Lambing Report

 What you should know:

1. I am traumatised.
2. I might always be a softie. 

We're almost, almost at the end of lambing. (I say 'we' but I've really had very little to do with it all.)

The extent of my involvement

There is one ewe left to lamb. She's really stringing it out, enjoying the spa treatment of the lambing shed, that includes daily feeding and watering and regular staring, swearing and shaking fists from anyone named Fisher. 

"I'm just enjoying some me time"

She's expecting a single lamb. This would have been handy at the start of the week as there were a couple of unexpected lambs. Sometimes at the tail end of lambing there are triplets when twins were expected as they were too small to be seen during scanning (see this blog post for a bit more about scanning). 

I've mentioned in previous blogs that twins tend to fare better than triplets but haven't gone into detail. Mainly because it's quite hard to explain. Let's start with the easy bit. 

1. Ewes have two teats so twins always have a ready supply of milk. 
2. Often the third triplet is quite small so has trouble muscling in on the other two. 
3. This is where 'twinning on' comes in. 

Twinning on involves persuading a ewe with a single lamb that she had a second lamb that she just hadn't noticed. It can be done in a number of ways and to varying degrees of success. 

• The lamb is put in beside her in her pen and everyone just crosses their fingers. 
• The lamb is covered in her afterbirth (or 'cleaning' as I learned it was called the other day) so that it smells like her own lamb and she licks it clean.

Those of a sensitive disposition, look away now. 

• The lamb is covered in the skin and fleece of her dead lamb like a little chichi jacket and the ewe is none the wiser. 

You can come back now.

Thankfully here, one of the first two ways tends to be used as I'm not sure I could handle the third. 

"Me? Been here all the time."

All this reduces the likelihood of having pet lambs that have to be bottle fed and kept close by before they're strong enough to go out into the field unaccompanied. 

There are no pet lambs here this year. They've either been twinned on, twinned themselves on by wandering into a neighbouring pen and pretending they were there all along or not quite made it. And other ewes have kept all three lambs as they had enough milk to make all of the triplets strong. 

Hearty twins

I'm too traumatised to tell you the story of the lamb that went to another farm the other night to be twinned on elsewhere. Maybe next year when I've toughened up a bit after another orbit round the sun. It seems unlikely, though, doesn't it.