This year's lambing was short and sweet. It was all over and done within two weeks, except for a couple of ewes who are going to be very late. No casualties, not even a fatigued farmer. There were only two nights of disturbed sleep for Martin and Konstantijn when they had to be in the barn between midnight and 5:00 A.M.
Konstantijn has been a great help for Martin, her dad. She loves the sheep and is keenly interested in all aspects of being a shepherd.
Here's her account of some of her experiences.
This year hasn't had anything particularly dramatic happen, but there are still some interesting stories to tell!
This first one happened just a few days ago, at 1:00 a.m. in the morning. We have cameras set up in the barn so that we can see what the sheep are doing. During the night, we have a friend in Hong Kong watch them, and call or Whatsapp us when something happens.
Tony Tan had just called, and Daddy came to wake me. He said that I was completely delirious when he woke me up, and I think that I must have fallen back asleep because I remember waking up about 5 minutes after he left, thinking, "Did someone try to wake me up earlier?"
So, after much walking into walls in the dark, wondering how much sleep I would get after this, and almost putting my boots on the wrong feet, I put on my overalls and went to the lambing barn. Daddy said he was very surprised that I came!
The ewe, Ellie, had already had her first lamb, and we were waiting in the haystack for the second one. Suddenly Daddy asks me, "Is there a cloth or towel up there or something?"
I assumed he wanted it for helping to clean off the lamb, so I said, "There's this one. It's a little bit dirty though."
"Eh, it looks fine. Give it here." Then he put it on his face!
"What are you doing?"
"I'm lying down in the haystack here, but the lights on the ceiling are annoying. I need something to cover my eyes."
I was mostly asleep at this time, so I just replied laughing. "Ok…" It was the cloth we used to clean lambs when born!
About a half-hour later, the second lamb was born. The rest went like normal. We put the ewe and her lambs in a stall with a heat lamp, gave them hay and water, weighed the lambs, and milked the ewe to bottle feed the lambs. This is important because they often don't learn to get milk for themselves for a bit, and they need colostrum within 24 hours, nutritious thick yellowish stuff that comes in ewe's new milk.
We got home at about 2:00 a.m., but despite being extremely tired, my brain decided it did not want to sleep until 3:30, so I wasn't in excellent shape the next morning.
The second story is about the ewe Lizzie (short for Elizabeth).
My siblings and I had just gotten back from piano lessons and were eating lunch in the store when someone said, "There's a sheep acting funny; maybe you should go check on her."
So, I finished my lunch and went out to check. Soon Daddy was there too. Lizzie gave birth to two healthy babies, each 11 pounds. We decided to leave her in the barn and not put her in a stall for a bit, because it wasn't cold outside. We were fairly sure that she wouldn't have another lamb, so we went back inside.
But about 45 minutes later, she had another one! We went back to the barn and put them in their stall and fed them. Later we noticed that one of them wasn't getting enough milk, so we had to bottle feed it.
It can get milk on its own perfectly fine now, but it still whines extremely loudly three times a day when it's accustomed to be fed, so we just feed it anyway.
One day, when we were checking on another ewe, she was whining, so Daddy gave it a leftover half bottle. She immediately went to go get some more milk from her mom, and that's when Uncle Dan, who usually fed her, walked in with another full bottle in his hand!
We thought she wouldn't want it, but we tried anyway, and the little greedy baby drank the whole thing! Then she went to have a nap, licking her little milk moustache.
She's just a spoiled, fat little baby!
Shepherding is not for wussies.
