Lambing - joy and challenges
2pm.
The lambing shed feels quiet. Just a few bleats from the ewes and their lambs, and birds singing from the barn roof.
John goes from pen to pen to check the lambs that’ve been born in the last few hours, calls them ‘my darlings’. A hand on their belly tells him if they have suckled or not.
It’s quiet and slow. John has a tired air about him, and so does the shed, today at least. It’s a warm, sheltered maternity ward with an air of waiting. The newborns are in individual pens, each with their mum, a chance for the lamb to suck, and mum and lamb to bond. Those that haven’t suckled, John helps. In one pen, he lifts the ewe onto her haunches, holds her milk-swollen teats, and lifts her tiny lamb onto them. Encourages. Tries to get things started. To help another lamb, John hand-milks the ewe into a jug, then fills a bottle, and the lamb is soon sucking on this - enough to get its strength up.
The gathering of around 50 ewes isn’t yielding any lambs just now, so other necessary chores begin. The large barn floor is covered with straw, and this needs to be kept fresh. We move the sheep out of the way and then we’re all hands on, spreading new straw. Then John brings in new bales of hay to put in the feeders. The water in the nursery pens needs to be changed, and the ‘cades’ (unmothered lambs) need to be bottle-fed. New lambs that are no longer wet are checked, and they and their mums are marked up: numbers for twins, letters for singles. Once they’re out on the field it’ll be easy to check on them.
Time ticks by in a series of gates - opening, closing, and moving them around - and the repeated act of bending and checking sheep. Then it’s time to feed the new foal and to check and feed the cows in an open-sided barn: twenty or so warm-breathed beasts calmly chewing, with the huge white bull among them. Next, it’s off to another shed where ewes and lambs shelter among the hay; then we stroll down to the bottom field to walk a flock of ewes and lambs back up to the yard, to check them all, then coax them into a trailer and drive them to fields a little way away from the barns. Then it’s back to the lambing shed to see how the ewes and lambs are doing, and check for newborns. Before we know it, the temperature has dropped, the light has dimmed, and it’s 7 o’clock.
Move the clock forward another 9 hours: it’s dark and quiet. No wind and, thankfully, no rain. Just after 4am, and the sheep are sleeping. Just one lamb born last night, around 10pm, otherwise there are no new arrivals. But there’s plenty to do, and we freshen up the pens ready for new arrivals, and grab a cup of tea and a bowl of cereal before dawn. When we come back to the shed, the first lamb of the day is emerging. And when a second ewe begins to give birth, John invites me to help.
“It’s so warm inside a sheep ...”
It’s so warm inside a sheep. Perhaps that shouldn’t be a surprise, but the warmth and the wetness are striking. My hand sweeps around the edge of the lamb’s bony head and single leg, feeling for the cervix ‘like a tight elastic band’ says John. I feel it - a taught band in a thick warm soup. John urges me to feel deeper for the pelvis, and there it is: hard bone, unmistakeable. The task now is to gently ease the lamb’s second leg out from behind the pelvis. The lamb is arriving with its head and one leg forward, but the second leg back. John guides me to pull on the leg and the head. I pull and feel no movement. He says to pull harder, then to reach my gloved hand inside, feeling for the shoulder, trying to tease it out. I ask John to take over - here’s me never having seen a lamb being born before, let alone helped, and I don’t feel equipped to do this! John leans forward, rolls the ewe first to one side and then the other, and inserts his hand into her warm wet body, gently, skilfully. His eyes move as if tracing a map of the movement of his hand in the darkness. He gets that second leg forward. From then on, it’s straight forward. The ewe is pushing and a little help from John and the lamb’s out.
The next lamb to emerge appears with two hooves and a nose first, covered in the gooey sac. John asks me in again to help, and asks Rob to fetch another lamb who needs to be mothered on (there are several reasons this can happen, usually a mother can’t cope with triplets, or doesn’t have enough milk to support either a singleton or a twin). The idea is to catch the birthing liquids and smother this lamb in the unique mother-fluid, so that the ewe will adopt it, together with her own; as if she’s birthed twins. The birth could go ahead without our help but to enable this adoption, we need to be here. John explains how to pull each leg, one at a time, until I feel a click. It’s like fixing them into place, ready for life. A healthy lamb arrives. We’ve placed an empty plastic feed bag under the lamb so that it holds the birthing fluid. John rolls the adoptee lamb around in the fluid, and rubs the two lambs together. We both rub these tiny animals. Soon both are wet and yellowed, steaming with heat in the cool barn, and bleating with tiny, persistent voices.
John makes sure the new lamb suckles well and fills his belly with colostrum - the first milk that’s full of nutrients, antibodies and goodness. And then guides the ewe and her two lambs into their own small pen. Then we turn to the next ewe who’s ready to give birth.
It’s a first for me, but John has decades of experience. His skilled hands and body manage each sheep, and his mind, I can tell, is thinking about all the other sheep, the cows, the dogs, and all the jobs in the cycle of a long farming day.
The romance of lambs and daffodils and sunshine isn’t really where it’s at. For all the wonder of helping to bring new life into the world, the reality is a busy, repeated set of chores, the responsibility for lives, more chores, more fragile young lives, more chores, and less and less sleep.
The first lamb was born here on February 17th. The last is likely to be born in early May - by timing the tupping schedule the plan is to have three batches of lambing ewes, with a small gap in between each for a bit of rest - but that’s not guaranteed. And of course, lambing has to be done alongside all the other farm tasks - keeping pens clean, feeding animals, checking their health, and somewhere in between all that, seeing the children, having a meal and snatching some sleep.
John is mostly upbeat, but he’s tired. Very tired. We’ve stopped to chat in a field above the farm, having let a batch of ewes and lambs out onto the grass. ‘I’m just living with a sense of heaviness, I’m exhausted,’ he says. ‘Most professions that demand a lot of work and little sleep give endurance training - like the army, or sports. And a special diet. I don’t do the training, and my diet is coffee and chocolate at the moment! It feels a bit like my battery’s running out, like a remote-control car that’s kind of sluggish going along.’
He smiles, and then looks across the field, towards the common that rises above the farm. ‘And it’s stressful, very stressful.’ The stress isn’t just coming from the challenge of caring for ewes and lambs. ‘It all costs money: cake, feed, fencing, fuel, all the little jobs, it’s all money. And at this time of year, when you're tired, it does weigh on you quite a lot, but it is worse this year, with the cost-of-living crisis and all the uncertainty about where money will come from, with changes in payments.’ Yet like most farmers we meet, John balances the gloom with some optimism. ‘Well, you know, you just live in hope. My alarm clock goes off at four o'clock. You’re so tired, but you do get up, and you go up to the shed, and you do get there. And if there's a lamb with a big head or something that needs help, it is worth being there. And you feed the lambs. And you keep going. You do enjoy it. But it's bloody hard.’
“It feels a bit like my battery’s running out, like a remote-control car that’s kind of sluggish going along ... but you do it, you keep going, and you do enjoy it.”
John Heighway, quick to smile despite the sleep deprivation and the stress!
To find out more about John Heighway, who is a commoner on Clee Liberty Common in the Shropshire Hills, visit his profile here.
And you can read about a day we spent with John on the common, and with Mike Williams learning about butterfly conservation, here.