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Back to Menu From The Moon to The Midden. By Neale McQuistin for D&G Standard April 2010
I seem to recall writing in this column about a year ago and declaring that my 32nd lambing at Airyolland would be recorded, in my memoirs, as being the best so far. The 33rd will also merit special mention for being one of the worst. Although there will be many areas of Scotland that will have suffered far worse than Dumfries and Galloway at the hands of the atrocious winter we’ve just had, few farmers will have escaped its consequences. I am no exception. The writing had been on the wall since before Christmas when the snow arrived and forgot to go away. The first thing I did wrong was I didn’t bring my 32 radiators indoors. I hear you say no damned fool would have radiators outside. But, Bluefaced Leicester ewes, with their big naked ears and bald heads are not designed for life on the Luce Valley Tundra! I thought that if I fed them enough it would compensate for their heat loss but it wasn’t enough. Scotland just got warmer and my ewes got thinner. Even though I was giving the small flock enough feed to sustain a small third world country they still managed to lose condition. By the time they lambed the ewes were in poor condition but worst of all many of the triplets and quads were weak and spindly. There is nothing more soul destroying than having a ewe with four lambs that has milk for all of them, eyes for only one of them and time for none of them. The Blackface ewes, that hardy hill breed, faired not much better. I had bought a hundred and thirty yearling ewes in the autumn. I was very pleased with them at the time but the onset of winter and the snow meant that they could now devote all of their time to itching and scratching instead of foraging for food. It turns out that we had bought in more beasts than the hundred and thirty that we had paid for. Under close inspection the wee varmints were identified as being lice. Having lice on your sheep is bad enough but we were relieved that it was nothing any worse than that. We’ve never had scab on the farm and I would like to keep it that way. At the other end of the age range in our Blackface ewe flock the older ewes had really struggled to hold onto their condition and when lambing finally did start they had not much notion of nursing their lambs. In fact this all seemed to fit in perfectly with the circle of life as a fox very soon caught onto the opportunity and started helping himself to the odd lamb or two through the night. So the situation at the end of March was basically this: A third of my Bluefaced Leicester lambs were being reared on powdered milk. The wool was peeling out of my young Blackie ewes and foxes were killing my lambs through the night. Then the weather took a turn for the worse! We hurriedly evicted our Beltex hoggs from the buildings where they were seeing out the rest of the winter after returning home from their winter grazing and replaced them with our ewes that were left to lamb. We managed this just in the nick of time to escape 48 hours of the most horrid torrential rain which would have slain dozens of lambs for sure. We had just finished patting ourselves on the back for that quick and decisive action when I found one of the Beltex tup hoggs, which had just been evicted 48 hours earlier, floating in a ditch as dead as a Dodo. You just can’t win with sheep. But it’s a long road that has no turns. At time of writing I still have a hundred or so Blackface ewes to lamb. The weather has picked up; the grass has started to grow; the fox seems to have had enough to eat; and maybe things aren’t so bad after all. Roll on summer.
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