Witness the miracle of birth by visiting a working farm during lambing season. Ali Wood takes a flock of excited children to see and hear the pitter patter of tiny sheep.
It’s mid-lambing season, and the kids are clambering over the hay bales with the farmer’s sons, imaginary rifles in hands. Around us, fat-bellied ewes graze and sleep, apart from one, who is pacing and emitting a low-pitched bleat. She pauses to lick her newborn lamb, now an hour old, then slumps down into the fresh hay, ready to give birth to another.
We’re in the lambing shed at Penpont Farm, which, thanks to the mild Cornish climate, has an extra lambing season in November. While the children play, my baby daughter is sound asleep in her carrier, despite the cacophony of starlings fighting over spilt corn, and the noise of the tractor moving older lambs out to the surrounding fields.
At four years old, the ewe is an experienced mother, and her first lamb today was born easily.
“I noticed a couple of hours ago that she was bleeding,” says the shepherd, Rob Hawkey, who works 12-hour shifts during lambing season with his cousin Oliver. Farming at Penport is in its third generation and the pair are old hands at lambing. “I knew she was coming to lamb, but I didn’t expect it to happen so quickly, as some pace around for hours. I came into the shed and she was half out.”
NATURE IN THE RAW
It’s time to deliver the ewe’s second baby, so Oliver gets down on his knees, and gently slides his hand inside her to check the position of the lamb. Most ewes give birth without assistance, but with multiple births the shepherds like to get them out quickly, so that the lambs don’t get muddled up with other little ones born at the same time.
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