Elusive Lambs

 The lambing season is still going great and luckily we’ve had mostly fine weather with only a couple of snowy days. One of the tricks of the farmers is to shear the ewes towards the end of winter, so after the birthing process takes place, they will cuddle those lambs to keep warm. Otherwise many babies perish if the mothers are too comfortable in those freezing conditions when the temperatures plunge under zero and the wind brings the snowstorms.

This year the ewes designated for this farm that were heavily pregnant, were put onto a far paddock behind our chook house. So we can’t see the babies from our house as we normally do when they’re on the front paddock. Eventually I wanted to take some good close ups of some of the newborns so decided to try to capture some that we pass on the road. But that requires a stealth photographer who can sneak up on these young ones and snap their pictures in record time. For me, that seems to be too much to ask. Either the driver, my esteemed mate, won’t stop in time or at all. When he does I try to exit the car quietly but even by then whichever lambs were by the fence had long pranced away. Eventually I did manage to get a few good shots of two babies hiding from me from the safety of a couple of trees. Another winning shot is of a baby lambie pie looking out from the safety of the maternal proximity. I guess most ewes aren’t shorn after all. But be that as it may we hit the jackpot on the way home the other day as we approached one of the farms that’s owned by our farmer. They were in the process of moving their sheep. John figures that these were the orphans that they had to hand raise, leaving home at last, now big enough to be on their own with a few extra ewes around. We were stopped for a few minutes. The brownish longhaired sheep dog kept coming back to our car wanting to be petted. I’d already gotten out so I could try to catch a few good shots and was almost running to keep up with the mob going up the hill. But I never did get any photographs that I would call spectacular. My subjects just wouldn’t cooperate long enough for me to fiddle with my phone camera, which kept going into video mode or reversing to show my tense expression. Many colorful swear words emanated in my self-dialogue to myself. But the elusive lambs won out. Oh, fiddlesticks.