During the long, cold nights of March, Christian Walkis, a father of young children, sleeps with a video monitor by his bed. He wakes up every half hour to check the video and make sure everything’s okay. 

But the screen isn’t showing him a baby in a crib – those days are over for his two sons, who are four and almost two years old. The other end of the monitor is in Slough Farm’s sheep barn, where the ewes are getting ready to give birth.

Walkis is the farm manager at the nonprofit meat and produce farm in Katama, and one of his jobs is to assist the ewes during lambing season. At a time when many of winter’s charms have largely faded and the real warmth of spring still feels weeks away, the ewes add a bit of life into one of the bleakest times of year. 

“It’s something that I really look forward to,” Walkis said. “It’s my favorite time of year, for sure.” 

Preparation for lambing season begins months ahead of time. On October 15, Walkis introduced two rams, Monty and Ramble, to the ewes. The ewes are impregnated by the rams and, come March, the ewes will give birth, with most lambs coming in a thirty-six to seventy-two hour window. This year, he expects the first due date to be March 9. 

Walkis lives on the Slough Farm property with his wife, Carla Walkis – who works at Slough as the garden manager – and their children. Nature doesn’t abide by man-made workdays so Walkis makes sure he’s always present and available during the lambing period. He keeps the monitor with him and checks for the telltale signs that a ewe is getting ready, including staring off into the distance, “pawing the ground, and kind of just getting up and down, up and down, up and down,” he said.

When it’s go-time, Walkis will head to the sheep barn, but he stays on the sidelines as much as he can. Unnecessary intervention in birth can lead to a waterfall effect of further complications. 

“The moment that you put your hand into an animal, you’ve got a ticking clock in your head where you need to be done with that birth in fifteen minutes, because the increase in mortality goes up exponentially beyond that,” Walkis said.

So, he hangs back, watching calmly, in case he’s needed. The idea is to be “very present and in the moment and also moving slowly but decisively.” 

He tries to respond to what each individual ewe needs, because he’s learned that all of them relate to the experience differently. Some ewes, especially the first-time mothers, get nervous. Others are almost worryingly at ease. One of the ewes “would just get up and start eating while delivering the baby, and it would just be like, ‘What are you doing? You need to focus on what you’re doing,’” he said. The ewe would stop pushing and “start eating like a normal day.”

The sheep at Slough are called Tunis and this breed usually delivers twins. But the first ewe to give birth last year was different. 

She “had two pretty quick twins and then I thought we were done, and I went back in the house.” Then, about forty-five minutes later, she went back into labor, which is atypical. Out came a third lamb, the same size as the first two. “I wasn’t expecting it,” he said.

The personalities are special and the surprises are memorable, but one of his favorite parts of the job comes from a cross-species experience, in the form of field trips. Last year, first graders from different schools came to the farm. 

“A couple of them got to see lambs get born, which is very overwhelming for the kids, but also really exciting,” he said. There was one particular first grader who got emotional and had to take a step away from the action. But then the mom delivered the twins successfully, and the student came back in to pet the new lamb. 

As a father with young children, Walkis appreciates helping children learn how to interact with livestock. The lambs are “going to have a really great life and you can come back and visit it out in the field in five months and see it, a big, happy animal running around,” he said. 

The lessons continue from there: “Being able to, you know, frankly, eat it six months down the line in school is really cool.”

Slough Farm donates produce and meat to local organizations, including the councils on aging, Kinship Heals, the Islandwide food pantry, and the schools. “Everything is donated on the Island,” he said. “It’s something that I feel proud that Slough is able to do.” 

Outside of wild game, just about all of the meat we eat comes from some kind of farm somewhere, and connecting the dots from field to plate happens in the Walkis household, too. “Our culture is very disassociated from animal birth and death, and where our food is coming from,” he said. “I see it even in my own children.” 

The farm recently slaughtered and processed chickens and Walkis brought one home for dinner. When he pulled it out of the fridge, there were some questions about how it made its way to their house. He explained that it had been slaughtered earlier – and he was careful to do so in a matter-of-fact way, so it didn’t feel scary or intimidating.

Many of the lessons of parenthood and farming seem intertwined. Walkis notices the connections but acknowledges the differences. He and his wife had their first child before he started working lambing season. Then, after he had some experience with the ewes, they had their second child. 

“I would say that I was definitely better equipped for my second son’s birth than my first son’s birth.” But how much of that comes from learning to support the ewes? “I don’t know,” he said.