Farming Diary

The risk of that happening increases when stupid ewes, particularly inexperienced gimmers lambing for the first time, choose to give birth on exposed sites rather than in the shelter of a dyke, hedge or bed of tall rushes.

This year's lambing can be best described as a "coat and leggings" affair, and most lambers have had to trudge across water-logged fields in wellington boots.

Apart from losses in bad weather, lambs perish in a variety of other ways such as being still-born or from disease. It's reckoned that on average about 15 per cent of all foetuses perish and I can tell you from bitter experience that the mortality rate can be a lot higher in a bad year.

Apart from the risk of newborn lambs perishing from hypothermia, they also have to contend with predators like foxes, carrion crows (corbies), ravens, black-backed gulls, eagles and even badgers on occasions. Such predators seem to be more numerous with each successive spring and financial losses to farmers can be hefty.

While most foxes often only take dead lambs, there are rogue foxes that kill healthy lambs. Rogues that go on a killing spree can kill dozens of lambs in a season and are often difficult to snare or shoot.

While gamekeepers regularly arrange to drive foxes out of woods to waiting guns, the best method is to drive around at night with a powerful hand-held lamp that helps to spot the fox and then mesmerises it, like a rabbit caught in the glare of car headlights, long enough to aim a powerful rifle and fire a fatal shot. Unfortunately, while that is an effective method of shooting young, inexperienced foxes, older, wily rogues have enough sense to keep moving out of range.

Often as not, losses to foxes are a lame excuse for bad shepherding where lean ewes have given birth to weak lambs and haven't enough milk to feed them. Who can blame a pair of foxes for carrying off dead lambs to feed their den of hungry cubs? Sadly, there is often no way of knowing if incriminating evidence near fox dens came from healthy lambs or carrion found lying in the lambing field.

More commonly, healthy lambs are lost to corbies, ravens or black-backed gulls, depending on the area of Scotland. Their vicious beaks cruelly peck out the eyes, tongues and navels of lambs, often disembowelling them.

While a lamb with an eye missing will recover, those that have had their tongues pecked out can't suckle and have to be put down, as well as those that have been partially disembowelled.

It is a fairly common occurrence to see a corbie, or several of them, following a lamb that has become separated from its mother, prior to attacking it. It's much the same with ravens that adopt similar tactics and have become so numerous in some areas as to mob their prey. Indeed the problem with ravens has led to recent calls for Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) to relax the rules on killing them.

No such protection exists for corbies, that also eat ground-nesting birds' eggs, and as a result many farmers and land managers shoot or trap them.

The most efficient method of keeping their numbers down is to set Larsen traps under known flight paths. They are large cages with an opening on the top that allows the birds to enter, but prevents them from flying back out.

A live crow is placed in the cage to act as a decoy to attract others, along with an adequate supply of drinking water and carrion, usually a dead rabbit.

Most contentious lamb predator has been the sea eagle that became extinct early last century, but returned to the UK in 1975 following the importation of birds from Norway that were released on the Island of Rum.

Being a protected species they have flourished, particularly on their stronghold of Mull, and lamb losses to them are a cause for concern.

Little wonder sheep farmers are alarmed at proposals to re-introduce wolves and lynx.