Lambing drama at Stroud

During the weekend of my second week at Stroud Paul, Sarah and Becky went away overnight to a friend’s birthday party and to visit Sarah’s daughter who had just had a baby. This meant that I had to be on hand to check on the sheep, so Jeni came over on Saturday and stayed overnight and I also had two friends from Draycott come over for the evening – Grainne was coming from Draycott and her daughter Siobhan and her boyfriend were coming from north of Oxford where they now live. We’d decided to perhaps get pizza and share a bottle of wine and catch up on each other’s lives as we had not met up for nearly a year. We’d planned that it would be a lovely and relaxing evening.

I’ve realised that you should never plan anything as Fate has a way of coming along and scuppering any plans you might have thought you had! Jeni and I went up to do evening feeding and noticed that ‘Blackberry’ the sheep was in the early stages of labour. We couldn’t coax her into a pen on her own so we went out to the field to feed the ewes and lambs out there. While we were there Siobhan rang to say they had just arrived, so we told them where to find us and headed back to the lambing shed. As we greeted them I realised that Blackberry was sniffing at something lying very still on the ground, so I leapt over the barrier and ran to her to find that she had had a lamb but the amniotic sac was still over its head. I quickly pulled it off, tickled its nose and then swung it by its hind legs for good measure to drain any fluid from its lungs. It sneezed, shook its head and spluttered a bit and Blackberry took over the mothering duties, licking it all over and bleating quietly to it. When it looked like a ‘goer’, Jeni and I carefully lured Blackberry into a pen. Siobhan then went off to buy pizza, as her mum was due to arrive at any moment. While she was gone I realised that it was some time since the ewe had had the first lamb, but she still didn’t look comfortable, so I decided to check to see if there was another lamb – there was, but it had one leg above its head and was effectively stuck, so I realigned the leg and out it came, spluttering and sneezing as it lay on the straw, so mum carefully licked that one, too. Jeni and I were sitting on a straw bale congratulating ourselves on a job well done when Jeni said ‘Can’t I see another hoof protruding from under her tail?’ The light was beginning to fade by then so I couldn’t be sure, but just in case I checked again and there was another lamb – this time he had one leg bent back behind him and was again effectively stuck, so I had to try and flick the bent leg up and straight so that he could emerge like a diver with his head between his front legs.

By this time Grainne had arrived too and Siobhan and her boyfriend had returned with the pizza, but I was concerned that the lambs would get chilled so we needed to get them into the pen where the heat lamp was and this involved moving another ewe and her twins (the ones I mentioned in my last blog). Everyone mucked in, deconstructing and reconstructing pens and ushering the confused ewes and their offspring into the appropriate ones. At last, we had achieved that aim and decided to go into the house, eat pizza and drink wine and then check that all the lambs were up and had fed afterwards. The pizzas were great, the wine was good and we did manage to have a bit of a catch up but the majority of the conversation centred around the triplets and what should be done next! Siobhan and her chap had both been to agricultural college and had worked with sheep so I was really pleased that they had come over, although Jeni said it felt strange that three out of the five of us had helped ewes give birth before! We went back up a little later and I stressed a lot about whether all the lambs had fed – probably more so than I would have done if they had been my own sheep – and decided, in the end, to ‘tube’ them i.e. put a stomach tube down their throats and pour some milk down. By this time it was gone 11.00pm and everyone had to go – hardly the lovely, relaxing evening it should have been, but strangely satisfying anyway. I know that Grainne and Siobhan read this blog so I would like to take this opportunity to thank them once again for a) coming to see me in the first place and b) being so supportive with the sheep! I am also pleased to report that mum and babes are all doing really well!

I left Stroud on a Thursday evening have renewed friendships, not only with Paul and Sarah, but also with the market gardeners who come on Tuesdays and Thursdays to grow their own organic vegetables and with whom I worked in October and again this last couple of weeks. I drove the fifteen miles or so to Cheltenham to spend four days with my Mum before she went off on a short break and Jeni and I repacked the Peugeot to start our joint WWOOFing adventure, beginning in Oswestry, Shropshire where I was last June.