Lambing season is a serious business - the harvest time of a shepherd’s calendar. It’s a period packed to the brim with extra hard work, longer working days and on-standby nights, even more tiredness, and some innocuous wry humour to help us get through it all.
The next few lines are my less than serious look at lambing time, based around our experiences. I’m sure many of you have your own versions of some of this, and to those who don’t, I hope you enjoy it.
The Shepherd…
The whole lambing time hinges on this highly skilled operative. Midwife, surgeon, logistics manager, catering organiser, and general dogsbody are to name but a few of their roles.
From these job titles you are probably picturing a high-powered executive style individual, a sharp-cut Italian suit and the calm, collected demeanour of a military general, moving pieces around the chess board that is the infamous lambing shed. If this individual exists I’ve never met them!
Mostly, myself and other typical shepherds are slightly dazed individuals, who started lambing time with a grand plan. But, by day 12, are being swept along on the tide of events.
In the perfect world, weather and sheep will all have played a blinder. Or as dad calls it, “the lambing of ’88” – that once in a lifetime golden event where every ewe smoothly delivered a pair of lambs and some even triplets and, even better, wanted to be a great mother to all her offspring (instead of casually disowning one, like it's the nice and normal thing to do).
In reality, lambing ebbs and flows in terms of who’s winning - sheep or shepherd. with ‘crisis manager’ becoming another official title. But as my Dad always maintains “whilst there’s allus a moment when the sheep are winning, as long as you get your nose back ahead once a day you’ll win through in the end”.
With regards to the dress sense of us debonair shepherds, well, its more akin to ‘refugee’ than ‘executive’, and is based around choice of waterproof over-trousers and a jacket with enough pockets to serve as a walking-talking apothecary cabinet. Oh, and, don't forget the lambing gloves... Yes, the arm-length ones.🧤😅.
The Sheep…
No lambing time is complete without them. A team of vibrant participants seeking to make the shepherds life as easy as possible…oh dear… well maybe not.
A tweet by John Kelly got me to thinking about the role sheep play in the lambing process. And in a moment of flippant musings I imagined the sheep in their pre-lambing team talk…
“Right girls, we need to get this sorted…we’ve got the prolapse team ready (the suicide bombers of lambing time), a couple of last years trainees the shepherd missed, and some new enthusiastic volunteers. Mavis will be running a workshop on mis-mothering for the first time lambers – we feel it’s important these skills are passed on through the generations. Five-time lamber Mavis, prides herself on never raising all her own lambs."
“Dolly has a crack team of ‘head no legs’ and ‘tail no legs’ already lined up, but we have a few place on the lambing-into-a-water-tank team. Our biggest surprise this year is the new stealth, lamb technology we have available. Barbara and her team have spent a lot of time using a combination of chubbiness, full bellies and dancing in the scan-crate, and we anticipate we can slip at least three triplets that are quads and three pairs who will have triplets past the scan man."
“A quick round of applause for Sally who hopes to produce six lambs the size of gerbils again this year… and we’re hoping she’ll lead the day with the 9-13 lamb avalanche we’re planning. Remember girls – lambing time’s not lambing if we don’t try and break the shepherd.”
