Massively sad news: our run of successful births has come to an abrupt end as this afternoon we found Bressay with a dead lamb. We are not sure whether this was a still-birth or whether the lamb died soon after being born as we missed the birth. Our last check had been mid-afternoon when Bressay was seen happily munching grass. At teatime Bressay did not come over for food and we could see her licking something on the ground. When we went over we found a huge ram-lamb that was fairly dry looking – we have had quite a wind today which will have helped – but very clearly no longer alive.
The guilt is fairly huge: the 'what if we had been there' question will remain unanswered as we will never know if we could have made a difference but the guilt will remain because there is a chance we might!! We began lambing indoors back in early March but as the weather became warmer and drier and also because these last few births have been so spread out, it seemed so much better to have the sheep in the field next to the barn where we could still keep an eye on them, but where they could eat grass and benefit from the fresh air.
It was quite possibly a difficult birth as this single lamb was probably in excess of 4kg, maybe 5kg which is twice what Skerry’s twins were and a good one and a half times the size of most of the others!!
We moved from shock, sadness and speculation to the crucial question as to what to do next. Bressay was distressed and of course has a massively full udder of milk. We really had two options, take the lamb away, give her time to get over it and allow her udder to dry off OR, see if we could source an orphan lamb and attempt to get her to adopt it!! Having never had a ewe in this situation before we have no experience but our gut instinct was to see if we could find a replacement lamb. We rang our farming neighbour and have arranged to go over tomorrow morning and pick up both a lamb AND possibly a 'corner restraint' which will keep Bressay in one place whilst we attempt to get the lamb to suckle her. By suckling, the lamb will then start to smell of her which will hopefully mean she will accept it. Although, this makes it sound easy, it is not necessarily going to be so. There are various methods and tricks of the trade when it comes to fostering (one includes skinning the dead lamb and putting the skin on the lamb to be fostered!) but we will hopefully gain good advice tomorrow and see how we get on. NADIS (National Animal Health Information Service) has a page of advice that begins with an alarming statistic: 'the long-term acceptance rate by the ewe is likely to be less than 60 per cent'.
We are aiming to contribute to the 40% but time will tell!!!