Lambing work begins as shepherds hope for kind spring weather

Most ewes will lamb within three weeks, although there are always stragglers that returned to the first service, dragging the lambing out to six weeks or more. While farmers try to lamb when the weather is improving, the reality is that we can suffer a dreadful spell of cold wet weather in May and even June. Despite our best laid plans we are all hostages to the vagaries of our Scottish climate.

As well as deciding the ideal time to lamb a flock, sheep farmers have also have to decide what breed of ewes best suit their conditions, and what breed of rams to mate them with.

There are at least 50 different pure breeds of sheep in Britain, in addition to countless rare breeds, hybrids and crosses.

Native British sheep were descended from the Mouflon (Ovis musimom), a small long-legged, goat-like mountain sheep, not unlike the modern Soay, introduced from central Europe by Neolithic man.

The Romans imported their own type of sheep with improved fleeces compared with our indigenous breeds, during their occupation of Britain. Those imports were much larger than the British native sheep and descended from the Urial (Ovis vegnei), a primitive sheep of the Middle East.

During the eighth and ninth centuries, the Vikings invaded Britain and introduced their own breeds of black-faced, horned sheep that were descended from the ancient Argali (Ovis ammon) sheep of Asia. Those Scandinavian imports are the ancestors of hill breeds like the Blackface, Swaledale and Herdwick.

With these three principle groups of ancient, primitive sheep in the genetic melting pot, generations of shepherds have bred a bewildering array of sheep breeds that are suited to the many different localities and climates in Britain.

Generations of shepherds have mollycoddled their charges to the extent that they can now take a lot of looking after. They have to be regularly checked at lambing in case a ewe needs help to give birth, or a lamb needs to be revived after suffering hypothermia, or needs trained to suckle.

During the summer, prior to shearing, the ewes may get stuck on their backs and need to be rolled over onto their feet. They need to have faeces-soiled wool clipped off their tails and hindquarters to prevent fly-strike. That's where bluebottles lay their eggs on soiled wool, that hatch out into maggots that can literally eat the sheep alive. All sheep need to have their feet checked, overgrown and diseased hooves trimmed, and then regularly run through a footbath containing a solution of chemicals that help cure or prevent disease. Then there is the annual task of shearing.

I could go on - suffice to say sheep are a lot of hard work.

Nuffield scholar Neil McGowan wrote in his recent report: "Sheep are a low-capital-cost way of producing a high value commodity product from low value land through simple hard work. The focus of our selection should therefore be to minimise the hard work, so that greater numbers can be managed. A focus on "operator comfort" and further labour cost saving needs to be adopted at the stud sector."

Mr McGowan went on to outline where solutions could be found, saying: "The biggest limiting factor in sheep production is time. The more mundane jobs that we can take out of sheep production, the more lambs we have per labour unit and the easier it will become to attract young people to work in this sector."

New Zealand shepherds look after thousands of ewes and haven't the time to pamper their charges like Scottish shepherds. If a ewe can't give birth without assistance, it dies. That way, you soon breed strains of sheep that fend for themselves. Similarly, if a lamb doesn't suckle its mother then it won't survive, so that type of sheep dies out.

Natural selection soon develops easi-care sheep that need little attention - but then I remember the words of an old shepherd who told me: "There is no such thing as easi-care. You either care or you don't."