When it comes to lambing, people often have a beautiful image of sunny skies, daffodils blooming and newborn lambs bouncing about in lush green fields. To get to this stage though there is a lot of hard work involved, a lot of sleepless nights and a few problems along the way too. Quite often you find you either have a run of problems at the beginning of lambing and then everything goes relatively well, or, everything goes great to begin with, then you end up with one thing after another. That is what has happened to us this year! 

The first 2 weeks of our lambing went extremely well, and all the ewes and lambs are now away out to the grass. Week 3 had other ideas though…… 

For some reason, the remaining ewes decided that it was time to switch entirely to night shift and proceeded to wait until 10pm each night to start lambing, stop at about 6am then wait till 10pm again! Hence, there was a few blurry eyes about the farm! We also had our first (& hopefully last) ‘vet job’ for a ewe expecting twins. Vet assistance always tend to be needed in the middle of the night, so after a midnight call, our amazing vet Euan, managed to help 2 lovely big live lambs into the world. Then of course, there was the 2am buckaroo event where one of the ewes lambed but when I tried to pen her up she was having none of it! After a few Usain Bolt laps around the shed I eventually caught her (at the opposite side of the shed from the pen of course) and then ‘enjoyed’ hanging on to her, whilst trying to wrestle her to the pen, as she tried her best buckaroo moves with me!! And then we had the weather…….SNOW!! The idea of lambing in March/April time is that the weather is usually picking up and the grass is starting to grow, not so much this year although the last few days have thankfully been a bit better.  

In between times we had a poorly ewe with a condition called mastitis. This is an infection in the udder and, if not caught in time, it can be fatal. Luckily, we did catch this one but we had to remove her lamb as the mastitis had caused a major reduction in her milk meaning the lamb wasn’t getting enough and it was too painful for the ewe to leave the lamb to suckle. We also had a few ewes who decided they didn’t like the idea of being a mother and didn’t want to let their lambs feed at all. These ewes require a good deal of time & a lot of patience, but I’m pleased to say they all came round and now love their babies! And the biggest problem of all…….our helpers, Rory, Euan & Blair, all went back to school!!!! 

So, although we have had less sheep to contend with this week, they have all required much more time spent on each one and I must admit I am glad that there is only one more week and 6 pregnant ewes left for lambing 2021!