Pi, Anyone?

The Black Vultures are back. They returned to Fair Hill Farm on March 10th this year. 4 days earlier than usual. 

On March 14th, a ewe lambed. A late lamb for us. We named her Pi, because we're that kind of family. She's healthy, strong, and exactly the right age to be a delectable snack. 

That's not dramatic. That's the math. Black vultures return from migration hungry. Ravenous. And unlike turkey vultures, blacks don't wait for something to die. They hunt. They work in groups. They go for the soft targets: eyes, tongue, umbilical cord, anus, on newborns and laboring ewes. (and calves too!) They are patient, intelligent, bold, coordinated, and federally protected.

Which means I can't shoot them. My only tool is me.

So for the next two weeks, Pi gets a shepherd. Not a guardian dog, not a theory, but a human being, present, watching, dissuading. Biblical-style shepherding for a modern problem. When I say we are out with my flock, I mean it's either my son or myself physically standing between my lambs and a sky full of birds that would like to eat them alive.

Here's little Pi, isn't she the cutest thing ever! Standing under her buddy Buttermilk, our guardian llama.

I've lost two lambs to black vultures over the years. Different seasons bring different numbers, different aggression. Last year the birds were almost passive. The year before, they were relentless. You don't get to predict it. You get to show up.

This is why we lamb in January and February. Not because we love frozen water buckets and midnight field checks in single-digit temps or sub-zero birthings. Because by mid-March, when the vultures return, January lambs are big enough to be safe from the sky. And they're old enough to have some resilience against the other danger waiting below, the parasites waking up in warming pastures.

The lambing calendar at Fair Hill wasn't designed around convenience. It was designed around predators above and parasites below. Two biological pressures, two windows of vulnerability, one timing decision that accounts for both.

Nobody taught me that in a textbook. I learned it from dead lambs and hard springs.

There's a romantic notion in parts of the regenerative community that if you just design the system right, predators and livestock coexist in some kind of pastoral balance. I understand the impulse. I share the ethic. I respect their role in the ecosystem. But I will also stand in a field for fourteen days straight to make sure they don't take another lamb from me.

Coexistence isn't passive. On a working farm, it's a job. It requires presence, observation, and a willingness to be inconvenienced by reality. It requires designing your operation around what actually happens on your land — not what you wish happened, not what someone else's land does, not what looks good in a grant proposal.

The vultures are back. Pi is 9 days old today, pronking in the sun. And I'm out there. 

That's the work.