But sometimes stars clash and new worlds are born. Something happens in the grand scheme of things and you find yourself kneeling on a bed of straw looking down at a tiny form that has just been born but which is still encased in its amniotic sack and you are wondering whether to intervene and break open the bag of fluid in which the lamb could drown and release it to this world. You find yourself working quickly, surprised at how strong the bag is, and how difficult it is to clear the mucus from around the lamb's nose, holding your breath while the lamb takes its first gulp of air.
Grey hairs have appeared during my first lambing season and I am still suffering from sleep deprivation. I blame it all on friends. Two of them in fact. There is Katie, who helps me in the garden, who idly, over a cup of coffee sitting outside the garden shed one morning, mentioned that her ambition was to have sheep once more. She had a mis-spent youth working with sheep and over the years the memory had become rose-tinted and she dreamt of owning some of her own. Just a dream until one lunch time sitting on the beach at the Seven Sisters (you need a leap of imagination here; close your eyes and think; spectacular white cliffs, a clear blue sky, the sound of soft gentle waves breaking over the shingle, a group of school children and two Sussex Wildlife Trust school leaders, one of them me in a former life and my colleague Sara, teaching about coastal processes). Sara was moving up to Scotland, and casually mentioned that she needed to find a home for seven of her sheep. I thought of Katie's dream and imagined large, white, nameless sheep grazing on some of my land. In fact what Sara owned were Shetlands, small, tough, beautifully coloured; black, rusty brown, dun coloured and grey and they all had names! Two and two make four and a month later we dropped the tail-gate on an old Land Rover and the Shetlanders had arrived on my smallholding and life changed for ever.
Looking after the sheep was easy to begin with. Just a case of checking them, counting the number of legs and ensuring that they looked healthy and happy. Windfall apples were a good way of getting to know each other. Then at the beginning of November the girls went on holiday to meet a fine looking ram and returned pregnant.
The experts will tell you that Shetland sheep lamb easily, produce healthy offspring and come up with lots of milk. And oh yes they normally lamb in the morning. Some of this proved to be true. What they don't tell you is that lambing changes your life.
I had absolutely no experience at all. I had never seen a lamb being born. But that was fine because Katie was there. Except some of the time she wasn't. Arriving in the morning I was never sure what I would find. I had to learn fast, I needed to recognise when things looked straight forward and when there were going to be problems, I needed to get mother and offspring penned as quickly as possible after the birth before they all disappeared across the field never to be caught again. So we waited and waited and I lived on a knife edge.
The crisis broke on a cold wet night as sleet hammered on the roof of the lambing shed. I had gone to check on Nessa, a ewe that we had bought inside because she looked ready to give birth. What I thought was the beginning of labour turned into a long night, a phone call to the vet at midnight when it was obvious she was not in labour and a call out at four o'clock in the morning as our lovely sheep went down, literally, with twin lamb disease. As we waited for the vet to arrive the sky lightened and I could make out the stark outline of the trees above the hill. I was sure he wasn't going to make it in time and even if he arrived I feared the worse. But as dawn broke this amazing man turned up, checked Nessa carefully, administered steroids and anti-biotics and gave us hope as the dawn chorus started up around us. He also warned us that steroids could send her into labour within twenty four hours. Nessa had always been a bit different and she waited three more days and chose evening to produce two lovely lambs and it was a perfect birth. I looked for the feet pointing down and the head tucked between them as they emerged and everything was fine. Unfortunately, the story did not end there; weak as she was her milk dried up and we found ourselves feeding the lambs. In the end we parted with them to someone who wanted to hand rear two lambs. A hard choice but we had our hands full with four more lambs within the next two days. These were text book births and both ewes are super mothers doing all the right things as mothers do.
Me, I can't quite believe the last week. The responsibility is enormous and every time I walk up the field to check them my heart is in my mouth. Being there at a birth (even though I have had three children!) has somehow changed my perspective on life. There has been a shift in what is important and what is not and somehow I feel privileged to have been part of a tiny miracle, one which happens everyday somewhere but is always special.
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