Friday, April 11, 2014

First Lambs of 2014

Sunday, April 6th was quite the busy day.  Love Potion #9, one of our Finns, decided it was time to give birth.  This is what she looked like before she gave birth.
She didn't look overly large, so didn't bother measuring her like we did with Lumi and Viveka.

She lambed her babies all on her own and so at 7:25ish in the morning, when Tim went out to do morning chores, he was alerted to that fact by Jack, our Border Collie, who sniffed in the air and immediately ran to the sheep pen.  Sure enough, there she was a few feet in where Tim couldn't see what Jack sniffed from the front steps.  She had two ram lambs with her and a stillborn ewe.

 He immediately called for me and I went in to see if anyone else had lambed.  As soon as I walked into the barn I saw Helle with a black ewe lamb (she wasn't pregnant), so I did a double-take and went to see if anyone else had given birth earlier in the morning.
Nobody else had lambed so it was obvious that this additional lamb belonged to Love as well.  That made a total of 4 lambs in a not so overly large body.  Unfortunately, since Helle stole the black ewe lamb, Love wouldn't accept her back.  Since Helle isn't pregnant or even lactating, I've got my first bottle baby.  I've nicknamed her Ebony and call her "Ebby" for short.  She readily accepts the bottle and is a voracious eater.

We are now very nervously awaiting how many reside in this 54 inch diameter body!  Update:  Since I was having trouble posting this until now, please note that there will be another blog post as Lumi has lambed her babies on Thursday, April 10th.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Such exciting news! Congratulations to all of EWE!