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.