Lambing season

Lambing season is the concentrated spring period when sheep briefly dominate the work of a rural veterinary practice. In James Herriot’s account, the season brings both a surge of births and a succession of related illnesses; its exposure and physical demands are balanced by the close, delicate work of helping lambs into the world. Its arrival makes the annual cycle tangible: a rush that transforms the veterinarian’s priorities, then ebbs until sheep again become part of the distant landscape.

Spring’s Arrival and the Annual Rush

Herriot places lambing within a seasonal change he first recognizes in late March. Snow still lies in strips behind the walls and the grass remains winter-yellow, but sunshine, larks, and the wind in the trees suggest that the hard months are loosening their hold. April brings sharp winds and primroses along the roadside banks—and, with them, lambing.

The work arrives at the least convenient point in the practice’s calendar. Cows are recovering from months spent in byres and need green grass, while their calves are vulnerable to illness; coughs, colds, pneumonia, and acetonaemia are already demanding attention when the sheep work surges. For roughly ten months, sheep scarcely figure in the ordinary flow of work. For the other two, they can seem to crowd everything else out. By the end of May, the rush has dwindled and sheep have receded once more into the hills.

A Compressed Sequence of Work

The season is not only a run of births. It begins with pregnancy toxaemia and prolapses, gathers into the concentrated rush of lambings, and is followed by calcium deficiencies and severe udder infections. Lambs, too, face their own diseases, including swayback, pulpy kidney, and dysentery. The sequence gives the season its force: a short interval in which the veterinarian must move quickly from one kind of problem to another, before the tide slackens to a trickle.

This compressed calendar explains why lambing can feel so disproportionately important. The sheep are not a constant presence in the practice’s daily work, but their needs become urgent and numerous within a limited stretch of spring. Once that interval passes, the practice returns to its wider range of livestock cases.

Outdoor Conditions and Practical Technique

Lambing is often conducted in exposed places rather than sheltered warmth. The work may take place in draughty makeshift pens assembled from straw bales and gates, or directly out in the fields. The veterinarian may have to kneel for an extended period in the rain, while farmers appear not to consider whether either the ewe or the attending professional might prefer a warm place. The season’s demands are therefore not only clinical: they include working outdoors in improvised conditions.

The births themselves can involve several lambs at once, with heads and legs tangled together. The veterinarian has to sort out which limbs belong to which lamb and arrange the presentation. Herriot recalls finding this manipulation comparatively easy after the more laborious correction of calf malpresentations. Its apparent simplicity does not remove the need for care; the two principles he retains from that first year are cleanliness and gentleness.

Memory and the Newborn Lamb

Herriot’s account moves from the seasonal pattern to a particular remembered birth: twins delivered on a bitterly cold evening on a wind-scoured hillside. One lamb struggles upright within minutes and makes an unsteady, knock-kneed journey toward the udder; the other follows on its knees. The scene gives the work a scale different from the lists of disease and the pressure of the annual rush. After the exposure, effort, and complicated positioning, the newborns’ first attempts to stand become the season’s lasting image.

Lambing thus joins practical veterinary knowledge to a recurring natural cycle. Its demands are brief but intense, and its rewards are not detached from the work: they emerge through particular births, in open fields and makeshift pens, as fragile animals begin to move toward their mothers.