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!

Catching up for lost time

Okay. I'm trying to catch up for being a bad blogger. I know, whip me with a wet noodle.

Sage gave birth on May 11th to two ram lambs. That ended lambing for us with 18 lambs on the ground with 10 ewe lambs and 8 ram lambs.

We've been moving the ewes over to the Gingras' grassy areas. They've been grazing like locusts! Before moving the girls, Sylph's ewe lamb wasn't paying attention to where everybody went when they moved to another patch of grass. She started to panic when she didn't see mom, so she ran into the hog panels we have up for fencing. I took her to the vet to find out she had a clean break on the bone between the hoof and elbow area. She looked like this after the vet wrapped her up.

She's now doing better - the break has healed and she's not sporting some funny kneesocks anymore. But, she still favors the leg from time to time. She's also not going to be registered. She's scritchy feeling and that's surprising for a lamb, considering her mom is the oldest ewe we have and still soft feeling. Her dad is SheltrgPines Uber and real soft, too. What a disappointment.

Rain, rain go away.
Momma needs to cut some hay.
The sheep are sad,
the weather's bad.
We'll all be glad when the sun comes again!

Thus ends your poetry interlude.

One other exciting thing that happened, was that when googling the farm name, I came across a person who bought some of Celebrian's wool and she posted on her blog about it. Check it out on her blog called Able to Dream.

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.