A Cute Lamb Syndrome

Say Ahh! No, not like you’re at the dentist. More like you’ve just seen something amazingly sweet and cute and adorable. So, say Ahhh! because this is the Easter gratuitous cute lamb blog written purely because our first lambs have just been born and because they are just so amazingly cute.

Pretty much everything new-born is cute. I’m sure there are creatures out there who produce plain ugly offspring, but once you get onto cats, chickens, sheep... everything is cute. But some are cuter than others and, for whatever reason, cute as the average lamb is, the Soay lamb has extra-added cuteness.

Wait, I know I'm cute, but is this my best side?

I have done pictures for this blog because you have to see this sort of cuteness. There is a degree of tradition that says the photos ought to have a cute girly holding the lambs, just to emphasise how much cuter the lambs are. Since we are currently out of cute girlies, you will have to make do with middle-aged bloke with beard. Now how cute is that?

Once you get past the initial ahhh! moment, lambs move on to higher levels of cute, with added gambolling and playful curiosity. Last night they were digging up the special SoftSoil(tm) Luxury Kitty-Poo facilities (mole hills), which is seriously cute and, even at a couple of days old they have the sense to not disturb the ones already used by the cats.

No, I'm the really cute one.

At present, the lambs are working on keeping up with Mum, but soon they will work on the next cuteness skill which we refer to as zoom. It needs more than one lamb to be properly effective, so having the twins is an ideal starter-pack. Once a few more have been born then we can have proper zoom - high speed, formation running, over the molehills, up and down slopes, around slow-moving ewes, over sleeping ewes. Zoom is the natural lamb expression of having legs. Sturdy, powerful legs that are functional within the first hour of being born. Legs that let a lamb keep up with the flock. Basically, legs that go zoom.

Either these legs really go zoom, or grown-ups are just very slow.

Lambs are the equivalent of an eighteen year old human male, with full testosterone-induced mental impairment, given the keys to the motorbike/hot hatch/Daddy’s mid-life crisis sports car – the only thing to do is find out how fast it goes.

So, lambs go zoom. And as with the sports car, we have trees to help them stop.

And finally there is the naming, but the twins are rams, and due for the snip, so no names for them, right? That was the rule/agreement/convention which we settled on when we started with the sheep. The ewes get names. The rams get names. The wethers are just known by their ear-tag numbers.

Ginge is also very cute and came to supervise

We only intended to start with a few, maybe as many as six, just to see how we got on, but there were twenty-six, the last of a flock in need of a home following the death of a Soay breeder. Rosie, Rhoda and Ruby were the ewes born that year, and the boys just had a number - we still have numbers Thirty-seven, Thirty-Eight and Forty.

So Bonny’s twins Ocean and Sea don’t really need names, and maybe they won’t be called Ocean and Sea... but lambs are so cute, they have to have names. Even the ones that don’t need it.

There you have it, the gratuitous cute lamb blog, the annually recurring outbreak of A Cute Lamb Syndrome, which will clear up by the autumn.