by Sally Urwin
The baby does a tiny sneeze and its chest gives a heave. The first breath. But there’s no following second breath, so I leap to my feet, grab the baby’s back legs and start to swing it, head down, backwards and forwards in large arcs across the straw. Birth fluid trickles out of its nose and mouth and spatters the bedding. It gives a convulsive wriggle in my hands and I lay it back down under its mother’s nose and keep on rubbing and squeezing its chest and stomach. It takes another breath. And then another. And lies there on its side in the straw with its flanks going up and down like a tiny pair of bellows. The mother, exhausted, reaches out her muzzle and starts nosing down the little body. A faint chuckle emerges from her throat.
I flop down into the straw beside the lamb. The baby still looks weak, but there doesn’t seem to be any damage to the front leg or shoulder that was trapped inside the ewe.
I rig up another heat lamp and carry the lamb into the pen. Making my ‘meep-meep’ sounds I coax the stiff mother onto her feet and she lies thankfully down in the clean straw, and starts to chuckle and clean her baby.
I give her a big injection of painkillers and antibiotics and cross my fingers that both mother and baby survive. It was a difficult birth, and they’re both sore and bruised.
Tuesday 17th April
The ringwomb mother and her baby are both doing well. They don’t seem any worse for yesterday’s dramatic scenes, and the lamb is now bobbling around the pen, butting the ewe to get at her milk.
Bertha and Hatty have concocted a great trick. At feeding time they both now stand right in the middle of the trough, refusing to move an inch, and I trip over them both, drop the sheep nut sack, and the two big fatties quickly hoover up as many pellets as they can fit in their mouths.
They better produce three ginormous lambs each, as otherwise I’m not sure where the feed is going …
Thursday 19th April
First thing this morning I can hear the pet lambs bleating in a higher pitch than normal. They sound hungry. Their pen is an old stable, and as I walk towards it I see a thin stream of white liquid trickling out from underneath the stable door.
I pull open the door. The straw in the pen is wet and squelchy, and the lambs are all huddled in one corner. The Titty Machine is lopsided, with both teats hanging off the front. It’s pouring out a stream of milk, soaking the lambs, the straw and the concrete floor.
Investigating further I realise that the lambs have chewed through the milk lines, sending the machine into overdrive and pumping out gallons of expensive lamb milk.
I lunge for the ‘off’ button and the machine shudders to a halt. Waves of milk lap at my welly boots. I want to cry. Lamb milk powder is very expensive, and the machine has mixed together and wasted a whole bag.
The pet lambs cluster round my ankles blarting loudly and demanding to be fed. I pick up Fuzzy and cuddle him. He smells even worse now that he’s been paddling in curdled milk all night. I push them all into the corner of a pen, put a hurdle in front and start to drag out the wet straw. It absolutely stinks after a night under the heat lamps. It takes me a good hour to muck out the pen, wash down the concrete with clean water and bed up again with clean, dry straw. The pet lambs watch my every move. Luckily I have a couple of new milk lines, so I swap the chewed ones over, open a new bag of milk powder and attach some new teats.
The machine starts humming again, and after I remove the hurdle the lambs lunge in to start sucking away, their little tails flailing from side to side.
This time, to avoid a repeat performance I tie the milk lines to the hurdle higher up, where the lambs can’t reach them. Like most babies, they chew everything at this stage. They’re very curious, and like to investigate anything new or unusual with their mouths. And their teeth are sharp!
When I’m in the pen with them they mouth at my welly boots or chew on my coat or zip. When I’m sitting, some even rear up on their hind feet, plant their front hooves on my knees and have a good chew of my hair. I’ve learnt to tie it up out of harm’s way to stop them swallowing big hanks of my ponytail.
Finally, all is done. I go back into the lambing shed and make myself a cup of tea from the urn. You need reserves of patience in this job, to stop yourself taking disappointments out on the animals, or just giving up and walking away. It wasn’t the lambs’ fault that they damaged the machine – it was mine. I should have realised that the milk lines were just the right height for curious mouths. Lesson learned.
Friday 20th April
Today I’m existing on sausage rolls, chocolate hobnobs, Diet Coke and plenty of coffee. Steve has gone grey through lack of sleep, and my hands are iodine-stained and I leave a small circle of straw whenever I sit down. It’s still below freezing, and the skin on my face has started to crack with the constant cold.
The first birth this morning was alarming, as it’s only the second time I’ve ever seen a breech, or backwards birth. When I feel inside the ewe, instead of a lamb nose and front feet, there are a pair of sharp, pointed hocks and a tiny dangling tail. Luckily it’s a simple job to hook my fingers under the tiny back hooves and gently ease out the lamb.
We have a few more difficult births this afternoon so myself (and the kids) are tired, whinging and covered in stringy bits of afterbirth. Steve goes on shift soon, so I’m praying that nothing gives birth before my day ends at 9 p.m.
Sunday 22nd April
Hatty has finally given birth. She popped out her three lambs overnight, and when I come in at 6 a.m. she’s chuckling away and cleaning them very carefully from nose to tail. They’re already up on wobbly legs, nosing up into her udder and wiggling their tails when they get a drink.
Hatty’s babies have the typical fuzzy-legged look of a Texel/Mule cross lamb, with the slightly squatter bodies from their Beltex dad. All of them have tiny black noses and long black eyelashes. Hatty thinks they’re the best thing in the world. She’s gone down a bit in size but is still very broad in the beam.
Bertha doesn’t seem any closer to giving birth, and is lying in the straw panting away. If she gets any bigger she won’t be able to get up.
Monday 23rd April
One of our younger ewes gave birth to a dead lamb today. This happens. I think the lamb was born prematurely, as it looks tiny and the wool hasn’t developed properly along its spine. The ewe is lying in the straw beside the tiny body. She’s cleaned it thoroughly but is now completely ignoring her dead baby. I wonder if she’s had a knock at feeding time that damaged her lamb and forced her into labour.
I pick up the little corpse and put it in an empty sheep feed bag. The ewe doesn’t get up but lies in the straw, staring straight ahead and completely ignoring me. I put the sad little bag outside the shed, ready to be picked up by the knacker man. We’re not allowed to dispose of any dead stock ourselves, and dead lambs are no different.
I want to try adopting a pet lamb onto the mother as she has plenty of milk. We have some very young lambs that haven’t yet got the hang of drinking from the Titty Machine.
I pick up two of the smallest and move them into a pen. There’s lots of different ways to adopt lambs onto a mother, and each farmer swears by their own tricks. I’ve watched Steve skinning a dead lamb and fitting the fleece onto another lamb. It never seems to work that well for me, and the dead hide often starts to shrink and smell, which I find rather revolting. Some people swear by soaking the adoptee lamb in different substances, to try and disguise the interloper’s scent. Some farmers try salty water, the mother’s own amniotic fluid or even strong black coffee, before offering the adoptee lamb to the new mother.
I’m not very experienced, and therefore the only successful way I’ve managed to get a ewe to accept a new baby is to use an ‘adopter crate’ for a couple of days. The crate is a narrow, rectangular, open-sided box made from strong plastic. You put the ewe into one end of the box and push her head through the end. She can still get up and down and eat and drink as normal, but she can’t turn around to hurt or kick the new lambs. Th
e theory is that once the lambs have drunk from her and the milk has passed through their system they will smell ‘right’, making it more likely that the mother will adopt them.
This is the idea anyhow.
I move the adopter crate into a pen and haul in the new mother. She stands there for a moment then lies down and starts to eat a mouthful of silage. I gently let the pet lambs into the pen and stand back to see what happens.
They blunder about for a bit, so I push them up towards the ewe’s udders, trying to encourage them to drink. One gets the idea straight away and dives in there, tail waggling. The other lamb doesn’t seem to realise what an udder is for, and noses around hopelessly.
This is when you need reserves of patience. I gently prise open the lamb’s jaws and poke its nose under the ewe’s udder. I push the lamb onto the ewe’s teat and press gently on its nose, trying to stimulate the sucking reflex. It takes a moment, and then the lamb swallows, and its tail flicks from side to side. I take my hand off the nose and it immediately slips off the teat and tries to suck on a mouthful of wool. Sighing, I grab the baby again and have another go. Another couple of sucks and then it slips off for the second time. I’ll have to leave them to it and go and feed/water the rest of the flock. Hopefully the second lamb will get the hang of it all before I check back later.
Tuesday 24th April
The ewe in the crate seems resigned, and isn’t struggling when her new lambs try and suck. The second lamb (christened Ratty, as it looks just like a small woolly rat) isn’t feeding as well as its new brother, but it must be getting something, as it does tiny lamb poos all over the pen.
Yesterday I watched a story on BBC’s Countryfile programme about some new technology that will scan a flock and check the sheep’s expressions to see if they have any pain or are feeling under the weather. Sheep naturally have a slight smiling expression, but if they’re in pain their nose and muzzle tightens and they look pinched and unhappy.
Opinions among the farmers on Twitter are mixed. Some think that shepherds should know their sheep well enough to be able to pick out illness without using technology. I think the ‘smiling scanner’ is a good idea. Anything that helps improve animal welfare is surely a worthwhile invention. Sheep are very good at hiding illness, as in the wild they would quickly be picked off by any predators if they showed any weakness.
The next time I’m out in the shed, I have a look at my flock’s expressions. They all look cheerful, with tiny sheepy smiles.
‘Are you happy?’ I ask Hatty, who is lying in the straw with her two lambs tucked up next to her warm, fleecy body. She’s chewing her cud and her ears are relaxed, out sideways. She looks up at me briefly to check if I’ve got any illicit sheep nuts, but then turns back to her babies.
Even Crate Ewe looks happy – she’s allowing the lambs to suck without any protest. I let her out of the crate and put her new lambs into the next-door pen. She immediately whickers to them and spins around trying to find out where I’ve put them. A good result. I stick them back in with her and she sniffs them all over, while they immediately dive in for a drink. Ratty is now sloshing from all the milk he’s drunk, and lies down in the straw, his tiny belly bulging to one side. I’ll keep an eye on all of them though, as I’ve seen adoptive mothers kick out and kill their lambs if they suddenly decide they don’t want them.
Thursday 26th April
Not a good day.
One of the ewes scanned as triplets gave birth to three perfect lambs. I move her into a nice airy pen, so she could clean them all off in peace. I iodine their tiny umbilical stumps and they start to stand on their wobbly legs.
Off I went to make a sandwich for lunch, and when I come back I can only see two lambs tucked up next to their mother, rather than three. I push the sheep’s rump to make her move and as she stands I see the little crushed corpse flattened under her body. The ewe has lain on one of her lambs and suffocated it underneath her.
I pull it out and sit with the limp body across my knees.
I think there is nothing in terms of lambing that is more frustrating than this.
The ewe is completely unconcerned, and is chewing her cud next to her other new babies.
Maybe she didn’t have enough space? I’d moved her into a bigger ‘triplet’ pen, but maybe she felt it was too small? Maybe she just didn’t want to mother three lambs?
I do not believe for one second that the ewe didn’t know what she was doing, and I know there will be some reason that I can’t yet see to explain why she killed her own baby.
I put the lamb out for the knacker man and walk away to ring Steve. I’m in tears on the phone, which sounds ridiculous, but it was a needless death of a perfect animal. There’s such pressure to produce as many healthy lambs as possible that setbacks can feel like huge disappointments, and it’s easy to lose perspective. Steve comes home and sends me off for a break. I think I’m tired and overwrought.
Saturday 28th April
It’s a better day. Finally the weather has improved. I see some watery sunlight, and it feels warm in the yard outside the lambing shed.
I sit down with my back against a pen and just savour the spring sunshine. A starling is busily swooping in and out of the shed entrance. She’s built a nest in an old tin can wedged behind the shed pillar and she must have lots of chicks. I can hear them squawking and chattering to each other as she bounds in and out with bugs in her beak.
All the sheep are bedded up and everyone is fed and watered. No ewe is on lambing, and it’s wonderful to have half an hour to myself.
I stretch out my feet in my wellies and push them into the warm straw.
In previous years I would keep working for clients through lambing to keep some money coming in. I remember doing a conference call with a client in London while sitting in the lambing shed. It had great 4G mobile connection, and I decided against going back to the house to do the Skype meeting, but instead patched in while perched in the straw.
I think everyone found it distracting, as lambs kept bounding up to the screen and trying to eat my mouse cable. I’d be on Skype telling everyone something sensible about weekly targets when a huge furry face would completely fill their computer screens.
‘Sorry about that. It was just Tilly the sheep coming to see if I have any sheep nuts,’ I’d say, trying to push the ewe off with one foot while her lambs stood on my keyboard.
It came to a head when I was presenting a short section about a marketing database, and a sheep started nibbling on my 4G box so that I disappeared from the screen mid-flow. I think everyone was grateful when lambing finished and I started working from the spare bedroom again.
Sunday 29th April
Bertha is finally in full lambing mode. She’s scraping at the straw, getting up and lying down and starting to push.
A dark bag of liquid appears at her hind end and bursts, and she turns around to mouth and sniff at the wet straw. She wrinkles her top lip and starts stargazing, stretching out her head and neck to stare at the ceiling. Eventually a foot appears, and then everything shudders to a halt. Bertha is still straining but there’s no progress, just a foot sticking out of her vulva.
I kneel behind her and feel inside. Bertha is tired and makes a heartfelt groan while laying her head down into the straw. I can feel the second foot tucked down so I reach through the cervix just as Bertha’s contractions hit again.
‘Ow! Bloody hell!’
She starts to push and her cervix crushes against my wrist. There’s nothing to do but wait it out as the muscular contractions try to expel my hand from her body.
When the pressure and crushing sensation is over, I quickly hook a finger around the tiny hoof and draw the lamb out onto the straw.
She’s got two more inside, so I give her a hand with those as well, grabbing the forelegs and guiding the lamb’s nose and head through the cervix and out into the fresh air.
Afterwards all three lambs lie wet and shivering on the straw, starting to shake their litt
le heads and make tiny ‘meep, meep’ noises. Bertha is pleased with her babies and starts to make a chuckling sound while licking them all over.
My hand hurts. I give it a shake, splash iodine over the lambs’ umbilical cords and move the little family into a pen.
I need a proper cup of tea. Not one served from a grubby urn. The brewery is open today, so I stagger in, covered in blood and gunk. Heather serves me a cuppa without even wrinkling a nose at my stained waterproofs. I sit at the bar picking bits of straw out of my hair while Lizzie does a wedding ‘show round’ to a prospective couple. I must look like the local madwoman.
Tuesday 1st May
My best friends Sarah and Debbie have turned up to give me a hand. Friends often pop in to see me, as they know the tea urn is always on and that I can’t go far from the lambing shed.
They bring cake, so we sit on upturned buckets and scoff chocolate gateau while watching the lambs race backwards and forwards in the big pen. The chickens can spot a snack from twenty paces, so I throw them chocolatey crumbs to stop them doing smash-and-grab raids on the confectionery.
I love my friends. They keep me sane and make me laugh. Today I’m feeling really knackered. It’s that mid-lambing slump, when you know that half the flock has lambed, all the novelty has worn off, and you still have half to go. Plus you’re grey, your skin has gone all lumpy and your hands are cracked and sore.
Sarah and Debs sit patiently with the pet lambs, pushing them up to the Titty Machine and teaching them how to suck.
Wednesday 2nd May