Still lambing

and shrieking at rats

There are many things I should be doing, but if they require brain (they do), it’s pointless looking wistfully at the to do list when still lambing. There are multiple reasons for this. The practical one is that getting involved with anything mentally demanding means I take my eye off the ball, metaphorically speaking, and I might miss a ewe going in to labour that needs my attention.

Related but separate, is that the stop start nature that the lambing demands, smashes into uselessness any sensible thought process that may have been in train just before you spot something small, wriggly and slimy requiring midwifery skills.

To be fair, I’m a bit beyond writing a cogent to do list anyway. Night shifts will do that to you, as well as messing with your eating patterns which means you might be ravenous for supper at midnight and don’t know whether a snack or a full meal is best. Having stuff to eat is not the problem. The polytunnel is yielding asparagus, lettuce, purple sprouting broccoli and chives, the ducks and hens are laying as if tomorrow has been slated for Armageddon, and the freezers are busting with homegrown and homemade steak, mince, chicken, last summer’s ratatouille, oxtail stew, curries and pork and fruit and so very much more. The freezers are trophy cabinets that can satisfy hunger, greed and spin you out of tiredness, providing bursts of energy. But still, the mental energy has to be reserved for the lambing, not writing or concocting of new projects, or contacting agents or for remembering not to wear that shaggy, fluffy teddy-like fleece when refilling the hay racks, which I did half an hour ago and came back to the house like a walking haystack. I have picked half a sheep’s daily ration out of it since. On the upside I smell rather nice as a consequence.

There is a downside to the night shifts. Nighttime is when the rats come out to play and I have what I consider to be an entirely rational response to them; I tend to shriek, when in all other matters I am not a shrieker. There will be the odd forgotten ewe nut scattered about, delicious bits of placenta and bits of wheat straw enrobed in birth-juice, all laying about inviting rodent attention. Please understand that any visible gunk is removed, but bits get missed or trodden into fresh straw by the sheep, and this is a barn, not a hospital theatre. There is plenty of poo and urine and plenty of the Werthers Original toffee shit from the new lambs. It really does look like chewy toffee, although having got all too close to plenty of it in my time, the smell of it is somewhat different from the confectionery. Although the ewes will lick their lambs’ bums to try and keep them clean (yuk, yuk, yuk), as the colostrum starts to emerge out the back end, it can adhere like superglue under the tail. If this causes a plug, it can literally seal the anus and the lamb can balloon with the gathering shit. So we check for and remove any shit-plugs when the lambs are being turned outside at 48 hours, and after that it’s no longer a problem. The smell is more pungent than you’d expect from a cute, fluffy, two day old lamb. Put bluntly, it absolutely reeks. It’s one of the reasons we get through so many boxes of gloves (latex, nitrile or vinyl, powdered or not, as you prefer), because any trace of that toffee-textured shit has to be kept away from naked fingers; it’s not a stink you want to carry about your person.

But to get back to the point, there’s plenty to interest a rat, rats that are, like the ewes, producing offspring and permanently on the hunt. Yes, you see the odd one during the day, but at night they all come out to forage. And some of them are huge. You see them on the camera, body as long as a sheep’s head, and double that when you add in the tail. I feel braver than a warrior when I step out into the night to go and check the sheds, not because of any potentially worrying dystocia but because the rats boing along the barn floor as I turn on the lights and hurtle under the barn gate EXACTLY where I am standing in order to turn on said light and they might run over my foot which is definitely shriek worthy. I absolutely hate the fuckers. We set traps, shoot them when possible, but won’t use poison as we have barn owls and other wonderful wildlife that we won’t put at risk. The barns become my very own Room 101 at night, and yet, up I go, torch in hand, heart thumping, thinking flame-thrower type thoughts and whistling all the while, hoping that and the torch beam will send them on their merry way. Well it does, but slowly enough for me to witness their exodus. Nerves of steel, me. Until I shriek and give the game away.

p.s. Just because the recycling and rubbish collections have been delayed a day each because of Easter (apparently it’s Easter weekend; not something that had really raised its head above the lambing parapet, but here we are), I saw no reason for delaying this post to match. Lambs and Easter, sort of matchy matchy, no?