Ruminations from the Lambing Barn - Rejection

Today the air is silver-hazed, and the grass flares livid green against the pale yellow of the daffodils beside the drive. Everything seems to cry out that spring is really here at last, and after the dull greyness of the last few weeks, that is a relief. Spring is the word that makes people think of unfurling buds, the delicate pinks and creams of cherry blossom, and lambs playing tag in the fields.

There are so many threats to a newborn lamb. The very first danger they face after they find themselves expelled from the warm darkness of their mother’s womb, is rejection. Sheep are usually wonderful mothers who guard their babies with a fierce and protective love, but not always. Sometimes a ewe, often a ‘shearling’ ( a first time mother) may decide with unshakeable determination that this lamb which just seconds ago swam in the amniotic fluids within her, does in fact have nothing to do with her at all.

A ewe just before she gives birth will dig nests in the straw, and lick at leaking birth fluids; she is learning to know her lamb by taste and smell, while all the time she bleats plaintively as if she has already lost what has not yet been born. After the birth it is by sound and smell she will recognise her lamb, and the lamb will know her by her voice. If that chain is disrupted and maybe another ewe licks the lamb thereby changing its smell, it is possible its mother will not accept it as hers.

This photograph should be called 'Mother Love' as this old ewe stares adoringly at her newborn lamb and it is clear that her only aim for months to come will be to love and protect him.

There are ways of dealing with rejection. One is to use a delicious vanilla musk to mask the smell of the rejected and accepted twin alike and that should hopefully convince the ewe that the two are both hers. Anther traditional way is to restrain the ewe so she can eat, drink and lie down, but smell neither lamb for a few days. By that time it is hoped, she will have forgotten which one was not wanted and accept them both.

That has never worked for me and I have usually ended up with the rejected lamb as a bottle fed pet, with a name, and a long life ahead of it, which doesn’t involve freezers or sheepskin rugs – fine for a ewe lamb as she can earn her keep in the years to come with her own lambs, but hopeless for a ram lamb as only the very best can be kept or sold for breeding.

Today I released a little ram lamb’s (photo at the to of the page) impossible mother back into the main flock and have resigned myself to bottle feeding him. I will try not to name him, nor to grow too fond of him, so he will be called just Lamb. But I fear that if you visit the farm in years to come, Lamb will be a fully grown ram, still enjoying our grass and feed. Today though, he sniffed the daffodils and wondered why everyone else had a mother and an on-tap milk bar...

There is still one ewe to lamb which has been scanned as carrying a single lamb, the rest are carrying twins or triplets. If the ewe with the single lamb decides to give birth soon, then I will try to persuade her to adopt Lamb. But if she takes more than a week, then Lamb will be too big for adoption, and the best I can hope for then is to find him a friend so that while he might be motherless, he won’t be alone - he will at least have someone else to snuggle up with on a cold spring night, and to hang out with round the hay rack. I will keep you posted…

...then along came the Cotswolds

So back to Stoneleigh and Weylode Windflower, (Windy, to her friends) who was certainly not black and white with handlebars. No, she was a much bigger, more solid sheep, with wonderful curly wool and a thick fringe of dreadlocks which hung above her large deep brown eyes. But what I really fell in love with was her white face, delicate dark nose and her turned up mouth which made her look as if she were smiling, rather like a dolphin…
Windy was a Cotswold Sheep, sometimes called The Cotswold Lion because of their wonderfully thick wool around their necks which looks just like a lion’s mane.

Brought to Britain by the Romans the Cotswolds have grazed our grass for many hundreds of years. Once there were thousands of them grazing the Cotswold Hills bringing prosperity to farmers and there their wool was traded around the world. By the late twentieth century they were facing extinction. Now there are about 1500 breeding ewes in the country - not many when you think that there are single flocks of commercial sheep which number several thousand. And as many of the Cotswold sheep are kept in the Cotswolds another outbreak of Foot and Mouth could return them to th ebrink of destruction. But that's too depressing to think of... now it's lambing time which means sleepless nights and worry and hours of sheep bleats....

In the beginning there were Jacobs

So to recap – my husband had no intention of any additional mowing hence the arrival of the ovine mowers… twenty Jacobs (each with a nice pair of handle bars, which I soon discovered were very useful for grabbing hold of, but extremely painful when digging you in the thigh) had duly arrived, eaten a large amount of grass, put on an extremely satisfying amount of weight and were about to head for my, and various friends’ freezers, when my husband had another helpful suggestion.
‘Why don’t we have lambs, otherwise who will eat the grass next year?’
I didn’t recognise it at the time but that was THE crossroads moment of my recent life. That was the second I should have realised what trouble another ‘Fine’ would be letting me in for… freezing nights in the fields, or in more recent times, in the barn (slightly more civilised but still not a patch on my bed), hours of staring at the back ends of sheep wondering why what I was seeing there didn’t look anything like the book described, and when all went truly pear-shaped having to phone knowledgeable, and long-suffering, friends in the middle of the night, or as a last resort receiving a visit from a charming, but exhausted, vet…
Anyway, for better or for worse, I said ‘Fine.’
So the Jacobs had their lambs and I found myself on the steepest learning curve of my life. But somehow we all got through the first and second lambing seasons reasonably well, and the damage was done - I was hooked on sheep…

Why Sheep Bleats?

Question – Why blog?
Answer – Why not? After all words are a refreshing change from bleats, and during lambing, bleats are about all I hear being fairly well confined to base for the duration – so why not try something different, and for me a blog certainly is different! And while I know, as an aspiring author, there are other pieces of mine that need proofing and completing, they do always say ‘write what you know’ and at the moment ‘I know’ sheep’.. .and I feel that I should not keep all that knowledge to myself … indeed I should inflict my sheep thoughts on to a wider sheep free world – so here are my sheep bleats… sorry, thoughts…
So where did this sheep thing begin? I suppose some nine years ago when I went to the Rare Breeds Sale at Stoneleigh in Warwickshire to buy a pair of ducks. The problem was that I not only bought a pair of ducks, but I also bought a sheep too. Not any old sheep, but one with a name and a pedigree, Weylode Windflower to be precise.
We had a few sheep already. We had moved house fairly recently and found ourselves proud owners of several acres (or rather less hectares as I am now supposed to call them) of water meadows.
However, it was only at this point that my husband said, ‘I’ve no intention of mowing this lot. Why don’t we get some sheep?’
’Fine,’ I said, knowing little of sheep except having some vague memories of bottle feeding a pet lamb called Paddy. Paddy, who turned from a cute tail-wagging lamb, into a head-butting monster, which would charge anyone unwise enough to enter his field and send them flying. But the pain of those landings had been softened by time.