Newborn Blues

A little just born triplet lamb was our surprise early morning visitor.

One of the farm owners, Jan, cradled it in her arms because it was doing

very poorly indeed, having been the third lamb of the trio to drop into this harsh world earlier today. Since it was a dark and chilly morning after a frosty night, I was still nestled in my bed with Domino, my enormous pussycat asleep at the bottom of all the covers. When I heard John opening the drapes I knew I had to pry my sleepy eyes open. I only barely opened one. He told me that Jan would be coming back soon after she made the rounds to see if there were any other little guys that needed extra help to survive the shock of being born into a frigid and unforgiving coldness with a mother intent on caring for the strongest two offspring first. This muddied, bloodied, woolen creature couldn’t wait to get warmed up and fed. So John put the lamb on a towel in a crate by the heat of the wood fireplace and eventually I opened the other eye and managed to put my rather long feet on the floor and myself into some sort of clothes with a favorite olive/avocado green wool sweater over the ensemble. Then I sort of dragged myself into the other room and immediately saw the pretty big baby animal by the fire, fed one cat that left immediately afterward to join the other skittish one that already was hiding from the interloper in the bedroom and I closed the door. That way, no more cats that might be curious would enter this area until the lamb warmed up a bit or Jan arrived back to take it.

I was quite incorrect on one of my latest blog posts when I declared that we might not have baby lambs being born here this year. The crew did take all of them that were here somewhere else, but they did bring us scads of heavily pregnant ewes that hadn’t dropped their lambs yet and distributed them to several different enormous paddocks. As usual they put the ones expecting twins or triplets separately onto our nearest hilly paddock. In modern farming the ewes are scanned early in the pregnancies to ascertain how many babies they might be carrying and then different color markings are sprayed onto their backs so the multiple birth mothers can be easily identified. That helps a lot when you have a few thousand sheep to manage in the process. There’s another trick too that our farmers practice every year. They shear the ewes soon before the due dates even though it is usually the absolute coldest time of the season. Doing that, the mothers tend to stay close to the babes to keep them warm and to stay warm themselves. Being shorn almost guarantees that the maternal instincts will kick into high gear right away for the protection of the offspring, (soon to be in spring) as they too will really feel the cold wind blow. So with that said I’ll include a couple of shots of the little wooly visitor. Last year Jan said there were 120 of those at their place. That means bulk buying of milk powder and whey and muesli and intense care for many weeks until the lambs start to thrive although they’ll never be reintroduced to their mothers. Sometimes if the ewe dies the healthy newborns are switched to a distraught mother that has lost her baby, but only by rubbing the scent of the placenta from the dead lamb onto the orphaned lamb. And apparently all these weaklings that have needed to be hand fed at the farm, they’ll need some colostrum from their mums. Don’t ask me how that’s accomplished. I wouldn’t have a clue.