Mothering Sunday

 The Sunday before last was Mothering Sunday.  Good weather was forecast, so instead of spending the morning in bed, being waited on by my devoted daughters, I got up at 6.15am - yes, really - and joined my husband as he undertook the morning sheep-checking routine. 

It was a beauiful, crisp, almost cloudless morning.  As it was so early, the shadows were still long and no-one else was about.
As the morning wore on, it became quite warm.

We started off by checking all the pregnant sheep, a few of them had lambed early, but all was well.

They know that if my husband turns up on his quadbike, that it is feeding time and they mob him.  You can see them all belting up the hill as fast as they can so as not to miss out!

There is one particularly tame ram who has become a favourite of my husband.  He pushes to the front of the crowd and tries to get his head into the feed bags - he is right in the middle of the picture below, with a black face.

The blue spot on their sides denotes that they are carrying triplets.

One of the ewes was 'cast', which means she had rolled on to her back and wasn't able to get up again.  Sheep have many design faults, but this one is potentially fatal.  She had probably been lying on her back for most of the night and had developed a prolapse (not nice and always puts me in mind of James Herriot). She was in a sorry state.  I was careful to only photograph the head end!!

 

 As sheep are ruminents, if they lay on their backs for too long their stomachs fill with gas.  My husband battled with the prolapse and then we had to prop her up the right way while she expelled methane burbs.  I am purposefully not going in to too much detail. We left her in the field with the promise we would return at the end of the morning to check she was fully recovered. 

Next to check were the ewes with lambs that are already a few weeks old.  The ewes rush over to eat the feed and the lambs all crowd together for moral support.

 

The number on their sides links them to their mothers, who also sport the same number.  They are always marked on the same sides so that the shepherds can easily check the numbers.  Here we were in a field of twins.

A cow has managed to infiltrate the flock.  I think she was supposed to go off for the chop, but managed to get herself pregnant in the meantime and now has this gorgeous calf.  She has now aquired a taste for sheep food.

 

I kept pointing out lambs that appeared to be abandoned and would clearly need to be hand-reared, in our kitchen, but my husband was having none of it. 

 

This is the one I particularly want.