We are done with lambing this year. Months of preparation. Late and sleepless nights. Early mornings. Days of work that stretched to midnight and beyond. But we are done. Lambing is all over bar the bottle feeding. We are tired. Frazzled. Too much adrenaline. Too little caffeine. Long days and short sleeps. But we are 16 lambs richer and a little more wise.
I’m proud of this seasons lambing. Every lamb has made it to day ten. Which is the most vulnerable time. Now they scarper around the fields in wild mobs, much too fast for any fox to catch, and hardy enough to manage whatever cold or rain Spring can sling at them.
16 lambs. Twins for every ewe. It’s geeky as all hell, but our lambing percentage is 200. 2 lambs per ewe. The average, even for a small pedigree rare breed flock like ours, is 150/160%. I’m proud of that. We had one loss, a ewe I raised, cared for, who remained part of the flock because I did a huge amount of work with her. Tending her hooves, gradually getting her back to health, treating her day after day. Probably milk fever, which struck after the midnight checkup, and proceeded very quickly. A handful of hours. A short span of time. 6 at the most, and she passed away in the night. Stock I cared for, and that returned that care with trust.
Such is farming. A loss can make you sick to your stomach. Her two cossets, her orphan lambs that we are bottle feeding, are growing fat on the four hourly feeds we give them. When my beard and glasses hove into view they bawl and yell “mommy” at me.
Lambing is done. Grass is finally growing in the fields. The thin whips of willow are coming into leaf. The hawthorn flowers are finally unfolding. The grass and the green and the flowering trees are finally here and with them life. A late spring here in North West Ireland, and still cold. Mobs of headlong tilting scrambling and scurrying milk drunk lambs hareing around the fields and tumbling in great woolly piles of lamb legs and tails. The first cuckoo of the year called yesterday, a pair of them. In the far fields we’ve seen raptors circling over the fields and the forests, and the dawn chorus has ramped up. Beyond the hill late at night I can hear the vixen call, as I feed the cossets their last bottles. The first bluebell of the year has broken cover in the woods behind the house. We are through the worst.
Spring is here. Late it may be, but more welcome still because of that.
