Monthly Archive

On Saturday the rain hurled rods and sleet flung stinging shot; the wind whipped and howled, crashing and banging anything and everything with vandalistic glee; the fields ran and sighed with cold clay water – and I lost a lamb. She died from pasteurella. She was bonny, big and strong; she and her sister were some of the first lambs to be born.

I’d been up in the top yard checking the buildings were holding out, and the ewes and lambs hadn’t succumbed to drowning or hypothermia. Surprisingly everyone was okay though a mite wet and bedraggled; the ewes had sensibly brought most of the youngest lambs into shelter. Returning back down to the farmhouse Robert made some remark about the water supply and so couple of hours later I went back up to check all was well. And there she was, dead. Pasteurella is that sudden. It’s a bacterium, p. heamolytica, which leads to severe pneumonia. I’ve never had a case before on this farm. They say if you’ve had one probably more will follow so I’ve been keeping an ever watchful eye on the flock and…I dare say no more.

But what a difference a day makes.  It was time to move Dot, her offspring and a couple of other ewes and lambs up to rejoin the main flock.  Walking them slowly up the hill to the Rutleighs I felt and smelt a balmier air.  A definite stirring. The verges along the lane had erupted with the crumpled unfurling of cow parsley and hog weed.  Down in the dip the pungent cat’s pee smell of wild currant mixed with earthy watery dampness. Primroses cover the hedge banks and nestled in a sheltered mossy hollow I found the first shy violet. Promise…

I love wearing grey: blending, cloaking, merging. Subtle, veiling, yet a window to life beneath. Both disguising and revealing. A foil for the complex colours of the soul.

Sultry, smudgy charcoal, wispy, misty smoke. Sharp-glint granite, feather-down nestle dove grey, iridescent mussel pearl. Gauzy-gossamer and ethereal ashes of roses. Addictively, I’m drawn to it. My wardrobe is full of shades of grey; I collect the colour in all its varying hues.

My comfort blanket, handed down from my great grandmother and miraculously free from moth damage, is made from the softest, snuggliest cashmere – a smoky charcoal one side and soft cloud the other. To wrap oneself in its comforting soothingness is pure bliss. And then there’s grey jumper.

I bought grey jumper about twenty years ago for no other reason than it was another grey jumper. Overlarge, a simple block square design, perfect to throw on over anything. It became a staple, not only to me but to the boys too…after a days surfing ‘throw us a jumper mum’; coming in from a cold wet windy day ‘where’s grey jumper?’. A hormonal downer, a rejection or some deep thought-thinking - you’d find them curled up in it. Walking, farming, gardening; holidaying, travelling, drifting…grey jumper would be found stuffed in some nook or cranny.

Over the years it’s often found itself in the pile of clothes to be given away, recycled or bundled to the charity shops only to be snatched back. And every year at the beginning of lambing and calving I find myself rooting around in the bottom of the cupboard. With a contented sigh I pull grey jumper out, slip the well-worn fabric over my head, ready to face whatever lies ahead, secure in my other skin.

Everyday I check the ewes with eagle eye. Once over the frantic, hectic lambing and immediate post lambing days it’s very easy to rest on one’s laurels, sit back, enjoy the hilarious antics of growing lambs and the satisfying sight of the flock contentedly grazing.

One of my problems this year is too much milk…yes, too much milk! Supposedly due to last year’s wet summer I’ve had a higher than normal percentage of singles. A proportion of ewes that generally twin have given birth to single lambs and yet are still producing milk enough for two; resulting in engorged, painful udders until lamb, mum and milk sort themselves out - regulate. This can resolve itself naturally but not always, and if ignored could lead to mastitis. Mastitis in sheep is very serious, unlike mastitis in cows, and almost certainly results in the loss of the udder if not the ewe. An ‘udder’ (groan - sorry, just couldn’t help myself…) problem is orf. The stress of lambing can cause a break-out of orf pustules around the teat area (similar to reoccurring shingles in humans). It’s very painful and the ewe will prevent the lamb from sucking – and, you’ve got it…inflamed udder, damaged teat and possible mastitis if not detected and treated.

Today at  feeding time I noticed a young feisty ewe with a very lopsided udder. Unfortunately the sheep were thinning out around the troughs (the easiest time to catch them is when they’re in a feeding frenzy) and she saw me coming. After several abortive attempts at trying to catch her I was about to give up when I thought I would try out some sheep whispering.

Crouching, I approached her and her lamb slowly, very, very slowly with my arms outspread. Looking her directly in the eye, I mumbled soft sounds whilst gradually moving forward. My mind was totally focused. Edging closer and closer I saw her fear and anxiety reached fever pitch then gradually subside; her breathing steadied. I was inches from her. I made no attempt to catch her. I waited just a second or so; she took a steady step towards me, looking unswervingly into my eyes she put her head forward to snuffle my hand. For a moment we were frozen together - a tableaux. She allowed me to put my arm around her chest, start the milk flowing from her swollen udder and encourage her lamb to suck.

It was over in minutes. One trance-like udder-relieved ewe and her lamb rejoined the flock and one happily flabbergasted shepherd walked the half mile back home - grinning.

I’ve run out of steam. For me March can be like that. The world around me has lifted; lighter and brighter, faster and smarter, pulsing in an elevated frequency - but I am not resonating to this hammering beat.

Bird business flourishes and whirrs through bush and branch, a helter-skelter of display, mating and nesting, collecting and feeding. A lattice-work city of frenetic activity. Song clamours from every direction swelling the air with vibrating tunes and notes; the head-banging enthusiasm of the woodpecker’s drumming, a heart-busting liquid cadence from a blackbird, the clear loud chime of the great-tit belling, a robin’s hope-filled spring aria, the rabble-rousing, chattering, squabble of sparrows. Even the night echoes around the vixen-cry of the barn owl discordant against the quivering ‘oos’ of the tawny owl’s hoot. The first chiffchaff, the first skylark, an imagined cuckoo…

The trees shift imperceptibly as their roots suck up draughts of deep cold water. Buds tremor, blush, swell and burst. Peeks and flashes of fresh-clean acid green. Cotton-wool buds of pussy willow, golden-rain catkins. Shoots thrust with phallic determination through wet glutinous clay topped with winter detritus.

Ice-clear light bounces off surfaces in shattered kaleidoscopic patterns. My eyes sting - hurt. I’m so far behind this living vitality. Lost still in the sludgy greys of winter, my body has yet to shed its winter skin. I feel a pale, slow, sallow shadow beside the energy of life around me. Ugly and unlovely. Soon I will catch up with mother earth but for a few weeks more I shall struggle to free myself from Skadi’s clutch.

In the glow of the setting sun on Monday evening Dot gave birth to twins. The last lambs of 2008 to be born. Dot is my oldest sheep (to find out more about her click on Sheep Secrets) and quite a character - even Robert has a soft spot for her and he has no time whatsoever for sheep. I was hoping to keep her away from the tups last autumn, but Dot had other ideas. I kept my fingers crossed that at least she would spare herself and have a single - but no, in true Dot style, she was in lamb to twins…yet again.

Old productive ewes carrying twins can run into problems during the later part of the pregnancy. Pregnancy toxaemia can develop as the fast growing lambs take more energy than the ewe can take in. If the signs are not seen early on the ewe can become so depleted she’ll stop eating all together; having reached this point it becomes very difficult to pull her back to recovery.

Over the last month I’ve watched Dot with an eagle eye and as soon as I saw her interested in food was waning I took measures to make sure she had access to an easy unchallenged measure of oats and molasses. Soon she was back to her old self, bright and lively, though still thin.

Dot gave birth on Monday evening with the minimum of fuss and bother. But she wasn’t out of the woods quite yet. With the unborn lambs having used up all her resources and her labour having sapped every last ounce of energy, she had nothing left to make milk with. It’s a fine line allowing the lambs to suckle to encourage milk supply and teaching them to suck a bottle to substitute the ewe’s milk. But with patience one eventually gets the balance right.

Old ewes can crash after the stress of giving birth, and Dot did. The immediate need for energy and the changing hormones can cause digestive upsets and prohibit the liver from working properly. So it’s careful nursing and feeding, letting the ewe have access to ivy and certain plants that will help her rebalance her metabolism. I gave her a multi-vitamin jab as B vitamins help kick start the liver.

We’re there! Today Dot is nearly back to normal and has begun grazing, making some milk and eating a small quantity of whole oats. Her lambs are bonny and bouncy and joy of joy the little ewe lamb is a replica of her mum – a mini Dot!

So here’s to Dot’s last lambs…and a peaceful retirement!

bluetongue’s winter warmer

Now here’s a thing. I had a fit of the giggles. Actually it was probably a touch of mini-hysteria; the uncontrolled, raucous, thigh-slapping, tears-pouring-down-face kind, coloured by total disbelief. Wishful thinking there – what I would hope to be total disbelief.

In this week’s New Scientist under the heading ‘Bluetongue’s Winter Warmer‘ we were told about the distinct possibility of bluetongue virus overwintering in the unborn calf cosseted and protected by the cosy bubble of bovine uterine warmth.

And as those hungry veracious biting midges reappear (the end of the non-vector period was the 15th March) these bonny babies would become a delicious fresh source of the bluetounge virus. Hey-presto! Yup, you have it in one.

Pirbright suggest there should be additional controls targeted at newborn animals. Now, me-wonders, what on earth have they in mind? No vaccine around yet. Could only be one other thing.

And if that’s not sinister enough – listen to this…the only bluetongue virus ever seen to cross the placenta of infected mothers to infect their foetuses was a laboratory-adapted strain used in experiments with sheep in the 70s.

Ring any bells? Shades of last summer’s FMD fiasco? Afterall the great and the good have been wondering how the BTV8 strain gained such an unshakable foothold in northern Europe.

Maybe they now have their answer.

I’ve surfaced from a surfeit of lambings. Zombie-like and mindless. Why?

It doesn’t seem to matter much if you have a large or small flock – for one reason or another it evokes the same reaction in the shepherd. I started off my shepherding with a dozen or so Longwools expanding to two hundred Mules and Mule-Suffolk crosses when I was dairying, back down to a medium flock of Herdwicks which I grazed over moorland on the North Devon coast and finally to my Whiteface Dartmoors here at Locks. Oh, and somewhere in there was a sprinkling of mad hysterical Shetlands that Robert gave me as a present one Easter – never again! Each breed has its good and bad points and it really depends what you’re after as to what breed you choose. The main thing is you like what you’ve got – that will help you tolerate multitudinous sins…

Sheep generally lamb together, it’s part of their flock survival strategy. So you are dealing with rapid-fire; that’s lots of births in quick succession, many of them multiple, and associated difficulties.

And then there’s temperament, theirs and yours. Sheep have tendency towards hysteria when they lamb whether there’s a problem or not; but if you’re dealing with a complication, and the ewe you’re helping suddenly decides she’s not dying and legs it across a muddy field, or uses the lambing shed as a race track, it can be difficult to keep one’s patience and cool.

And patience, calmness and time are definitely needed - to make sure all newborns have suckled and have a belly full of colostrum (first milk full of fats and antibodies): baby lambs are tiny and it’s imperative they suckle as soon as possible after birth. Once ewes have lambed and are penned, ewes and lambs are bonded, and lambs are sucking well …it’s maintenance time - water bucket, hay net, feed, bedding. At the same time you are dealing with all this you could have a handful of ewes in varying stages of labour. It’s trying to be everywhere at once that’s energy sapping.

Twelve to twenty-four hours after birth, all lambs (providing they are strong and healthy) need double-tagging in the ears, tail docking, and castrating if males; mothers need their feet trimming (they haven’t been done for the last three months  of their gestation) and worming. When lambs have recovered from handling, tagging, docking and castrating they are numbered along with their mums for easy counting and identification in the field. Mine are transferred to an adjacent nursery field close to the house with access to shelter. Back in the lambing shed, the pens are mucked out and disinfected ready for the next occupant.

Every year due to tiredness or just lambing pandemonium there’s someone whose tail is forgotten, a tag wrongly recorded or a lamb who slips through as a female when he’s a male and should have been castrated. I have a note book in the shed which I translate onto the lambing sheet in the house – there are always mistakes in transcription, however hard I try!

And that, in a nutshell, explains the dazed, shell-shocked expression friends’ or acquaintances’ have when they say in a rather bemused fashion ‘Oh, I’ve been lambing’.

I’m afraid I am exhausted, weary and dragging a body around that seems to be made of led. I mentioned the sheep were hanging onto their lambs this year and according to my calculations only had the next couple of days in which to lamb. Well, that’s just what they’ve done. Since yesterday afternoon lambs have been dropping left, right and centre – I’ve only a handful left to go! The cows, not wanting to be left out of the fun, thought they would add a bit of spice by having a couple of calves too.

My bed beckons. Sinking my head into a soft pillow and letting oblivion wash over me for a few hours would be ultimate bliss. I’ll leave you with a picture of some of the first shoots of wild garlic I found the other day. It’s green, it’s peaceful, it’s not an animal and it’s not going to have babies….

This weekend we burnt. Throughout the winter months Robert lays hedges. This is done in rotation over the farm and is a bit like the Forth bridge – you never ever get to the end.

The final hedge to be laid this winter is between Dillings and Rushy Field. Our third time of laying since we’ve been here. Stupid. In retrospect we should have trimmed it more often to encourage the hedge to stay thick, bushy and do what it’s meant to do; be a strong effective stock barrier as well as providing a bountiful larder, the ultimate des. res. and the definitive transport system for multitudinous types of wildlife. This doesn’t mean hedges should be trimmed every year – but once every three to four and at a slightly greater height each time. By doing this you can increase the hedge’s useful life as a bushy barrier and it should only need laying, say, every twenty years, even forty years, instead of every eight. Of course there’s the other side to the coin – if you don’t trim but lay, the hedge will produce copious quantities of firewood and won’t require hours of fuel-guzzling tractor work. Something which with our changing climate and countryside we should to take into consideration?

It’s hard gruelling work, laying hedges. Especially on our land as the trammelled clay becomes a gloopy, welly-hungry, energy-depleting morass. Over the years Robert has honed his skill and expertise resulting in hedges that are aesthetic living sculptures, works of art. My role, on the other hand, continues much as it always has. I’m the skivvy, the pack donkey, the serf that trudges up and down the hedge line bowed under huge bundles of branches and brash for the final burn and tidy. But in some perverse way it’s satisfying, hard, hot work. And a change from the intensity of the lambing and calving sheds.

A first for Locks Park…twin heifer calves!

They are the sweetest things and I found myself treating them more like lambs than calves. Luckily they were eager to suck and happy to be helped with the standing-balancing act which was slightly problematic when all your growing has gone into bone with very little muscling. Gwen started calving at around 5 am and finished by 8 am. She’s a very gentle, sweet and attentive mum after the surprise of finding two babies who needed attention. Read the rest of this entry »

Lambing and calving is a strange time of year. It’s unsettling. I still have masses of routine things to do. But I avoid them. I can’t concentrate on computer work, I shun the phone - where are you? the messages demand; I wander listlessly through the house and wander back again.

Happier outside. I put on my boots, hat and coat; check the sheep, ewes and lambs, check the cattle, cows and calves. Carry hay, carry straw, muck out pens, scrub and disinfect, ready for the next occupant. I’m hungry; I’m yearning for something delectably delicious, though nothing tempts me. I pick at proper food and end up eating a whole packet of shortbread, cashew nuts and maltesers which make me feel sick.

Oh it’s time! On with the boots, on with the hat, coat, pockets heavy with knife, castrating tool, homeopathic remedies, iodine, surgical gloves, notebooks and pen, twine and hanky; out again to check sheep, check cows, check lambs and calves.

Each year I think I’ll manage to avoid my slip into no-man’s-land. Cook good food, rest after lunch, keep to some normal routine if at all possible and prevent the slide. Never works.

I’m in a lull. The first snow-sprinkling of lambs born and I’m experiencing a hiatus. Surely, you’d think, a welcome break before the intensity to come; time to recoup and recover? But it doesn’t work like that. Giving birth isn’t an exact science it’s unpredictable. So every few hours it’s out to check. Waiting, I’m out of kilter; jumpy, wondering when the bubble will burst.

In the nursery field I keep an eagle eye out for any problems that may develop with baby lambs and their mums. Post-partum mastitis, scours in either ewe or lamb, orf, inter-digital abscesses, pneumonia, clostridia, failing-to-thrive and, less serious, but very uncomfortable, scraping glutinous-glue-sticky colostrum-ochre stools which gum tails hard and fast to ballooning rumps (dogs’ delight!). The first few days can be critical. Energy required by a post-partum lactating ewe is huge and demanding, stress triggering all manner of nasty surprises. Baby lambs are tiny and vulnerable, dependant on the ability of their mothers and diligence of their shepherd. But I’m lucky; my sheep are motherly and vigilant.

Oh it’s time! On with the boots, the hat, the coat, pockets heavy…

plannin’ and dreamin’ that she’ll have some time to spare away from that lambing affair…

The dogs find this time of year a trifle tedious. Apart, that is, from the delicious morsels that come from multitudinous birthing and milk-sucking baby animal - more detail would be too much information. Read the rest of this entry »