The youngest lamb is only two weeks old when SVT Nyheter Helsingborg visits the sheep stable. A few unusually fertile spring weeks have passed, when a total of 106 lambs have taken their first breaths – 19 more than the year before. This may be due to several factors.
– Both that you feed correctly and then that you cover at the right time and have good animal husbandry, says Viola Thorbjörnsson, who is a final-year student at the school. It's fun because you really feel that this year we have succeeded.
The fact that there were so many just this year is largely due to the fact that many ewes who became mothers for the first time and who normally only get one lamb instead got several. In addition, only two out of a total of 108 lambs were stillborn, which is a record low figure.
A total of 13 single lambs, 28 pairs of twins and 13 triplet pairs were born during a few spring weeks. Photo: Caroline Martos / SVT
Student emergency services assist
Every year, students in the school's specialisation Animal Care and Agriculture are included in a lambing emergency service that may need to be called out quickly. One of these is Viola Thorbjörnsson, who assisted in both the first and the last of the spring lambs.
– The most important thing is to make sure that the lamb gets colostrum so it can build up an immune system and of course also check that the mother takes care of her lambs, she says.
After graduating from high school this summer, she hopes to continue working with sheep and lambs.
Hear Viola talk about how lambing happens in the clip above.
Viola Thorbjörnsson is in her final year at the Animal Care programme at Svalöfs gymnasium and is one of the students who responded when it was time for lambing. Photo: Caroline Martos / SVT