birthday

After the excitement of cow herding, I was looking forward to a nice dinner. We’d gotten all the stuff to make Arvind’s meat curry when we were in town, so I set to work cutting up chicken. Graham, looking out the window, pointed to a sheep in the paddock closest to the house. “See that one? She’s about to give birth.” “Really?” I asked, thinking all the sheep looked the same, with the exception of lambs attached to some of them. “Yeah. Looks like she might need some help.” Dinner dropped in priority. After all, lambs were what I’d come to see – and my guess was that newborn lambs were among the cutest stages.

We all went out into the paddock, and applied our herding skills (or, in my case, lack thereof) again. The difference from cows is that sheep are smaller – so, less scary, but also faster and they tend to slip through holes in ‘human chains.’ We didn’t want to disturb the pregnant ewe too much, so Wag stayed behind. Our first attempt at herding the sheep into a corner didn’t work out – most likely my fault, but Graham was nice about it. We got them into another corner, and let some of them slip past on purpose while watching to make sure the pregnant one was still in the corner. At the end, it felt like some sort of guerilla exercise – all of us advancing, using trees to our advantage, waving our arms, Graham whispering directions. When we got close enough, Graham dove in and tackled the ewe. It’s not really a stretch when people surmise that Kiwis are good at rugby because they have practice tackling sheep, it looked much the same at least to the untrained eye.

So now comes the fun part. I retrieved my camera and started snapping away while Miva held the ewe. Graham pulled on the visible paws, and then the head appeared. More pulling, and then the whole lamb, which he placed on the mother so she’d get used to it. After making sure there was only one guy in there, Graham put the little one on the mother’s nose and we all ran away so she could bond. It all looked promising when we left – the little lamb was standing and the mother was cleaning it up.