Spring has sprung and there is new life everywhere
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COLUMN: The Postie Notes by Mark Gilbert
Although every season has its own identity, spring in the rural community brings waves of new life, and especially during lambing it also brings a twenty-four-hour operation to deliver and keep the lambs alive.
By the time you read this, the lambing will be over, but for the last few weeks, I have seen crofters and their “lambers” looking more tired by the day, all with stories of varying successes in this year's mad few weeks of new life in the rural community.
My delivery covers a sixty mile round trip from Bettyhill to Kinbrace and back, and this year with just about every croft having a working resident, it has been wall-to-wall lambs for just about every mile.
Strathnaver now has young crofting families on the previously dormant crofts, and after new fencing, barns, more gates than you could throw a stick at, interconnecting the parks, there has been new life breathed into the area in more ways than one.
Orphaned lambs are called pets, because they have to be brought on by humans, a time consuming merry go round of bottle feeding and rounding them up.
They all seem to cry for food all the time, and when I deliver to some places, the pets think I am the person coming to feed them.
I have even been surrounded by a “gang” of hungry lambs at one place after they spotted me getting out of the van and broke out of their enclosure to get to me. Trying to get the wriggly blighters back in was amusing.
On a number of the crofts the young children have the job of feeding the pets, and do it very enthusiastically, becoming the foster “parents” and caring for them as their own.
This is the epitome of rural life, like something out of The Darling Buds of May, where everybody in the family has a role to play, even two-year-olds!
Although I had heard of the practice of “skinning” previously, I encountered one of the lambers looking like a scene from a horror movie a couple of weeks ago, he had dried blood up to his elbows and had just presented a triplet lamb to a ewe that had just had a dead single lamb.
In order for the ewe to take to the lamb, which she would know wasn’t hers, the skin of the dead lamb is put on the “new” lamb, like an overcoat, and the ewe (who is full of milk) will allow the lamb she now thinks is hers, to feed.
The lambs seem like they are attached by an elastic band to their mother for the first little while, and when they are on the road you need to be aware that a lamb may rush across the road to be with mum as you approach, but soon they get into “lamb gangs” and chase each other around the parks during play time, a joy to behold.
The lambs soon change and become calmer and more confident with traffic. Touch wood, I haven’t seen any road casualties this year, which is fantastic, but strangely, during the first Covid lockdown, when it was just about only the postie and the crofters going about on the roads, there were quite a number of lambs killed?
Nature doesn’t do lockdowns, so all the usual joys of Spring arrived around the same time this year, the Cuckoo came a few days later than last year, very closely followed by a Woodpecker, the Swallows, the Bats, Primroses, Wild Forest flowers, and a new phenomenon of spring, The campervans!
Mark Gilbert works as a postman out of Bettyhill.
