The ewe in the photo birthed in a dry slough bottom which for some little reason pleased me to see. She is nuzzling lamb number two while number one makes a first attempt to find milk.
The first lamb races also started up today, but certainly did not include the lambs above.
For the first portion of lambing the pasture scene is relatively quiet, in action and sound. The first ewes to lamb and each one following all still have their lambs close by. But now those oldest lambs have discovered they can move away from mom and that there are other lambs to move with. In small groups they run pel-mel along trails and down hill slopes and back up in the ultimate display of play for the sake of play. Ewes are calling, lambs are calling. As I make my way around the pasture I see lambs with no ewe and ewes looking for lost lambs. There is no attempt on my part to sort it out though – that is the job of the ewes and lambs. The pasture scene is now chaos, in action and sound, and there is nothing to do but surrender to it and attempt to enjoy the activity of it.
Whether it has been a smooth day of lambing or a rough one I find moments of relaxation and distraction in felting even if I don’t get much time for doing it right now. Lambing time (i.e. raising market lambs) and working with wool is stirring thoughts of raising fibre animals and questioning market lambs. With the recent publicity of the Beyond Beef product I find myself once again stirred up by agriculture and how senselessly extreme some of these choices are.
Once again people are focused on a product and remain blind to an underlying mindset that says land, animal and plant are commodities to be bought/sold rather than natural resources to be honoured. I do feel that this is a fundamental flaw of farmers and ranchers on the whole and the Beyond Beef discussion/debate is bringing some of these thoughts to the surface again. This is a type of chaos playing out in agriculture and I’m wrestling with surrendering to this chaos and letting it be or responding. But I need to leave that topic for tonight as it will take more brain power than I have to sort it out and time is tight for all things not sheep, dogs or lambing right now, plus sleep is pulling hard at my edges.
So I’ll leave off with sharing the piece of fibre art that gave me some distraction during the past week and come back to the deeper topics as I can.
Fibre Queens, 12 x 30 inches, needle felted. For sale.
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