Lambing 2023
Gala Bailey-Barker
Lambing has been very special for me this year. In 2021, a couple of weeks before lambing, I found out I was pregnant. Hopefully most of you know pregnant and lambing ewes are to be avoided by pregnant humans due to a few different zoonotic illnesses that can cause miscarriage and deformities. The riskiest thing is to be exposed to birthing fluids, just fine if you stand at a fence and watch from meters away but impossible to avoid if you may be needed as midwife to a whole bunch of ewes. Luckily for me, Miriam was already working with us, and Lou was keen to get involved. It ended up being a great opportunity for them to learn. Thankfully I was feeling much better than I had in my previous pregnancy and was able to cover most of the work that Miriam and Lou were pulled away from.
Being an employed farmer in this special place that is Plaw Hatch I was able to take a year off after having Orla in December 2021 which meant I also mostly missed lambing in 2022. I’ll be forever grateful to everyone that enabled me to take that time off and took care of the flock so that I could spend time with my daughters and recover from my second c-section.
Lambing is pretty much the most important time of the shepherding year. This lambing we have had just over 90 lambs born in 3 weeks. 3 weeks of 5.30am starts, some beautiful sunrises and some very soggy and muddy ones. Thankfully, despite the seemingly endless mud, it wasn’t too cold and the lambs with a belly full of milk managed to stay warm even if they weren’t dry. We had 12 first time ewes lambing this year and all of them lambed by themselves and have been excellent mothers. My bottle-fed lamb pen is far larger than I’d like. Sometimes timing allows us to adopt lambs whose mothers can’t manage them on to another ewe. However, this needs to be done when the lamb is at most a few days old and involves drenching them in the lambing ewes birth fluids and convincing her the lamb is hers. You can imagine a week old shouty and wiggly lamb is not likely to be accepted alongside a freshly born lamb. Ewes can be very aggressive to lambs that are not their own. There would’ve been 4 lambs in the pet pen but sadly we unexpectedly lost the mother of triplets 2 weeks after she lambed. So now, we have 7 shouty lambs to bottle feed three times a day. Delightful, but a lot of work!
It won’t be long until we are shearing the hoggets (year old sheep) and moving the ewes and lambs off the farm to their summer grazing.
