Long nights for shepherdess during lambing season

It is the middle of the night but Daisy Baker is awake and scanning footage on her mobile phone.

She is checking her flock of rare breed sheep are safe and well as lambing season begins.

Baker checks her lambing barn in Tilton on the Hill in Leicestershire every 90 minutes at night to ensure her ewes are not in difficulty while in labour.

This year's season has already started with a caesarean section of a Ryeland ewe, one of the oldest English sheep breeds.

"Both me and the vet spent a long time lambing this sheep and we could not lamb it for the life of us," Baker said.

"We used every bit of our strength to try and pull this lamb out, but it just was not budging. He made the call that it would have to have a caesarean.

"Sadly we did lose one lamb, but we did get another little live ram lamb out of it. We made the right call."

Baker has a flock of 55 native rare breed sheep, which includes Whitefaced Woodlands, Badger Face Welsh Mountain sheep, Herdwicks and Greyface Dartmoors.

Baker, 29, is a member of the Rare Breed Survival Trust and is passionate about helping to secure the future of some of Britain's critically endangered breeds.

"I've got about seven different breeds of sheep, all native breeds, some really rare," she said.

A horned breed she owns, the Whitefaced Woodland, is from Derbyshire and is one of the biggest hill breeds in the UK.

She said the breed was among the top five critically endangered and added: "I'm hugely passionate about keeping that breed going and making sure we don't lose them.

"They are at risk of going extinct sadly, so every little lamb born is so important."

As part of her job, Baker starts at 05:00 and works a 12-hour day, plus night checks.

While it is round-the-clock care, she said she would not swap it for the world.

"I work to look after my sheep," she said. "My sheep don't make me any money, but I do it because I love it.

"I do it because everybody starts off small and then they get more and more sheep as they go on."

She added: "Sometimes I don't know why I like sheep at all, but I think the fact that some of my sheep are so rare means that I'm doing something to preserve that bloodline.

"I suppose I'm doing my bit to keep them from going extinct, especially my Whitefaced Woodlands. They're the ones I first fell in love with."

Baker calls herself the 'Travelling Shepherdess'. She works at different farms during the lambing season, as well as tending to her own small flock.

While her parents are not in the farming industry, her grandad is still farming at the age of 91.

She added: "I suppose it's always been there in the background, but definitely nobody else is as involved in sheep and livestock in my family as I am."

Baker said she first fell in love with farming eight years ago.

"I was thrown into the deep end with sheep basically," she said.

"I'd never touched a sheep in my life and I had the opportunity to shear one and that was it, I never looked back."

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