It's lambing time again

 

Back on the farm

Back on the farm the Farmer is busy getting everything ready for lambing.  

The ewes were scanned a month or so ago and marked with different colours according to the number of lambs they are carrying.  The older ewes and the hill ewes expecting twins were all kept to one side and put in a field on their own.  The hill ewes expecting singles were put back to the hill.  The Cheviots and Zwartble ewes were put in another field and this week the young gimmers expecting their first lambs were separated from the others as they are going to come into the cattle shed and be looked after away from the watchful eye of the Hooded Crows and other large birds looking for easy pickings at lambing time.

The winter work on the cottages is almost finished, and plans are already in the making for next winter..  Looking back on the winter, it seems to have passed very quickly.  We certainly have not had as many storms as we usually have and the wind generation on the turbines is down quite a bit as a result!  But we are not complaining as it has given us some lovely weather and we so appreciate the longer days.

April in all her glory

What a beautiful day.  Clear, bright and sunny.  Completely magical!  

Farmer is in the middle of lambing, and as often is the case, part of his preparations for going out on to the hill is to apply suncream and find a hat so he can protect his ears from sunburn/chilblains!!  Luckily he has plenty.

Lambing has been going for about a week now, and last night Farmer brought in his first pet lamb.  He had, to his surprise, earlier in the day found some children who were staying in one of the cottages chasing lambs and was concerned about mis-mothering as they were separated from their mothers.  So just before dark, he went down to see if everything had settled down again.

As darkness fell, the lambing field was quiet but for a faint bleating from the far side of the field.  Luckily where the chasing had been going on, it was all quiet.   But on the other side of the field quite a strong male lamb was sitting huddled up getting cold by a gate, no sign of its mother anywhere.   We brought it home.  Earlier in the day, Farmer had milked a ewe who had masses of milk, and so we were able to give it fresh colostrum.   Daughter named him George and after a second feed before she went to bed, he was left in the porch in a cardboard box.

Simon is helping us again this summer, one day a week.  A huge help.  Today he was harrowing in the field below the house.  It has been a couple of years since we did this last, as the ground was not dry enough.  It is great to see how it rips the mosses and dead grasses out, and flattens the molehills.

This morning I went down to feed him to find the box was empty!  I heard a bleating from the airing cupboard, and when I opened the door there he was, sooking on one of Farmer's jackets.   He finished off the colostrum and later Farmer twinned him on to a ewe whose lamb had died.

Farmer took off to the hill, suncream applied and hat on.  He lambed one ewe on his way round, and on the way back along the shore beyond Port Haunn, he found an odd pile of stone he hadn't noticed before, and when he looked more closely there was a sheep's head sticking out from under the stones.  To his amazement the year old hogg (ewe lamb) was still alive.  Her ear moved.  He has no idea what definitely happened to her, but he thinks perhaps she jumped the wall and it collapsed on top of her.  He pulled the stones off, and brought her back to the farm on the quad.  She is in the cattle shed, with food and water, fingers crossed she will be okay.

Swallows are back in the shed with the sliding doors which we leave slightly open so they can get it.  I haven't heard a cuckoo yet, Farmer says he always hears his first one on a Saturday - so we will let you know.  

Celandine are flowering all across the 'lawn' in the farmhouse garden.  The first Wood anemone are flowering in the sheltered bits of the burn down by the gate into the graveyard field.  Primrose and Dog violet flowering too.  SO good to see the flowers beginning to come. 

We have one or two spaces left from Saturday 23rd April into May.  Please have a look at the website for details, and contact us for our Special Offers. 

May days

Prasad told me to keep an eye out for a Lesser Redpoll at the bird feeders, which I did - and caught this one.

I went away for a night to see an exhibition of paintings at Resipole Studios near Strontian.  When I came back I found that Farmer had turned eggs into bread.  (in fact Jeanette from Ballygown had brought us some sourdough, freshly baked yesterday morning, in exchange for some of our surplus eggs!)  How very delicious it is too.

Today has been a wintery sort of a day. High winds and persistent rains.  Not good for poor little lambs, being born into that.  Farmer wanted until the winds had dropped before going to check the coast.  He had been round the fields as usual, but everything was tucked up out of the wind. Some times you can cause more harm than good by disturbing them.

The weather did improve. Daughter and I did some gardening.  Farmer returned with a lamb whose mother had fallen off a cliff and died, but he managed to foster it on to another ewe, so fingers crossed they will bond.

The grey clouds finally revealed some colour before the sunset.  I didn't see the hare out in the field this evening for a change, but there were wheatears and wagtails bobbing about, the wagtails seem to enjoy following the cows.

The double twin bluff

Yesterday was a winter blast - snow, hail, wind and rain - grim weather for newborn lambs. The sunrise was not red but full of warning anyway.  Farmer cannot remember ever having to lamb a ewe in a swirl of snowflakes before. He did the usual rounds of the fields and when the skies cleared in the afternoon he got to the hill.

Last night, Farmer had a couple of ewes and lambs he wanted to check on in the Emergency Ward before bed so I walked up with him.  Walter waited patiently outside.

Today did not start much warmer.  I drove to Tobermory first thing and the temperature was 1.5 degrees.  The hill tops were white and the roadside along the Mishnish lochs was covered in patchy light snow too. Thankfully the sun did come out at times, between the showers.

Lambing is about half way through now, and today was, for various reasons, the first time I had been out with Farmer when he was checking the older ewes and the Cheviots.

One of last year's bottle fed Zwarties was lambing for the first time this year (a gimmer), and when we reached her, she showed no signs of having had her lamb and yet she had two lambs running around her - to complicate things further, they were of different ages!  This tiny one was clearly newborn, and most probably she had given birth to it, despite there not being any signs of her having lambed.

As Farmer investigated, the Zwartie bunted the little lamb and walked off with the larger lamb, who was trying to suckle from her.  Leaving this wee one on its own and bleating frantically.  He popped her in the back of the buggy and we continued on our way.

This ewe was in the middle of lambing but the lamb had a 'leg back'.  Intervention was necessary to save the lamb and possibly the ewe as well.  He and Jan leapt out of the buggy and with some successful non verbal communication between the two of them,  Jan stood her ground the other side of the ewe whilst Farmer jumped towards her and caught hold tight.  It was amazing to watch him gently lamb the ewe, clearing the nose and mouth of any blockages, massaging its body to get the blood going, and out it slips onto the ground.    Within a minute it was trying to get up onto its feet, and he moved the lamb round to the ewe's head so she could start to mother it.

Farmer decided to try something he had never done before, that he had heard of other shepherds doing.  He was going to try and trick the ewe into thinking she had given birth to a pair of twins.   I fetched the lamb from the buggy, and Farmer rubbed it in the afterbirth, so that it would smell the same as her own lamb.   He then placed the lamb next to her own one. It appeared to work as she started to sniff and lick the second lamb as well as her own.  

We brought them back to the farm, set her up with her new twins in one of the Emergency Ward pens, and left them to it.   Farmer is never smug about his successes but was quietly pleased, and justifiably so, that this had worked and that she had taken to the foreign lamb.  

However... imagine his surprise when he went back an hour later to see how they all were, to discover the ewe now had THREE lambs in the pen.  She had been marked at scanning time as carrying a single lamb but had in fact been carrying twins!   So today she had the last laugh. And we were back to square one with the unwanted wee lamb.