Lambing: The Prequel

What I learned last week:

1. High numbers make Ivie happy.
2. I might have to roll my sleeves up in March. 

Last year, I wrote three blogs about lambing (imaginatively entitled Lambing: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. I'm nothing if not creative). As time went on, I got more involved but only as much as squirting iodine on newborn lambs' navels and occasionally feeding the pet lambs. I've yet to actually lamb a ewe and, to be fair, I'm not sure I'd be trusted. 

It's a bit of a responsibility as so much can go wrong (and they're also not my animals). The lamb can come out the wrong way round - in lambing terms, you want the front legs first, then the head - or it can get stuck on the way out. It's not all cute lambs gambolling around and bleating, sadly. 

Anyway, one of the things I'd heard a bit about before was scanning percentages. Every year, a man comes with a special ultrasound to find out how many lambs are due in the Spring. I haven't actually seen it in action but I like to think of it as the self-serve counter in the supermarket. 

Each ewe is scanned and the man shouts out the number of lambs - hopefully 1, 2 or 3 - so the ewe can be sprayed with the right colour. And then Ivie hands over his Nectar card. Or something. After all the scans, the machine tots up the numbers and comes up with a percentage.

You want the percentage to be nice and high as that means lots of twins and triplets on the way. This year, the Spittal percentage was 205%, making Ivie and his brother very happy indeed (no, really).

There are 48 sets of triplets due next Spring. This is good as it means lots of lambs but it also means lots of pets. This does not make Ivie and his brother happy. 

Ewes have two teats which means that twins generally fare better than triplets, although ewes with just one lamb can often be persuaded to 'adopt' (more on that in a later blog). 

The maternity ward lambing shed is going to be a busy place with lots of multiple births, adoption hearings and the like. I'm a bit worried that I'm going to have to get a bit more involved than in the past. Hopefully, this will just mean filling water and feed troughs and not getting in the way, rather than scrubbing up and wearing gloves that go up to the shoulder. 

Now I'm wondering if #lambing2021 will require masks. 

Lambing: Part 3

Things I learned this week:

1. There are far worse places to be in self-isolation
2. Life (and lambing) goes on

It's been a funny old week for everyone. I'm now in lockdown for 12 weeks since I had a kidney transplant in 1997. I'm lucky that I don't live on my own anymore and that I have Ivie to go to the supermarket and listen to my inane witterings. It's going to be tougher on him than me, to be fair. 

I'd hoped that by the time Lambing: Part 3 came around that I'd be able to tell you that I'd delivered my first live lamb and could now wrestle a ewe in labour to the ground. But the only progress I've made is to feed the pet lambs - one of which is going to die anyway Ivie's brother informed me the other night (cheers for that) - and help Ivie give a wee triplet colostrum. 

The next section is for non-farmers. Farmers - skip this paragraph because:

a. I might have got it wrong

b. I still think lambs are cute (even more so after three glasses of wine) 🍷🍷🍷

Pet lambs are the ones that need a bit more TLC. They might be orphans or more often they're the smallest of a set of triplets. A ewe only has two teats so twins generally fare better. It is possible for a ewe with a single lamb to take on another ewe's triplet but that's a story for another day. 

Colostrum is contained in a lamb's first feed and is full of antibodies. If a lamb doesn't get any in its first 6-12 hours then it might not survive. Giving a new lamb colostrum involves a syringe and a tube down its throat into its stomach. Not as horrific as it sounds. 

Calves and Lambs
Photo by Ivie

*** Farmers rejoin here ***

Lambing has reminded me of the things you take for granted when you're dating a non-farmer:

• going to bed at the same time as each other
• having a lazy Sunday morning together reading the papers
• entire evenings when your partner is wide awake

But the positives far outweigh the negatives:

• at least an hour and a half on my own every morning before I have to interact with another human being
• really appreciating a surprise night off when Ivie's brother was waiting for his daughter to arrive home from college 
• being surrounded by new life and signs of Spring

And, as I said at the beginning of this post, there are far, far worse places to be in self-isolation. 

View from the front step
Photo by Ivie