February Thoughts from a Shepherd’s Viewpoint

In my book, February is always the hardest month of the year and this one is no exception. By now, the last traces of the previous year’s life outside have disappeared. Most of the berries and the last leaves that clung to the hedges are largely gone. The grass has finally succumbed to the repetition of frosting and sunk to its minimum ebb, a thin brown green stubble which seems to be of little use to sustain sheep or cheer man.

There is something about the cold in February too, it always seems to me to be the coldest month, I don’t know if that’s actually true. But whatever the actual weather is like, the sun only ever feels to have a rather watered down stake in it at this point in the year. It is as if the frost and damp manage to conspire for a few brief weeks to take full control of things, and with no apparent promise to allow a return to a normal, warmer, cheerier state of affairs. An atmospheric coup. The reign of the White Witch in Narnia.

I think there is some rational validity in this feeling about this time of year. It hints back to the precariousness of survival in times where our life was more closely bound up with the year’s cycle. In every part of life on a farm that I have been involved with, it was most evident. As a food consumer these days in the UK, we don’t really perceive it so much. The shelves in the supermarkets continue to stock the same ranges of food year round. Shortages only seem to appear for other reasons. I have yet to see a notice pinned up to say that a product was in short supply because February happened. Yet from the farm end of things, it seems like we probably should.

Just to look at sheep for a minute. For over twenty years in my previous two jobs, I have been heavily involved in managing and caring for these wonderful animals. On both farms the aim was to lamb from sometime in March onwards. In many ways this is the optimal time of the year for lambing, as the rising grass growth rates in late spring/ early summer coincide with increased demand for milk on the ewe. Subsequently, this timing supplies good grass for the lambs to grow on well as they progressively wean off the ewe’s milk.

But this still leaves February. It is in many ways the crunch point. Coping with February is the price that has to be paid by the sheep and by worry in the shepherd for this fairly good and longstanding natural arrangement. The trouble is that in the last 6 weeks or so before lambing, the lambs inside the ewes have a prodigious growth rate. Added to this is the fact that a significant proportion of the flock, in all but hill and mountain sheep, carry twins. In fact, so high is this growth rate in embryonic lambs that ewes carrying twins (or more lambs) have to supply some of the energy to sustain this growth from their own body fat, no matter how well they are fed. That is, they have to lose body condition (i.e. get skinnier) for their lambs to grow inside them.

And of course this challenging point in our sheep’s annual cycle came in February, the point with little or no grass in the fields, and sustained cold and damp conditions.

As a shepherd, it is a time of concern. One must try to give the ewes the best possible conserved forages (hay and silage) and if practical (though this is fraught with difficulties too) an optimal amount of ‘concentrates’ (a cereal based extra feed); the point of both actions being to minimise this loss of body condition in the ewes. The success of these strategies though is largely already pre-determined: the quality of the stored forage on the farm will have been set by the previous year’s season and forage conservation efforts. The ewes’ best chance of getting through this successfully then, is largely down to having helped them get the right body condition (i.e. body fat cover) in autumn and winter, such that they can sustain the loss at this time of year.

So the shepherd worries and does his best with the few variables he or she can have any influence over now: He or she gives them the best forage available on the farm, though worries about the dwindling stocks; looks to put the ewes in pasture with dry and sheltered lying up places; watches to ensure adequate room for all the flock to get their food share; avoids anything that causes any additional stress and watches carefully for any that are ailing so that they can receive extra care.

Most of all, though, as he or she endures the seemingly endless daily rounds - breaking ice on troughs, lugging hay and feed around - the shepherd longs for those first days in March where the warm sun returns to replace the sun which is the cold white disc of February, and know that this hardest month is over for another year.

The stars of the show are, however, the ewes themselves. Sheep are not demonstrative animals. These remarkable, gentle patient creatures are emblematic of steadfast endurance. The real solace to the shepherd comes from the remarkably loud sound of the just spread out hay being munched all the way down a line of feed racks, surrounded by the misty warm breath of so many sheep, which briefly breaks the coldness of the air.

For a moment the damp feet, wet muddy legs and bitingly cold hands matter little amongst this quietly remarkable display of appreciation of the fulfilment of the most basic needs of life from these superb animals. The means to carry on are there for another day. For sheep and shepherd alike.