Viveka's lambing

Friday, April 25th was the date that Viveka decided to start lambing.  It was early afternoon when she finally got down to active labor.  First thing that happened was the bag broke with lots of fluid.  I'd never saw that much fluid come out prior to a lamb being born.  After about a half hour of active pushing, nothing was proceeding, so I applied some super lube to my hand and reached in to see what was happening.  I could feel the head and from the feel of it, the baby was completely upside down as the throat was up and I could feel the ears below.  I searched around for a leg and found one, pulling it forward.  I then searched for the second front leg and couldn't find it, so I went back to the first front leg.  Unfortunately, it had reverted back to where it was when I found it.  I attempted to turn the baby's head around so that the presentation was a bit more normal and searched for that leg again.  At this point the head was in the pubic region, so I did what I could to get the head to pass beyond her hips.  Finally, the head was presenting and I kept reaching in to find the front legs.  Still no luck keeping the front leg forward, so I began putting steady pressure on her head.  During this time, I had called to speak to one of our vets and was waiting for a call back, since this would be my first solo assisting of a birth.  I was able to get the head out and kept pressure on the head until a good portion of the lambs neck was out.  I tried again to get that front leg out and was able to get it out, but it hooked around her vaginal opening weirdly.  With steady pressure on the head and one front leg, I was finally able to get the shoulder area to pass and finally the rest of the baby passed as well.  I brought the baby to Viv to get it cleaned up and remarked to myself that the baby had some good horn buds ... typical.  Last time she bred she ended up giving us boys and the first was full on butt breach!  The lamb's front legs looked a bit weird and I tried straightening them with no luck.  Here's a shot of what they looked like, hopefully you can see that they're tucked in a C shape.

Soon after the lamb was fully birthed, I got the call back from my vet.  I told her about how the baby presented weirdly, but I was able to get it out, but that the front legs looked kind of weird.  She said that it could be that they were just a bit stiff from being in one position for a while (similar to my ram lamb from the first birthing that had a loose hip joint).   She also suggested that it could be a disease known as arthrogryposis, but that she wasn't willing to say that was what it was without seeing the lamb first.  She suggested I continue to try to straighten the legs and get the twin out and if the legs wouldn't straighten, then I'd need to bring the lamb into the clinic for a looking over.  If it was the disease, then the lamb would need to be put down as there is no fix for this disease and the lamb wouldn't be able to walk.  I went back to mom and baby and found that the baby had passed away while I was on the phone with the vet.  

Next thing to worry about was the second lamb.  I waited for her to get back down to brass tacks and luckily for me the second presented well and came out fine with virtually no assistance from me (front legs not full on superman, so I gave them a tug and they popped into full superman mode).  

Another boy.

Once the second lamb was out, I contacted the vet and told her that the first lamb had passed and I wanted them to look at his front legs, so I drove over to their clinic.  Unfortuantely for us, the diagnosis was that the lamb had arthrogryposis.  

"Arthrogryposis, congenital fixation of multiple joints, has been reported to result from infectious, toxic and genetic causes.  Affected animals have severely flexed forelimbs and overextended hind limbs.  A spiral deviation of the spine also is evident"  According to the book "Sheep & Goat Medicine" by D.G. Pugh and N. Baird.  My vet also mentioned that sometimes the jaw is affected (in this case the fore and hind limbs were affected, but not the spine or jaw).  

The vet suggested that I could have the lamb sent off and be tested, but I wanted Tim to see what the lamb looked like so she suggested we place the lamb in a garbage bag and place it in our freezer.  This will help us in two points: 1) By keeping the body we're less likely for it to happen again (you know Murphy's Law and all) and 2) if it does happen again this year, we still have the body for sampling purposes.  When Tim got home, I showed him the lamb who passed and his first thought was that it was a black based katmoget.  I hadn't really looked at the coloration of the lamb as I was so focused on not losing the mother and getting the lamb out that it hadn't occurred to me that he was a katmoget.  This loss is sad for a few reasons.  We do not plan on breeding Viveka again as she has turned 10 years old and since we've not kept a katmoget from any of her or her sisters breedings, we have not retained the pattern.  If we want another kat, we'll have to purchase one.  Secondly, of all the breedings, this is the first time we've got a black based katmoget only for it to not survive due to problems.

It's at these times that I have to look at the big picture.  Viveka is alive due to my intervention and she still has a lamb to take care of since the second is perfectly healthy and gaining weight.  Add to that the knowledge that I've gained with assisting a birth and this new to me disease and I feel better armed to handle another birthing issue (even if I'm hoping I never have another problem again!)

Waiting for the next sheep to lamb.

Available Ram Lambs

We have 5 ram lambs that are available for sale. The links lead to the parents pedigrees.

"Whitey" (CB0056) - White Ram

Born April 14th from Contented Alendil (Maybelle Sabrina by Underhill Bach) by Contented Asbjorn
Color Genetics: Awt/Aa Bb/B? S?/S? M?/M?

Loki (CB0058) - Moorit Ram

Born April 17th from Islandfleece Viveka by Contented Asbjorn
Color Genetics: Aa/Aa Bb/Bb S?/S? M?/M?

Thor (CB0059) - Moorit Ram

Born April 17th from Islandfleece Viveka by Contented Asbjorn
Color Genetics: Aa/Aa Bb/Bb S?/S? M?/M?

CB0062 - Moorit Ram

Born April 26th from Islandfleece Freya by Windswept Goshawk
Color Genetics: Aa/Aa Bb/Bb S?/S? M?/M?

CB0063 - Black Ram

Born April 26th from Islandfleece Freya by Windswept Goshawk
Color Genetics: Aa/Aa BB/Bb S?/S? M?/M?

Lambing trials and tribulations

Lambing started with Ingrid, a first timer, giving birth to twins on Thursday, April 12, one day earlier than the beginning of lambing was due to start. Usually that is not anything to be concerned about, but this was not good. She looked as if she was only going to lamb a singleton, but she lambed twins, a ram and a ewe! They were both very small (ram was 3 lbs and the ewe was 2.6 lbs). the ram lamb was acting strange as he was walking in circles and didn't have the desire to suckle. The ewe lamb was able to suckle with assistance and although it looked as if she was blind, we figured we could handle that. By morning, the ram lamb had passed away and later that afternoon, closer to early evening, I found the ewe lamb flopping around like a fish out of water. We called the vet and found out that she was having seizures. We took her to the vet to euthanize her. It was one of the saddest trips I ever took to the vets office as she was having seizures every few minutes. According to the vet, the neurological problems were due to the fact that they were premature.

The next one to lamb was Alendil, another first timer, who on Saturday, April 14, gave birth to a singleton ram lamb. A beautiful white ram lamb with some splashy fawn-like spots on his one ear and a few splashes on his derrière.

Sunday, April 15, found us with another first timer lambing. Astrid also did great with her birthing and gave us a beautiful singleton ewe lamb. This girl is just adorable with the splashy face and gulmoget markings. I have thus far nicknamed her peanut.

Tuesday, April 17, came the day we were waiting for. Viveka, AKA the Goodyear blimp, started to "till" the ground. Hooray, she was in the first stage of labor. We were waiting with anticipation to see if she would give what we guessed was triplets all alive (last time she gave birth to triplets, one was stillborn). By 2:00pm, she moved into the second stage of labor, lying down and trying to push. By 3:30pm, nothing had progressed at all. She continued to push with nothing presenting itself. After talking to Tim, who thought I was overreacting, I called the vet. The call was either to put my mind at ease or to confirm my concerns. The vet said that something was wrong and that we needed to have a farm visit vet of the day come out to assess the situation. Long story short, we ended up having to take her to the vets office in the back of our horse trailer. Susan at Riverbend Vet Clinic examined her and found she had a condition known as ringwomb. She mentioned some of the options for fixing the problem and started to work on the most non-invasive option, manually manipulating the cervix. After a time of slowly stretching, she was able to feel the lamb and discovered that he was breech (butt coming first). She pulled him out and showed me an interesting method for getting fluid out of a lamb by letting gravity work for us. That lamb was a ram, who quickly got the name of Loki (Norse God of mischief). The second lamb started to show as soon as Loki started to nurse. This lamb was a normal presentation, but was also helped out of the birth canal. After he was born, Susan checked for another to find out that she had no more lambs left. They were a little bit bigger than normal twins at birth, and since she had triplets once before, she had plenty of room for those boys to grow! Each boy was moorit with white splashes. The second one to be born, Thor, has some white lightening bolt marks on each side.

We did try grafting a lamb from Viveka, but by that time, Ingrid had no interest in mothering any lambs and just wanted to spend her time butting heads with the other younger maiden ewes. We will try breeding her again this fall to make sure that the premature lambing was just a fluke, like Viveka's ringwomb (this was her fourth time lambing and each previous time there was no issue).

The very next morning, Wednesday, April 18, Tim found Sage (the oldest carrying lambs - 10 years old) had given birth to twin ewe lambs. Both girls were black with a few white splashes on them. At this point, four out of five ewes had given birth in the span of a week. This is a bit unusual for our farm, as they are usually fairly well spaced out.

The last holdout, Freya, gave birth on April 26. She gave me twin ram lambs. One moorit with no marks and one black with some splashes on his head.

All in all, lambing was quite the roller coaster for me and I have never been so happy to see a lambing season end like I was happy to see this one end. Ending tally, 5 rams and 3 ewes alive. Oh well, there is always next year!

The triplets cometh ...

What started out looking like this:

Ended up giving me triplets. Viveka was bred to Bach, and she's never given triplets before. Since I was at work and Tim was out at the time of the birthing, we're not sure what order they came in, but we ended up with this little guy. A nice brownish katmoget.

This little guy with the white stripe on his back also appeared. Yes, another katmoget.

The third lamb born was a light looking brown based ewe lamb (normally when we get moorit babies they're so darn dark it's almost as if they're black) that most likely would have been fawn colored. Unfortunately she was stillborn. Looks like, from her development, that she died in utero at the later stage of Viveka's pregnancy. The lamb was fully formed (as far as I could tell) but her eyelids were closed and they appeared sunken in where her eyes should have been. Also, where she should have had a nice rounded looking belly, she appeared as flat as a pancake. Is it possible she ran out of space to grow? Something happened, and I'm sure it was a blessing in disguise, although a bit of a let down.

These are the only ram lambs that came from Bach's randy insistence that he breed everything on the farm that was wooly and female. Unfortunately, it looks as if Bach's insistence to breed others left Rakel (Viveka's twin sister) without being tupped this year. But, fortunately for us, it also looks as if he didn't get any other ewe we didn't want him to have!

Two more to go. Will I get any more gulmogets from Gulliver ... time will tell.

Breeding Groups Together

Every Veterans' Day Tim and I put the breeding groups together. It always seems like a good date for us. Firstly, because we have the day off and secondly, it gives us lambs in April when the grass is starting to appear and the dreaded snow is disappearing.


This year we opted to use two rams with 7 ewes total. Last lambing was a blast with 11 ewes pregnant, but we really didn't need the extra work and there are a few lambs left over that didn't get purchased.


First group is SheltrgPines Gulliver's girls. Gulliver is a black smirslet gulmoget (At/Aa BB/Bb Ss/SS M?/M?).

Gulliver's ladies are Sabbath Farm Sylph, a light grey ewe (Ag/A? BB/B? Ss/S? M?/M?). Sylph is our oldest ewe, but is still going strong! In this picture you can see her chowing on a pumpkin. We've bred her twice and each time she singled. This year we're hoping for twins.

Contented Brisingamen is the black ewe chowing down on some hay. Her genetics are Aa/Aa BB/Bb S?/S? M?/M?. Brisingamen is a first timer with a ram and it will be nice to see what she throws.

Contented Arwen is a gentle moorit (Aa/Aa Bb/Bb S?/S? M?/M?). This will be her first time lambing as well.

Our second breeding group is with Underhill Bach. Bach is a mioget (Aa/Aa Bb/Bb S?/S? Mm/Mm). This photo shows Bach with his four girls.

Bach's first ewe is the one in the middle with the black face. It is none other than Underhill Mulan, our grey ewe (Ag/Aa BB/Bb Ss/S? M?/M?). This breeding will be very interesting. Bach threw a horned ewe lamb and a scurred ram lamb this past lambing and Mulan has thrown a scurred ram lamb in the past. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to seeing their get. They'll hopefully make it so that I don't have to wait too long. There was a bit of "activity" yesterday after they were put together.

The next two are Islandfleece Viveka (Ab/Aa Bb/Bb SS/S? M?/M?)and Islandfleece Rakel (Ab/Aa Bb/Bb S?/S? M?/M?), our two moorit katmoget twins. We weren't going to breed Rakel, but the twins have never been separated, so we said "what the heck" and kept them together.

The last ewe Bach is getting is Maybelle Sabrina, our white ewe (Awt/Aa Bb/B? S?/S? M?/M?).

Almost breeding season

I haven't blogged in a while. Life is crazy and hectic and I know it's no excuse, but it's only one I have! :-) Spent the first two weeks of October in Germany. Lots of fun and had a good time overall. Our great friends Ruth and Ed took care of all the critters while we were gone. No major problems, but Ruth has resolved that she will get chickens, just no roosters! Ed the last couple of days decided to read our instructions on how to take care of the critters and read the grain amount we give the girls a little wrong, so needless to say they were not happy to see us come back with the "puny amount" we gave them. Thanks so much Ruth and Ed for all your work keeping our critters healthy. Now it's back to reality and needing to keep plugging along. We're going into the winter with more sheep that we had originally planned. You know what they say about the best laid plans. So, knowing that we have a wee bit too many, we're working on only breeding a few of the ewes. Here's the plan so far.

SheltrgPines Gulliver (our black gulmoget) will be getting Contented Arwen (moorit), Contented Brisingamen (black), and SabbathFarm Sylph (grey).

Underhill Bach (mioget) will be getting Maybelle Sabrina (white), Underhill Mulan (grey), and Islandfleece Viveka (moorit katmoget).

With Bach and Mulan's breeding, I'll be interested to see what the get is like as Mulan is a half poll and I'm not sure what to call Bach (threw a scurred ram lamb this year from Sage and a horned ewe lamb this year from Celebrian). Needless to say, that breeding has the potential for all sorts of things!

Will have pictures posted when the groups get put together.

Baby Explosion!

The last couple of days have been a lambing explosion! First, Islandfleece Freya lambed on Thursday. I didn't get a chance to grab the pictures and was planning on doing that on Friday. Here's a picture of Freya with her two lambs. She was bred to SheltrgPines Gulliver.

This is Freya's chocolatey ram lamb. He was the second one to be born.

This is Freya's black ewe lamb. She was the first one to arrive.

On Friday, I planned on getting shots of the new lambs and posting here on the blog, but when I got home Friday night, Tim came into the house saying that there were lambs everywhere. I quickly rushed out to help him to find that Contented Rafn had a black ewe lamb on the ground and that LaughingRiver Rosemary had just birthed a lamb.

Below is a picture of Contented Rafn. She's a black who has some heavy iset (white fibers mixed in the fleece - think salt and pepper hair). Excuse the sideways picture of her. She was also bred to SheltrgPines Gulliver.

Rafn gave us this really pretty black ewe lamb.

LaughingRiver Rosmary, another black ewe, was bred to Contented Balder. He's not registered yet - dam is Sabbath Farm Celebrian and sire is PaintedKnoll Zweiback, but will be as he is looking excellent conformation wise and his horns are nice and wide. Rosemary is very protective of her lamb.

Here's a shot of Rosemary's black ewe lamb.

Tim thought that the black lamb of Rafn's was Rosemary's until he picked up the lamb only to have Rafn baaing and following after her. Silly Tim, Rafn knew it was her lamb! After we got the lambs and moms sorted out, we placed them in their lambing jugs to bond with baby.

Not to be an exaggeration of baby explosion, we noticed that Viveka, who as one friend kindly put it, "She's as big as a table!", was wandering away from the other ewes. Sure enough, she was not going to be outdone by two younger ewes!

Islandfleece Viveka promptly (okay not so promptly - about an hour or so after the others were settled into their jugs) gave birth. She was bred to SheltrgPines Uber. Their pairing gave us two katmoget ram lambs. Here you can see her with the second ram lamb behind her. We had run out of lambing jugs, so constructed a jug around where she lambed using hog panels. God bless hog panels.

Here's a shot of the first ram lamb born.

All that birthing in two days time has me wiped. I'm so tired, you would have thought I gave birth to 6 lambs! I just looked over my paperwork when we had breeding groups together and see that I did catch when Bach mounted Celebrian. Based on that date, looks like more will be on the ground by Monday. Stay tuned. I'm excited to see what Bach is going to give us.

For those keeping track, we've had 7 ewes give birth to 12 lambs. We bred 11 so, we've got 4 more to go. The ewe to ram ratio is currently tied at 1:1 (6 ewes and 6 rams).

Breeding Groups are Together!

Tim and I were able to put our breeding groups together on Tuesday. We always try to do it around Veterans' weekend. I've been a bit under the weather, so I didn't get shots of everyone the day they went into the groups, but I can give you a heads up of how it went and if the blasted rain would hold off, I'll grab some shots and upload them.

First off, each lady needed to get a pedicure before meeting their big date. First up was Sage and Celebrian. After pedi's done, Tim got the pleasure of dragging (actually she kept rolling a number of times) Sage while I walked Celebrian to the hog-paneled pen near the old J.D. baler that they would be staying in. We then grabbed Bach to meet his women. The funny thing is that they all sniffed and then Bach went right over to the hay and started munching down. Mmm this hay is good!

Next breeding group would be Freya, Helle, and Rafn to go on another hog-paneled pen on the front lawn. Tim took Freya, who funily enough acted much like her mom, Sage. I got Helle and Rafn to move to the pen in leaps and bounds. They were given Gulliver, who sniffed and started immediately pawing Freya (who was having nothing to do with him).

Third breeding group included Sabrina, Mulan, and Rosemary to go to the dog's kennel complete with filled in holes and a blue tarp for shelter. I thought that I would be real tricky and take Mulan, who after all is a Gail Former sheep, so should lead properly. Guess what? She didn't want to budge and kept putting on the brakes and dropping her hind end. Sabrina and Rosemary moved much better for Tim. I kept putting pressure on Mulan and every so often she would do a jump (which would release pressure on the lead nearly making me do down!), but eventually she got to the dog's kennel. They were then introduced to Balder who showed a keen interest in Rosemary, but who was also not interested in him. She was much more interested in eating the grass in there.

Last, but not least, is the grouping of Viveka and Rakel (aka the bruiser twins) and Sylph. They stayed in the normal ewe winter quarters and were introduced to Uber. Uber wasted no time and found that Rakel was receptive. He must have mounted her at least 5 times.

If you're counting, you realize that there's 3 other ewes who won't be bred that were put in a separate pen near the barn. There's also a bachelor pen of 5 rams (anybody interested in a ram or 3?). One more pen was created when Wilkins came back from breeding 6 ewes in Meriden, NH for a 4-H'er. He's currently sharing residence with Arcturus (our wether) until his quarantine is over.

All told, we'll be and have been taking care of 7 pens of sheep. This will stay that way for 36 days (a good 2 cycles) and then we'll bring all the girls back together for 2-3 weeks and then separate out those 3 non breeders and use Bergelmir to clean up anybody who didn't take. At least that's what we'll be doing in theory. Changes can possibly happen.