May All Our Troubles Be Little Ones

 The garden is full of babies; six lambs, and baby birds by the score. Lambing has not been so easy this year, the ewes seemed very reluctant to release their loads! Berletty was the first, but only had one good sized ram lamb, then came Bryoney with twins, one of each, whilst Beth grew ever bigger. The last 2 or 3 days she looked a bit distressed, and could only walk a little way before flopping down and panting. I was most relieved to find her giving birth late one Sunday afternoon. We kept an eye on her, from a discreet distance and after a bit of a struggle she produced a pair of enormous twin daughters. They were the same size as Berletty's single son who was already a week older! Beth cleaned them both up and they were soon feeding. Beth usually only has a single lamb, but everything seemed O K.
We awoke the next morning to the distant rumble of thunder and as I got outside there was a flash of lighting, a huge crash of thunder and the heavens opened. Beth had her twins under a group of Christmas trees, not in one of the little portable sheds. Normally the rain does not get through their branches but in the torrents of rain that were falling mum and daughters were soaked. Poor Beth looked rather weak, so she got some extra food and a tonic from my emergency cupboard. Later that day she decided that twins were too much for her and stopped feeding one of them. She was not rough with it, she just gently pushed it aside every time it went to feed. So began what became a week -long battle.
One of my books says that once a lamb has had 5 feeds from its mother it will smell so much of her that she will then accept it. It's a shame that Beth has not read that book! She is one of the tamest sheep, so it was easy enough to catch her and hold her while little Cheeky Chops had a feed.
We had been doing this for nearly a week and things had only got worse. The lamb Beth was feeding was growing well and was now half as big again as Cheeky Chops. Beth had become harder to catch and much, much harder to hold. Time for a change of plan. The only course of action was to buy a bottle! Although it was initially tricky to catch Cheeky Chops, she soon got the hang of things and hopefully there will be no stopping her now. There is a long way to go yet though, but at least we are giving her a chance.
Don't forget that the birds are nesting, so keep those hedge trimmer under wraps until the end of July or August. More of Cheeky Chops and the baby birds next time.
Wendy Bathurst