Day 11... we've hit the half way mark

Day 11 and we are just about half way through lambing with around 170 of the 340 ewes left to go.

The day starts at 5am when Martin gets out to check the sheep and pen up any who have lambed in the break between night and day shift. I fall out of bed around 8am depending on how late a night it has been and Fay and Mark who work for us, arrive at 8am to feed the ewes and start the routine work of marking ewes and lambs, turning them out of the pens and mucking out ready for the next lot.

The ewes stay in individual pens with their lambs for the first 24 hours to allow them time to bond and make sure the lambs are suckling properly and then they go into another barn with other ewes and lambs for a further 24 hours so we can be certain they are able to recognise each other and stick together when they are turned out into the field with other sheep.

As soon as I get up I feed any weak or sickly lambs, carry out any necessary veterinary treatments and then mark the pens that are ready to be turned out and then I go in for breakfast and feed the cats, horses, rabbits and dogs and catch up on any other domestic bits and bobs before going back out to the lambing sheds again around 9.30. I also do the night lambing so, other than meal breaks, I stay out there till it all goes quiet which can be any time from midnight to 3am or later. Our old caravan is parked right next to the lambing shed and I sleep there for the duration. From the doorway, I can see anything that is lambing so I don't have to keep going in and out, especially when it’s more normal lambing weather, which is cold, wet and windy. We call it Lamb Van Central, or LVC for short and with a kettle and a heater in there, it makes the night lambing a lot more pleasant.

During the day, we all have our own jobs but if an ewe needs assistance to lamb then whoever is free deals with it. Once the lambs are born, their navels are sprayed with strong iodine solution to dry them up as quickly as possible and stop bacteria from getting in and causing infection. It's a messy job and by the time we have carried the lambs to the pens, the iodine stains on our hands make us look as if we have a serious nicotine habit!

We ultrasound scan our ewes in February so we know exactly how many lambs to expect and put a spray mark on the ewes back to indicate whether she is carrying a set of triplets (blue mark) a single lamb (green mark) or twins (no mark). This year we had 28 sets of triplets at scanning and as far as I can tell, there are only 9 left to lamb. Ewes have two teats, as opposed to 4 in cattle and 2 lambs is the optimum so we don't leave triplets on the ewe and always foster on the "spare" lamb on to an ewe with a single lamb. Some people rear triplets on the ewe but they need extra feeding and a lot more care so we prefer to match them up with a good foster mother and let her do the work!

I try not to have orphan lambs around because cute as they, they are a bit of a nuisance. They imprint on humans and follow me around all the time and yell for food as soon as they see me but inevitably, however careful we are, there will always be the odd lamb that doesn't thrive and ends upon the bottle for one reason or another. This may be because the ewe develops mastitis (an infection in the udder that reduces or stops milk production) or because a lamb that has been fostered is rejected by the ewe or because it is just too weak and fragile to survive without human intervention. Each year, we have a small group of lambs that get trained to feed from a milk feeder to reduce the bottle-feeding but they are still friendly and people orientated and some very strong characters emerge. At the moment, I have 4 lambs who are with their mothers but need a "top-up" from the bottle twice a day as their mother's don't have a lot of milk but I also have three who are entirely dependent on the bottle. One is a tiny triplet whose mother is very thin and hasn't got any milk, one was a triplet who was fostered on to an ewe successfully from the ewe’s point of view, but the lamb refuses to drink from her! The lamb had been very poorly for a couple of days and spent time under the heat lamp being bottle-fed and she is totally fixated on me. After she escaped from the pen to find me for the third time that morning, I gave up, let her foster mum go and put the lamb on the bottle.

And then there is Churchill!

Churchill is a lamb with a developmental deformity that prevented his face from fully forming. As a result, he has a short nose and a slightly lop-sided face and looks like a bulldog. I didn't expect him to live but gave him a chance by putting him in the warming box and feeding him and he is now 11 days old and is incredibly robust. Unfortunately, as time has gone it on it is clear that he also has some sort of mental development problem and at this stage I am not sure whether he will be safe out in the field as he tends to walk in straight lines, following the line of the wall and will get stuck in a corner where he will just stand, sucking his tongue as if he was sucking from a bottle teat, until someone comes to his rescue.

He is also very difficult to feed as he gets so excited that he rears up on his hind legs, goes rigid and clamps his mouth shut. The only thing that gets him to relax is to get the bottle teat in his mouth but getting him to relax so you can open his mouth is really hard. I suspect the solution for Churchill will be to get the automatic lamb feeder set up (a plastic tub with teats around the sides that is kept topped up with milk for multiple lambs to feed from) so he can go and suck when he needs to. The nice thing though is that he has teamed up with the tiny triplet with the skinny Mum so he has a friend and they can often be seen curled up asleep together. He has also just started to “play tag” with the other lambs and run about in the barn so I am hopeful that he will have some sort of normal development and will have a good quality of life for however long that may be.

The weather has been glorious and fantastic for getting lambs turned out but we really need rain to push on the grass. We actually had a bit today which got me soaked as I was out moving the horses electric fence at the time but as far as the ground goes, it is still bone dry and I'm afraid it won't have done much good. On the other hand, the smell of damp grass, dandelion flowers, distant bluebells and warm damp soil is really wonderful so if it hasn't been much good for the crops, it is at least good for the soul!

Don’t forget it’s open house from 2 till 4pm on Easter Saturday if you would like to drop in to see the lambing. Lamb feeding is around 3pm and there should be enough lambs to go round. Hope to see you then!

Day 5...Triplets, triplets and more triplets

Here we are only 5 days in to lambing and we have had over 80 lamb so far out of 340. Tuesday was a crazy day and virtually all the ewes that lambed were carrying triplets. All the spare ones were fostered straight on to a "single" as soon as she lambed using the wet foster method where you cover the foster lamb with the birth fluid and let her lick it before you let her have her own lamb and this has a 100% success rate so far. It's great to see a happy and well fed pair of lambs and equally great not to have to be bottle feeding "extra" lambs all the time.We kept all the lambs indoors for a few days as the weather was a bit grim but the first ones went out to the field yesterday afternoon and all seems well. So far, the only "orphan" I have to look after is Churchill, a ram lamb born with a birth defect that makes him look like a bulldog because his jaws have not elongated properly. He is a strange little soul but incredibly cheerful and persistent and although he seems to lurch from one crisis to another, he is 6 days old now and happily living in a nice cosy pen under a heat lamp. There have been a few nights this week where I could have happily joined him! We have had a lot of requests from people wanting to visit and while it's great that people are so interested, it can be very hard to find the time to stop and talk when things are busy without "taking our eye off the ball". Obviously there is also the need to supervise visits for safety reasons and minimise the comings and goings that inevitably stress the freshly-lambed sheep when they are feeling at their most vulnerable. What we are planning to do is hold a "drop-in" from 2pm till 4pm on Easter Saturday when things will be a bit quieter and we will all have had a bit of a break, but there will still be something to see. If you would like to come along please drop us a line at enquiries@overtownfarm.co.uk so we have an idea of numbers. We had a break from triplets yesterday but we have had another threee sets today so I'm off to try and foster them on as soon as possible.

One day to go...shed ready

The sheds are now all mucked out, disinfected and bedded down; the gates and hurdles have been set up so we can get in and out easily with an armful of lambs and we are ready to go.

We were going to get the ewes in this evening but as the weather is so beautiful, we thought we would give them one last night at grass and they will come in tomorrow. Bringing them in early just means they will eat more of our rapidly dwindling feed stocks, which are down to the bare minimum after the long and very hard winter. Bringing the sheep in too late means lambs born outside that would be vulnerable to predators and changes in the weather in the first few hours of life. As usual, brinkmanship rules.

Lambing 2011... 2 days to go!

As BBC's "Lambing Live" seems to be so popular and everyone wants to know what lambing is really like, I thought I would try and keep a a blog going for lambing at Overtown. I can't guarantee to write each day but I will do my best to give a flavour of what it is like lambing 350 ewes indoors during April, nearly 1000 feet above sea level, here on our organic farm in the Cotswolds.

It is a little over 48 hours before lambing is officially due to begin and at the moment, it feels a bit like the lull before the storm. The weather is beautiful and it's perfect for getting lambs and their mothers out to grass within a couple of days of birth....or it would be if we had any grass! The ground is incredibly dry and although we had some rain earlier in the week you can almost hear the newly emerged corn begging for a drink to lay the dust. The warm weather will get the grass growing a little but it's water it really needs. However, this is April and I know from bitter experience that today's sunshine is tomorrows howling gale. I suspect in a week or two we will be looking at the rain and wishing for sun but for the moment the sun is shining, the skylarks are singing, the hedges look greener by the day and the lambing sheds are being mucked out and disinfected ready to get the sheep in. Better crack on!