Found Treasure: #079’s Baby Boy

Erin Mason said she wouldn’t adopt and bottle feed a baby lamb. 

“I prefer to let nature take its course,” she tells me. 

Then she did. And now she has a newborn fluffball living in her house. 

That’s the thing about plans—the fun thing, and/or traumatizing thing, and/or heartbreaking thing, and/or heart-melting thing about plans.

They rarely go accordingly. 

I had plans to write about Mason—and Tablas Creek Vineyard in Paso Robles where she works—at some point. Not this week. 

But then a little serendipity intervened: I saw her Wednesday night post on Thanksgiving morning and was crying before breakfast.

Words like amazing and incredible get thrown around a lot when they don’t truly apply. 

They do here.

I’ll let her post unlock the saga, with minimal edits done for spacing (and with her approval). 

Some brief context first: Mason works as a regenerative specialist at Tablas Creek Winery, and her duties include tending the flock of sheep and working the harvest. (She also volunteers on Big Sur Food & Wine’s kooky and relentless logistics team, usually with me as one of her henchmen, and I used a different poetic IG post from her to tell that tale too.)

Tablas deserves international recognition for regenerative practices and its flat-out excellent Rhone-style wines. Its long-time certified biodynamic practices, employee support and community involvement, in fact, helped earn it the world’s first Regenerative Organic Certified® vineyard in 2020, and recognition as the first Regenerative Organic Certified Gold vineyard in 2022.

Here’s the story of Mason and the baby lamb, right on time for a weekend of gratitude.

Just before lambing, we lost some older ewes in their last month of gestation.

I try to keep the herd list pretty up-to-date and was recording their deaths when I just so happened to look at the stats on ewe #079. 

Born November 2013—10 years old—and a mother to about as many lambs in that time. Multiple sets of twins over her numerous lambing seasons at Tablas Creek. 

I thought I must have made a mistake the last time we did a full count; no way this old girl was still kicking around. 

But sure enough, her last lamb was born in 2022. So I’ve been casually looking for her, #079. Not an easy task with dirty, non-electronic tags. 

As I left work today, I did my final check on the flock. I noticed a ewe lying down, fully on her side, head firmly on the ground, labored breathing. 

Getting close, I saw the lamb—about halfway out, seemingly stuck in the birth canal. 

I quickly realized that mom was fading fast and didn’t have the energy to push. 

So I grabbed my gloves and carefully assisted pulling out her baby boy. 

I wasn’t sure if he was going to be alive, but within seconds he cleared the fluid from his nostrils, started writhing out of the amniotic sac, and burst up to his feet. 

I brought him closer to the ewe’s face and nestled him inside the crook of her neck, hoping she might respond. But it was clear she was taking her last breaths. 

She was laying on her tagged ear, so I softly tilted her head a bit to check and there she was, #079. 

The matriarch. So now here we are.

I said I wouldn’t do it, but here we are, me and baby boy, sitting on the floor of my bathroom, second bottle feeding since he was born about 4 hours ago. 

Most of our ewes have had twins this season, which has only now been a week. I know they don’t have it in them to take on an orphan.

So here we are… me and #079’s beautiful baby boy, her parting gift to us. It was the least I could do.

More at tablascreek.com.