Authors: Amy Liptrot
I do the early-morning shift, like Mum used to when she and Dad were the lambing team, getting dressed in the dark, then going out to the byre. I sleep on the sofa in the caravan. Dad has been up into the night and leaves notes for me at four or five a.m., detailing the latest lambs and things to watch out for. In the pen I look for ewes that have had lambs in the last hours, sometimes sorting out ten newborns between five confused mothers and putting them into individual pens.
We have around 220 ewes, scanned to carry an average of 1.8 lambs each. Most will give birth unassisted but the occasional ewe will need help: to pull out a large single with its head stuck or to untangle the legs of twins or triplets – a job I would sometimes be called on to help with as a child because my hands were smaller than Dad’s.
Every hour I do my rounds of the shed and the field. My eyes dart to their back ends: I’m keen not to miss any signs of lambing, looking out for sheep who are pointing in a different direction from the flock, lying on their own, or walking in circles, crying out with confusion. Ewes in birth throes arch their backs downwards, like plucked strings, noses to the rafters. If a sheep has not given birth after an hour or two, I’ll wake Dad to come and help.
While the ewes are let out to graze in the afternoon, I am able to bed down their pens. I shake out new bales of straw
over the old, which has got dirty and compacted, while listening to rap on my headphones, enjoying being a rural farmworker listening to urban music. I take breaks in the only place on the farm I can get mobile reception: sitting on an upturned bucket out in a field, texting and posting online with sheep shit on my wellies and straw in my socks.
I remember lambing when I was a kid as hectic and disorganised, with sheep getting loose and gory tragedy, but over the years, the system has been streamlined and good behaviour bred into the flock. They come when called, slow and heavy with lambs, following each other into the big shed for the night.
Across the field I spot a newborn lamb and, as I get closer, realise it must be dead, lying limp and still. The birth sac is still across its body and head, so with my fingers I puncture it at the mouth and peel it off, like a condom. The lamb immediately sneezes, shakes itself and breathes deeply before letting out a healthy baa. The mother, who had given up and wandered away, is alerted by the sound and trots back to begin licking her newborn. In just a few minutes it will be walking and sucking, and tomorrow skipping around the field.
At lambing time I’m part caring midwife, part stern eugenicist. Because sheep have only two teats, ewes who have triplets must usually have one ‘fostered’, as we call it, but really it’s more of a forced adoption. I feel like a 1950s doctor as I line up three lambs to choose the largest to take away. A ewe scanned to have a single has begun to give birth: as soon as her lamb is born, it is dunked in a bucket of warm water along with its new fostersibling; then they are stirred up together in a bloody brew with
the afterbirth and fluids so that they take on the same smell before being presented to the post-natal mother. Occasionally the imposter is detected and rejected but in the majority of cases the deception is a success.
Between the lambs, there are other jobs – building up more broken dyke, cutting down rogue thistles, feeding the poultry that peck around the farmyard. At the end of the day I attend to my body, thinking of how it will function rather than how it looks: getting rid of any hangnails that could get caught, letting the hot shower massage my muscles.
A weak lamb that can’t walk and is too weak to suck is taken inside, given some milk in a tube pushed gently down its throat and into its stomach. When Mum was here and we still lived in the farmhouse, we used to put them in a cardboard box in the oven and after a few hours they would either be dead or warmer and strong enough to go back to their mothers. Snuffling lambs are sweet and milky in the hay.
I walk up to the Outrun to check the sheep with older lambs that have already been moved up from the fields closer to the house. The sun moves in and out of the clouds, casting rippling shadows on the short grass. The treeless landscape is laid out in gently curving horizontal stripes of grassland, cliff, sky and sea, so it is easy to spot the dead lamb, far away from the flock. Its eyes and innards have been pecked out by gulls and it is splayed, like a rug. I turn it over with the tip of my welly to note if it’s a ram or a ewe. The number we spray on the side of twins has become too blurred to read but at least this means the ewe has another lamb to take her milk.
Most lambs are healthy, and we simply spray their navels with a squirt of yellow iodine to prevent infection and carry them out onto the grass by the front legs with a finger between, the way I was taught, while they squirm reassuringly and their mothers follow.
On fine spring days the landscape glows, lambs play under the wild, bubbling song of curlews and lapwings and, further away, the sounds of the sea and the odd tractor at neighbouring farms. But when it rains the yard gets muddier and the grass barer, the sheep huddle behind the dykes and I can’t hear much but the wind through my woolly hat.
These lambs born in April will either be sold in autumn as ‘store’ for another farmer to feed up, or over winter as ‘fat’, shipped to abattoirs in the south. ‘Scottish Organic Lamb’ sold in Tesco nationwide might have come from our farm.
About ten years ago, my parents converted the farm to organic, a system based around not using synthetic fertilisers. There are also certain rules about medication, which should be reactive only, no routine dosing, and animal welfare. We were no longer allowed to keep our cows chained up inside over the winter and they were replaced with long-haired, horned red and black Highland cattle hardy enough to stay out all year. We stopped castrating the lambs, meaning ram and ewe lambs are now separated after weaning, and abandoned traditional tail-docking, finding no problems with fly infestations on dirty tails.
It took several years of chemical-free farming before the farm and its produce could be certified organic and Dad has an inspection each year. He now uses crab waste from the local shellfish factory, mixed with straw, muck and seaweed, as a natural fertiliser. Spread on the barley, oats and reseeded grass, this mix helps to hold moisture, minerals and earthworms in the soil, rather than simply layering on synthetic nitrogen fertilisers, a by-product of the oil industry. Clover added to the mix of seed for new grass also acts as a natural fertiliser. Using these methods, grass and crop yields haven’t decreased as much as expected.
I remember the smell of the fish pellets we used to give the in-lamb ewes and also the smell of the sheep dip. The dip next to the Bay of Skaill has now been filled in and made into a windswept picnic area. One by one the ewes were plunged into the chemical swimming pool, pressed down to make sure their wool became impregnated, to protect against parasite infestation. I was tied up nearby, like a dog, to make sure I didn’t run and fall into the acrid and enticing brew.
It’s only lately I’ve been able to see beyond the dirt and hard work to some of the benefits of the farming lifestyle. When I was small, both my parents worked at home. From the kitchen window I could see someone crossing the field in overalls and wellies: they could be either Mum or Dad. Dad has always kept a notebook of jobs to do: buying feed or fixing the chainsaw were on the same list as repainting the bathroom in the house.
The whole family would take part in things like haymaking. When we were small, Tom and I would play in the fields when the adults were working, warned not to get too close to the
tractors and balers. When we were older we had to help, stacking the bales of hay into ‘stooks’ in the field, lifting and restacking them on the trailer, then throwing them off into the byre when we got back to the farm. A whole hayload, the size of a small house, with us kids, Mum, helper and the dog, once tumbled down onto the road as the tractor turned a sharp corner. The bales cushioned our fall.
At the end of the lambing season, all the sheep and lambs are moved from around the farm up to the Outrun and other top fields – a job requiring help. I vividly remember the days when we gathered the flock into a group at the corner of the field, then pushed them up the track. Ewes with new lambs become fearless and don’t flock in the usual way: staring down sheepdogs and stamping their feet. There was chaos as lambs escaped, dogs and kids sent to run after them as they scattered in panic or sheer exuberance.
As on many medium-sized farms, there have been different diversifications and experiments over the years. Dad went to other farms to shear their sheep and took in shearing blades for sharpening, using a dangerously spinning disc of sandpaper, a job I was taught and did for the customers the last time Dad was in hospital when I was a teenager. We had ducks and chickens, and a succession of Border collie sheepdogs. We had a goat, two horses, semi-wild cats and a changing herd of about ten kye. These days, Dad keeps a few alarming-looking and -sounding guinea fowl, the odd Kunekune pig and fifty thousand honey bees.
* * *
On the farm we were always close to both birth and death. Lambs were skipping around the field and a few months later hefty carcasses were hanging in our playroom in the house, a few kept back from the abattoir for our family and friends to eat. Often there was drama and stress. Animals would escape down the track and be found elsewhere in the parish. An expensive newly bought ram would die before it had a chance to carry out its duty, either by fighting with other rams or because it was over-bred and weakly. Now, newly introduced rams are put in a tightly packed pen for a couple of nights so they can’t kill each other by fighting where they have enough room to charge. But there are always new worries on the farm. Recently, there is the threat of change with the visiting surveyors representing energy companies from the south.
As well as the farm work, I recall unexpected interactions with wild animals: a swan in the freezer that died flying into a power line; a sparrowhawk found inside the tractor cab; glimpses of otters moving between the sea and a small freshwater loch.
At school, the question wasn’t which football team you supported but which make of tractor was your favourite: John Deere, Case, Massey or Ford. But I never joined the Young Farmers. I read music and fashion magazines and American novels. Now, browsing the internet in my tea break, still in my padded boiler suit, I suddenly feel frustrated, like I did when I was a teenager: I want to wear a dress and go into town but I can’t. I need to go and check on the lambing shed.
Carrying lambs out to the fields, I pass the farmhouse and remember the comforting weight on the corner of my bed,
Mum or Dad tucking me in. The creaks of that old house grew into me as firmly as the wind outside, and sometimes in London, waking in the night, I would think I was still there – the chinks of light through the wooden stairs above my bed, the rain on the window behind my head and my bare feet on the cold flagstones.
The Jobcentre had been patient but was now putting pressure on me to find work and widen my job hunt from office jobs in London. Reluctantly, I begin looking in the situations-vacant page of the
Orcadian
each week. I spot an advert for a summer job working on a bird conservation project for the RSPB and, although I was pretty sure I’d be back in my real life in London before long, something about it appealed to me and I thought it wouldn’t hurt to send off an application.
14
THE CORNCRAKE WIFE
IT IS TWO A.M. ON
Friday night and I’m alone down a farm track, dancing in the glow of my headlights because I heard the call I know belongs to a medium-sized brown bird. Unexpectedly, I got the job working for the RSPB on the Corncrake Initiative, a long-running conservation project and, rather than return to London, signed a contract for a summer in Orkney.
I spent the summer staying up all night. When everyone else was asleep, I was out in the gloaming with the livestock and the wildfowl, searching for a rare, endangered bird: the corncrake.
Corncrakes, sometimes known as landrails, are similar in size and shape to moorhens, but brown with a ginger wing and pink beak, inhabiting farmland rather than wetland. At one time they were common across the whole of the UK. Numbers declined dramatically in the twentieth century, and now they are found only on the western isles and Orkney in this country. The birds
are on the Red List of threatened species of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and last summer, 2011, just thirty-one calling males were located here.
My job is to locate every calling male – only the males call – in Orkney. I appeal for public reports, asking people to call my ‘corncrake hotline’ if they hear one. My answerphone message contains a recording of the call so that people can compare it with what they have heard. The sound is like a credit card being scraped over a comb, or a guiro percussion instrument or, like the corncrake’s onomatopoeic Latin name,
Crex crex
. The oldest islanders are already familiar with the call, which was once the sound of the countryside on summer nights.
As well as collecting other people’s reports, I carry out my own comprehensive survey. It is lucky that I’ve just got my driving licence back after the ban for drink-driving because my survey is carried out by car between midnight and three a.m. Corncrakes call throughout the night, peaking between these hours when the males are at the centre of their territories. Over seven weeks, following a standardised national methodology, I survey twice every one-kilometre map-grid square in Orkney containing suitable corncrake habitat – hay and silage fields, and tall vegetation such as nettles or iris. Corncrakes are elusive. They hide in the long vegetation and we locate them by ear, rather than sight. I stop every 250–500 metres, wind down the windows and listen for two minutes.
Now that lambing has finished, I’ve come back to stay at Mum’s in Kirkwall and she’s already in bed when I leave the house around eleven – nightclub time – having filled my Thermos
with coffee rather than wine, dressed in warm layers, made sure I have my maps and phone charged, and drive out into the countryside. I pass homes putting their lights out for the night, then ancient standing stones and modern wind turbines on the dark hillsides.