Lambing Season
It is here! With the birth of our first lamb, at the end of January, our lambing season has begun. While April is the month that the majority of our lamb are born, we will have some born March and May, as well as the outliers of February and June. While January is a bit early, the end of the month is not unheard of for us. In fact, I actually love when we get these early little ones- like the promise of spring for those of us that were skeptical about winter’s end. That January lamb tells me, “It’s coming, hold tight!”
The start of these lamb being born here at the farm is such a bittersweet moment. They are absolutely the cutest little things you could ever see! They bounce around the pasture and play together, and it makes my heart want to sing out of pure joy witnessing it. It also means the dawn of a new routine for me. A routine to ensure they make it past the lambing stage of their life- and sadly MANY do not.
The reality of owning livestock is that death is always around the corner, because most livestock are prey. Here, in Virginia, the main predator to our lamb is coyote. My husband and I have a love/hate relationship with coyote. We respect and admire their beauty, grace, and prowess, but most of all their brains. They are incredibly intelligent. This makes them very difficult to deter. Almost impossible. While we’ve spent close to a decade learning how to better protect our sheep from them, they’ve also taken that time to learn all about our property and our habits. We’re fairly sure it’s the same family that lives in the woods behind our property. I mean, we have fresh lamb for them every year, why would they leave?
We have built brand new sheep fencing surrounding our property, closing up any and all gaps where the coyote could potentially escape with their prey. They adapted, and now they no longer take their kill with them, and instead eat our lamb right in our pasture- sometimes in plain sight of our back window to the house. For many years the dogs could deter them, so long as there was no rain or fog to drown out the dog’s senses of the coyotes approaching. Yet in the last couple of years it seems the coyote have realized that the dogs are just noise and no actual threat to them. We have hired professional coyote hunters to come out to our property, who say that the coyote know they are there and spend the night hanging around the tree line, never giving opportunity for a shot. My husband has spent large quantities of money on special night equipment for his rifle, and has spent long cold nights outside- all to no avail. In all these years my husband (a Marine and excellent marksman) has taken down just one, very young, coyote that he happened upon in broad day light eating a freshly killed lamb. These are very wily coyote.
This all means that my routine is now to put the mama ewes up every night with their lamb in the barn. Our style of farming is to leave our animals turned out indefinitely, barring crazy weather or injuries. So putting them up, then letting them out again every morning, ensuring that all their basic needs are met for the time they’re put up- these are all things that we would consider “extra” most of the year. Yet it has now become part of the lambing routine.
Another part of the lambing routine that I hope does not occur this year, is bottle babies. Our first few years we did not experience this. This is what a farmer does in the circumstance that a young lamb can not nurse from it’s mother. This can be due to the mother dying during or after birth, or from rejection. We have now dealt with both. We’ve lost mothers and had to care for their babies, and we’ve had mothers reject their lamb to the point that we needed to intervene. We’ve dealt with rejection every year, although most years we are able to mitigate it. This is a situation in which a ewe has twins or triplets (very common for our breed), and the mother only takes on one of twins, rejecting the other. This can often be mitigated by “jugging,” in which you put the mother and babies together in a very confined space like a box. This is to encourage bonding while also allowing the baby to attempt nursing. This typically does the trick, although I will say that it seems the mother never fully accepts the rejected lamb, only allows it to nurse. Black welsh mountain sheep are incredibly dutiful mothers, and each has a unique call with it’s lamb. I can see that with the rejected lamb, this call is only communicated from the baby. I often wonder if the rejected lamb did not have a twin to follow after as well, if the mother would care for it at all or leave somewhere out on its own. In the cases where we cannot get the mother accept the lamb, I take on the responsibility. Bottle babies are another love/hate relationship! What an incredible experience it is to have these lamb running to you and cuddling you as if you were their mother. However, the payoff is having a newborn baby that requires night feeds. I am done with night feeds! Hear me universe, no more bottle babies!
I’ve come to accept that we have, and will continue to do, all that we can to protect our animals. It kills us to see these sheep being taken, especially when we work so hard to protect them, yet I have to understand that it is part of farming. I have to expect and accept these losses. Our sheep have an almost 200% lambing percentage because of the number of twins, and sadly we lose around half of our lamb every year. Our goal, of course, is to keep those numbers down, but I’ve accepted that these are numbers that we have to deal with.
The hard truth here, is that our sheep are meat for my family. They provide us with sustenance, a fact that I remind myself of everyday that I’m out taking care of them. The care I give these animals directly impacts their quality of life. I want the food that my family eats to be of the best quality, and I ensure that through my farming practices. The truth is that we are lucky that our breed of sheep produces so prolifically, because we have to account for 50% losses. It’s sad to look at pictures of my adorable lamb and put percentages to their lives, and a lot of people grapple with that. I don’t. It’s hard to put in to words adequately the way that it makes me feel to know that my family and my sheep are part of an ecosystem filled with care. I care for them from the moment they are born, and I truly love them. I care for them all of their life, and then I ensure that my children know that the nutritional meal they are enjoying is coming from all of the joyous life right out in our pasture.
“All energy is only borrowed, and one day you have to give it back.”
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