On the pot-bellied, "juvenile delinquent" lambs who were nursed at home... For Sunday Miscellany on RTÉ Radio 1, listen to The Pet Lamb by Leo Cullen above.
This is the time of year when the sight of lambs bouncing in the fields gladdens your eyes. The time you remember the lines of the poem you learned at school: 'All in an April evening, when April airs are abroad, the sheep with their little lambs passed me by on the road'.
On the lowlands, you’ll see lambs cavorting as early as February; up on the Wicklow, Connemara or Kerry hills you won’t see them until April. It takes a hardier breed of sheep to live on the hills: the Black-faced Mountainy for the hill, the Suffolk Down for the lowland.
My family’s farm was a mix of lowland and hill and so the flock was a mix of Suffolk and Mountainy. I loved sheep; they were easier to handle than our cattle. I loved their steadily-gazing eyes; I liked how when a hogget ewe had difficulty giving birth, it was more readily put to rights than was the case with a heifer. Heifers lost calves and that was the black day on the farm. But ewes too lost lambs. Or sometimes lambs were saved and mothers died. That was the bleak and sorry sight on the hillside.
The tottering lamb then had to be cared for. It was brought into the Aga-heated kitchen and coaxed with a baby bottle of whiskey-enriched cow’s milk. Once strengthened, it was introduced to a foster-mother. This might be a ewe that had lost her lamb, or sometimes a ewe that had lost one of two lambs. Sometimes it didn’t work. If the would-be foster-mother turned on the wee lamb and pucked it out of her sight the orphan remained on the whiskey-doctored bottle. It was even allowed the heat of the kitchen a few days longer – and so got used to loafing around the house like a juvenile delinquent. Once its sucking action improved, the teat of the baby bottle was exchanged for a black teat, made of more durable rubber, and the bottle for a porter bottle. What didn’t change though was that the pet lambs remained close to the home-front, didn’t mingle with the flock.
Listen to more from Sunday Miscellany here.
