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Back to Menu Easy Lambing Dumfries and Galloway Standard May 2009 The thirty second lambing at Airyolland will get special mention in my memoirs as being the easiest that I have yet to encounter. The barometer that measures these things is the intensive care unit that is temporarily set up in our tup shed. Most years these two rows of little pens, each designed to confine one ewe and her problems, fill up very quickly. Then, in true NHS style, pressure on beds will lead to some patients being reintroduced into the community too soon. But not this year. There was an eerie calm and a feeling of emptiness about the ward that I personally found quite unsettling. The present Mrs. McQuistin who usually tends to the sick and needy, which find there way into these pens, had no such feelings of regret as she skipped across the yard, each morning, to inspect the empty pens. Bless her; she needs to have a lucky break now and again. While the sheep farming fraternity are getting hot under the collar about double tagging and electronic identification of their sheep she has just finished the task of giving names to all of our 147 Beltex lambs. Don’t get the wrong idea it’s not a soppy/ girly thing that we are doing here. Pedigree Beltex sheep are the same as most other pedigree animals in that they each get a name starting with the same year letter. This year’s letter is N. My suggestion was to call them Number One, Number Two and so on… This was met with withering condemnation from Mrs McQ who likes to have some method in the madness of giving a sheep a name which is to be held on a central database. Her method is to give the wee things a name which is in same genre as their dam. For instance we have a Scottish line which sees those lambs being given names like Nevis, Nessie and Nae Bother, for the boys and Nellie Kilpatrick for the girls. But, the run of names that causes most problems and often hilarity are the “ladies of ill repute”. Just to give you a flavour of how this goes I can tell you that Foxy Lady gave birth to Harlot and Jezebel. Jezebel then gave birth to Loose Woman and Lolita and this year she has given birth to two fine ewe lambs that have been labelled as Nymhpo and Naughty Girl. Talk about getting a bad name! There is, off course, a more practical side to having a year letter included on the tag of your sheep, in that, it can instantly tell you the age of the animal just at a glance. Only this week we had a periodic Maedi Visna test on our flock of Beltex ewes. This involves the vet drawing blood from a percentage of the flock and sending the blood filled tubes off for analysis. It’s always a task that needs plenty of people around to make the process run smoothly. This year it was a lady vet that came to take the blood from the ewes. So I held the sheep and called the year letter and the number to Janet who wrote the age and the number of the ewe on a sheet while the vet took the blood sample. Jobs like this can take some time and the conversation during the task is often wide and varied and not always about animals and their problems. I was telling the vet that I was to be the bingo caller at a fundraising night for Stranraer Academy next month. “Best get some practice in now”, she says. By chance the next ewe I grabbed was J88. Two fat ladies 88 I called; much to the girls’ amusement. The giggles then turned into an awkward snigger, as the next ewe that I grabbed turned out to be K69. Not knowing the correct bingo call for that particular number I decided not to risk it; as a double-entendre seemed almost inevitable. As fate would have it the next ewe that came to hand was L69. The vet just quietly said “it looks like they’ve come together”. I blushed and pretended that I hadn’t heard her. |