Life & Death on the Field

*As the title suggests, I just want give a heads up that this post discusses animal death. Feel free to skip.

Yesterday was a dramatic one on the field. At over 50 lambs born thus far, we are about 1/3 of the way through our estimated number of total lambs for the season. Other than the ewe with mastitis and her twins in the barn, things have been running smoothly.

Losses

When Jesse went to the field on Monday morning, he was surprised to find a ewe dead, who had appeared healthy the day before. She had given birth to twins on Sunday, and she was up, active, and caring for them normally. When Jesse found her, there was no obvious sign of death—no trauma or post-delivery bleeding. Miranda conferred with our veterinarian, Dr. Johnson, and she said that the ewe most likely had internal organs that became bound up and blocked during her pregnancy (likely intestines), and one of her basic organ functions was compromised. We will be bottle feeding her two twins from here on out.

On Monday evening, another ewe began to labor, and a bunch of us gathered, hoping to watch her deliver her lambs. After it was clear the lambs weren't imminent, Jesse, the kids and I peeled off and headed back to our house for the night. Miranda, John, and Caroline stayed on to check on the mastitis ewe in the barn, and monitor the laboring ewe on the field. After giving her time to labor independently, Miranda determined that the ewe was not going to deliver without assistance. Caroline and John helped hold her while Miranda examined her internally and helped her deliver her three lambs. From my most recent update, I gather two of the lambs lived ,and sadly, a third did not. The vast majority of lamb deliveries we have here are unassisted and independent. As I think about John holding a sheep through her discomfort, in the dark, in a field, watching lambs live and die under a full moon—what a first day on the farm for him...

*Miranda, John, Caroline—feel free to reach out to me with any corrections on this account and I'll update accordingly!

Surprises

In the very same day, the pendulum swung the other way, and delivered a small miracle. A ewe that gave birth to a healthy, single lamb in the first few days of the season, surprised Miranda by delivering a second healthy lamb NINE DAYS LATER. We have had one instance where a ewe delivered lambs 24 hours apart, but none of us have even heard of something like this happening. Miranda talked it over with Dr. Johnson, who said, "It's possible—And—I've never heard of a case of this happening."

Sometimes, life does find a way, and the scales tip toward a first breath, and a second, and a third. This feels like a bit of folklore magic we'll all be talking about in rocking chairs on the porch fifty years from now...

The Gamut

With lambing season, the highs are very high, and the lows are very low. Watching new life come into the world, especially with an abundant natural backdrop, is an incredible feeling that helps sustain us throughout the year. Witnessing a ewe know just how to begin caring for her baby, and the lamb innately begin to lift itself to its wobbly feet and look for milk, is reliably awe inspiring. The momentum of energy that brings the plants and animals to life each spring is palpable and visible all around us.

The flip side of that is that watching fragile life flicker, then fade, sits heavy on all of us. I didn't grow up with livestock, but having lived with them for the last decade, the proximity to birth and death is something I've come to appreciate. I notice beautiful, fleeting things more sharply, and feel more gratitude for everything alive around me on a given day. In tuning in, connecting to the natural world, and caring deeply, we inevitably open ourselves up to more loss. But the spectrum of experience we let in through that door along with it, has made my life bigger and more meaningful. Even on the days with loss, the feeling of alignment and belonging to something so vast, impossibly complex, and undeniably beautiful, makes my life feel more viscerally like the gift that it is.

And with that, I'll quit my sermon from the hill!