it’s very difficult to persuade the original mother to allow her baby to feed, as it now smells of another sheep.
To prevent this, we check the sheep every 2–3 hours around the clock, to try and make sure that no babies and mothers get mixed up.
Of course, the other side of the coin is that some ewes will give birth, refuse to lick or clean her lambs, and instead wander off to the hay rack for a spot of lunch, leaving a pathetic lamb shivering in the straw. When this has happened in the past I’ve had to search through all the flock to find the miscreant ewe and reintroduce her to her baby by penning them up together. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn’t.
Tuesday 3rd April
Mrs Snuff is still the only ewe that has given birth so far, and she’s fast asleep in her pen, with all three lambs curled up next to her.
We have sprayed iodine onto the stubs of their umbilical cords to prevent against common infections.
Sheep have two teats to their udders, and usually make only enough milk for two lambs. When triplets are born we need to take the smallest away from the mother within forty-eight hours and feed them on the bottle with powdered lamb milk.
This sounds cruel, but the third lamb wouldn’t have a chance of thriving without being artificially fed. I’ve actually seen a ewe lie down and suffocate a third lamb rather than look after it herself. She knows how many she can mother properly. Sheep can count, it seems!
We reach down into the pen and weigh up which will be our first ‘pet lamb’. The smallest of the three has little black ears and four little black feet. I pick him up and tuck him into my jacket. He starts to bleat and struggle, but Mrs Snuff doesn’t even wake up.
I carry him over to another shed, where I’ve prepared a pen full of straw, with a heat lamp suspended a few inches above the bedding. Sitting in the straw, I wedge him on my knee, pick up the warm bottle of milk and try to slide the teat into his mouth.
He fights and wriggles, so that the milk drips out of his mouth onto his chest. He’s not hungry enough yet, so I give him a stroke and put him down into the straw. I’ll try again in an hour or so. He immediately starts blundering around the pen, blarting for his mother.
Pet lambs are very cute to begin with, especially when they’re first born. Lucy and Ben come out to see the lamb after school and give him the name ‘Fred’. Fred lies curled up underneath the heat lamp with his black nose resting on his tiny hooves. Lucy and Ben coo over him and want to give him cuddles. I remind them that by the end of lambing ‘cuteness fatigue’ will have set in, and the whole family will be heartily sick of pet lambs and preparing milk bottles.
Wednesday 4th April
I’ve bought some very unflattering Flexothane lambing leggings. I hate boiler suits, as they don’t fit round my magnificent monobosom, and waterproof trousers make a rustling noise and give me crotch sweat. But the leggings are so long. They h
ave braces that are supposed to clip onto your waistband to keep them up. I’m going to have to sling them round my neck to stop them dragging on the ground. Attractive. Yet strangely comfy.
I feel prepared. My tea urn is now switched on twenty-four hours a day. I’d originally filled it from the sheep trough, but a medical friend pointed out that it was a sure way to get a nasty bacterial infection called clostridium, so I poured it out and filled it again from the water tap.
No more lambs yet.
Mrs Snuff is doing well, and her lambs are bouncing around the pen. We move her into a bigger area of the shed where she can stretch her legs, and her lambs can strengthen up by running races around the straw.
Fred the pet lamb is now gulping down four bottles of milk a day, and smearing lamb poo all over my wellies and trousers. As soon as he sees me enter the shed he races around his pen blarting furiously, and tries to climb on my lap to get to the bottle. When he finally starts to suck, his little black tail wiggles furiously from side to side. He’ll happily fall asleep on my knee and loves a good neck scratch.
Thursday 5th April
At the 6 a.m. check I go to feed the ewes as normal, and hear the tiniest ‘meep, meep’ noise from the middle of the flock.
A hogg1 ewe has popped out a single lamb on her own. She’s already cleaned it up, and it’s happily wobbling round the shed following its mum closely.
The kids have named it Abby. We mark all single lambs with capital letters – A, B, C, etc., and the pairs/triplets with numbers, which are marked on the mother as well. It helps us keep track of whose lambs are whose. Although when I’m very tired, I sometimes forget what number I’m up to …