Tag Archives: lambs

Shearing, it’s not all fun

Posted on by
4

The sheep and I have had a bit of a testing time of it recently.  As you may have noticed if you live in the UK, there has been a lot of rain, wind and cold weather recently although it’s ‘the summer’.  In the same way that some people pack up bucket, spade and windbreaks and head for the coast even though it’s pouring with rain and howling a gale because it’s June, so my sheep grow an enormous thick layer of wool which then needs to come off because it’s June.  In the intervals when the sun comes out, it is very warm and the flies rise up in clouds.  And as many people will know, one thing you don’t want to land on a hot, woolly sheep is a blowfly.  So the sheep and me have been watching the weather, watching the flies, and trying to get the Gribbles interested in racing down to shear the sheep in the dry/warm bits of a very cold and wet summer.

The Gribbles, though, don’t do racing.  They do thinking about things slowly and doing them in their own good time.  This is very good for sheep they are shearing, they don’t get nicks and cuts from too hasty passes with the clippers, but it is awful when you are trying to attract them down here to do the sheep when they are (miracle!) dry, but there are mighty clouds building up on the horizon.

Anyway, yesterday it worked.  I rang Gribble Senior and after thought, consultation with the rest of his tribe, and several cups of tea he arrived here with his clippers and did the deed with my girls.  I was happier about this than they were.  He loves an audience, does Mr Gribble, but he absolutely can’t talk and shear at the same time.  So he was telling me a long and complicated anecdote about his owd bull, like, he’s such a character, while poor Lupin was slumped uncomfortably against his knees rolling an eye at me and wondering why she’d ever signed up to be a sheep in the first place.

The final trauma of what is an undeniably undignified and embarrassing business for a sheep is that when the ewes are shorn and returned to their adoring family, their lambs don’t recognise them.  There is a lot of “WHO ARE YOU?  I DON’T LIKE YOU!  GO AWAY AND WHERE’S MY MUM???” in shrill treble bleats before the lambs’ sense of smell tells them that despite all signs to the contrary the elegant lady in front of them really is the comfy old sofa that they used to love so much.

So that’s OK.  And I can hear buzzing of many flies and know that my girls are safe.  But thank heavens shearing comes just once a year!

A hatching observed

Posted on by
4

I think of our incubator as a ‘miracle tube’ and right now, as I write, it is performing another little miracle.  You may remember that when we came back from Morocco I filled it with 12 bantam eggs, probably because it was raining and I needed something optimistic to do.  Now their time has come and I’m finding it hard to tear myself away.  Honestly, it’s far better than watching TV.

The incubator is a yellow plastic tube, big enough for 12 bantam eggs, 8 hen or guinea fowl eggs and about 6 big goose or peacock eggs, and it has hatched all of these in the past (you may remember my mixed emotions when Duffy came into our lives).  When you feel like adding more players to the crowd scene in the hen run, you warm it up to the correct temperature, top up the water reservoirs, add the eggs, turn it three times a day and wait for results.  Two days before D day you stop turning it, so that the chicks aren’t dizzy when they come out.

First sign of imminent hatching is that an egg says PEEP! which is always exciting.  It continues to peep regularly as the chick inside gets down to business.  First a little hole appears in the side of the egg, through which you can see a tiny beak chipping away busily.  Then if the chick is strong, it saws around its shell as efficiently and neatly as if it had a tiny chain-saw tucked away inside, and flops out.  At first it is like a soggy cottonwool ball, which the astonished expression of most new-borns.  A few hours later, Sog Ball will have dried out into Perfect Easter Chick, pottering around on its tiny toes, and will be ready to make the move into the little run I keep for new chicks which has an infra-red lamp and special food and water bowls.

Of the 12 eggs I put in 19 days ago, 10 are fertile (nice one Pavlova), and it looks as if 6 will hatch out, which is fine by me. To date we have two Perfect Easter Chicks ambling about under their infra-red light, two Sog Balls collapsed limply against the other eggs, and two eggs saying PEEP!  I’ll keep you posted.

By the way, Lupin, Foxy and their four lambs are out in the meadow and lovin’ it.  Duffy has grown more blue feathers and attacked the oil delivery man (his oil tank, his rules), and the baby robins are now a nest full of enormous golden beaks.  Have a great Bank Holiday Weekend, I’ve taken a photo of Foxy and her little lambs which I’ll ask Mikey to put on the blog.  They are very sweet and incredibly friendly.

Foxy, neighbours and Chick

Posted on by
8

Foxy had it (them) in her after all!  She waited until the sun was shining, the grass was lushly green and the cow parsley, may and horse chestnut flowers were at their zenith, and finally got down to it.  When I saw what was going on and came back up the lane at warp speed, she was busily giving birth against a backdrop of verdant rural loveliness. It was all very artistic, and she milked it for all it was worth (pretty black sheep produces gorgeous black twins in preferred medium of extreme Cotswold rural beauty).

I fussed around, once I realised what was happening, but quite honestly she didn’t need me at any stage.  Once she was finished I picked up the lambs (soggy but sweet) and she trundled after me into the lambing shed and is now comfortably back where she was before, lounging in extreme comfort and calling for dainty meals to tempt her appetite at regular intervals.  And ivy, lots of ivy.  She’s running me ragged, and I’ll let her out very soon if the weather keeps fine.

Her twins are both completely black, one boy and one girl.  Very friendly and sweet, and I’ve already wasted far too much time playing with them.

And now I can turn my attention back on matters outside the lambing shed.  Many of my neighbours have turned bright pink in the recent fine weather, quite a startling effect when you see them en masse in the village shop, like a particularly virulent sunset.  Julia is still running, and still going (not to put too fine a point on it) extremely slowly.  She’s started taking her dog with her on a lead when she runs, and quite often he walks as she runs, which tells you something.

Frank’s one man battle against cow parsley is reaching a crescendo, and he seems to spend every daylight hour whacking furiously at billowing banks of flowers – sometimes the lane is completely carpeted with the bodies of the fallen.  But no matter how many he cuts down, there are always more.  Thank goodness, I love cow parsley.

Chick is definitely a girl, which is great.  I’ll ask Mikey to put a photo of her on the blog.  Her feathers are completely curly, and I have got a dreadful feeling that I’m going to call her Frillz.  She should be called something pretty like Annabel but every time I look at her I think Frillz.  With a Z.  You’ll see what I mean when you see her photo.

Lambs at last!

Posted on by
6

Great news:  Lupin had twin ewe lambs yesterday.  This is particularly pleasing because, both lambs being girls, I don’t have to do anything eye-watering with a sinister piece of equipment called the Elastrator (I’ll leave what it does to your imagination), and they can stay with us forever.  The girls are fit and healthy and can already do a hot line in bouncing.

I got up three times a night for far too many nights (and am still doing so for Foxy) to check the ewes.  Lupin being Lupin (a character) waited until 11am when I had decided she wouldn’t do anything exciting until the next night and was up at the house for a coffee break.  As soon as she heard my footsteps receding up the lane, she gave birth quickly and efficiently.  I arrived back after my cuppa to find her checking the newborns over and putting their names down for violin and Mandarin lessons (obviously spectacularly talented offspring, she could tell already).

Foxy has yet to show her hand, and is lounging around her maternity unit guzzling hay, criticising Lupin’s childcare ethos and calling for more ivy (her favourite treat).  I’ll tell you when something happens.

During the long hours I’ve spent in the building previously known as the Field Shelter but at the moment called the Lambing Shed, I’ve been watching nature unfold before me:  here are some of my thoughts on birds which I will share with you:

Swallows are wonderful, but they never shut up.  I was sitting with Lupin, gently dozing off, when I became aware of non-stop twittering and realised it was a gang of swallows who had presumably just arrived from foreign shores and were sharing their holiday stories.  All it needed was for one of them to set up their own travel video complete with atmospheric soundtrack and stills of the main points of interest flown over and the illusion would have been complete.

Wrens.  Say something very high and excitable and then zip away.  I like them, but they don’t hang around much.

Chaffinches.  Say ‘cheep cheep cheep, chirp chirp chirp, tweedeldee – kerpow!’  I watched a little pink guy in full song for some time before I got the spelling right.

I’ll be back in the Lambing Shed tonight (go, Foxy!) and will look out for more wildlife specials.