Lambing in Papa Stour, Shetland Islands
The farthest north I have been
A couple of stories from lambing at North House Croft:
Most of the sheep don’t have names, but there is one ewe named Friendly Sheep. She was a caddie, or an orphan who was brought up on a bottle, so she is approachable and sweet. Unfortunately, though, despite her friendliness to humans, Friendly Sheep is not a very good mum.
This morning we had to nurse one of her lambs back to health in the kitchen. He was cold and weak, and beginning to bend his neck back in a way that Steve (not the host, but an experienced former wwoofer who’s often here helping out) said indicates a sheep is getting ready to die. I held the lamb on my lap and rubbed his back and legs to try to improve his circulation, while Steve gently pushed a tube down his esophagus because he wasn’t strong enough to suckle.
We were all worried he wouldn’t make it. But after a day of bottle feeding and keeping warm in a cardboard box next to the stove, he was a lot more chipper, capable of not just suckling but baaing at us a little bit and even standing up on his spindly legs!
Over the weekend in Steve’s absence, despite our inexperience, Marilen (my co-wwoofer) and I were in charge of periodically checking the field of pregnant ewes for activity. We noticed a ewe had had a lamb, so we took her in to the shed for normal processing: the ewes get de-worming medicine and vitamins, the lambs get their tails docked and belly-buttons iodined, and are castrated if male and ear-clipped if female. Number 30 was so skittish that the “30” we spray-painted on her side came out scribbly and illegible. But when we picked up her lamb to lead her out of the shed and into the field of already-birthed ewes and lambs, she readily followed.
In a surprising twist, the following morning, Steve told us that Number 30 had actually given birth a day later to two more lambs, and that these two look much more like her — meaning that the first lamb likely wasn’t actually her kid! Although we did not see it happen, so we can’t be sure, the probable explanation is that she’d decided to adopt, or more bluntly, to baby-snatch. In any case, now Number 30 is a mum of triplets, and unlike Friendly Sheep, she is doing great. Although her kids are not biological siblings, she is continuing to nurse all three. We are still keeping a close eye on them in the hospital field, but all three triplets are strong and frolicking around.