Sheep Scanning

Sheep are ‘short day’ breeders, meaning they mate when the days become shorter in the autumn so their lambs are born early enough to take advantage of next year’s spring growth.

Around this time of year hill farmers will scan their ewes to find out how many lambs they are holding. They do this by using an ultra sound scanner much like the one a doctor will use to scan a woman when she is pregnant, usually they pay a contractor to come and scan all of the ewes at once who will travel around the country covering an areas farms at a time.

It’s very important for a hill farmer to know how many lambs his ewes are carrying as he can then order in the right amount of food and separate the ewes to control the amount of food they are given. Naturally a ewe carrying one lamb, a ‘single’, will require less food than one carrying triplets.

Sheep give birth to, on average, twin lambs but triplets are common too, if a ewe is one year old and in its first breeding season it is called a ‘yearling’ and will most likely be carrying one lamb.

Yearlings have to be fed carefully as the lamb they are carrying may grow too fast and large and therefore be difficult for the ewe to give birth to, this is obviously dangerous for the lamb and ewe as both can be lost but can also be expensive for the farmer in terms of food and vets bills.

Twins are the optimal number which a farmer wants, there is less hassle and feeding is easier, also the farmer then has options to fatten up, keep to expand or develop a new flock or sell.

Triplets can be problematic as the ewe can struggle to get enough food, the farmer will then have to keep a closer eye on the field holding the triplets so he can top their feed up sufficiently.

Very often one of the lambs may end up stillborn or born weak and smaller than its brothers and sisters which makes it vulnerable to exposure and predators like crows, so a farmer will keep the ewes carrying triplets somewhere close to the farm where they are more sheltered.

Often they will be kept undercover in a barn or polytunnel to give birth there, the last two weeks being the hardest when they require the most attention and food.

Ewes may struggle to produce enough milk to feed triplets so one of the lambs might have to be fostered off to another ewe or even hand fed, fostering a lamb is difficult as you have to persuade or force the other ewe to accept this stranger to its family and look after it instead of kicking it out.

When the sheep are gathered up and brought down from the higher and further fields closer to the farm in order to scan it is obviously very handy to know which ewes have actually been ‘tupped’, or mated. To find this out farmers use a device called a ‘raddle’. A raddle is basically a soft, coloured crayon hitch that is harnessed to the chest of the male sheep, the ‘tup’, each tup will have a different colour so the father of the lambs is known.

After 2 to 3 weeks the colour of the raddle will be changed so the hill farmer can visually check if that tup is actually doing his job and if the ewes are sticking or ‘holding’with that tup, a ewe which hasn’t been mated or doesn’t become pregnant is called a ‘gelding’.

Choosing and coordinating the colours of the raddles can prove to be very complicated, with many farmers having a calendar specifically for this purpose, as the chances of having the same colour raddle as a neighbouring farms tups must be minimised to prevent confusion and mishaps with stray tups. Also a ewe will be sprayed with dye after being scanned to indicate where it belongs and how many lambs it’s carrying, this leads to some very colourful and wildly patterned sheep!

There are many, many other logistical nightmares involved with lambing season, a main one is that tupping of ewes, and therefore lambing, has to be staggered and spread out over the season.

This means that if there is very inclement weather, as is likely in the northwest over winter, and the ewes that are near parturition , meaning giving birth, have to be brought inside out of the wind and snow, there is enough room for them, because a hill farmer simply won’t have the room to shelter all of his flocks at once.

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