Horns or Scurs? You be the judge

Around the time we were getting ready to do CD/T shots on the lambos, I noticed that Celebrian's really crimpy daughter (CB0035) has what appears to be horns or scurs popping out. The following pictures show the size of the "whatevers". This was around June 20th. I haven't noticed any significant growth of them since then. They're still there, but I'm not familiar with ewes and their horns. I'm assuming that they take a while to pop, unlike rams, that pop pretty soon in their lives.
Can you see them, they're kind of small and look chocolate chip like.





After posting about them on the Shetland polled yahoo group, it appears we forgot that Underhill Bach, this little girl's sire, came from a horned ewe.
Another breeding of Bach gave us a ram lamb with scurs. He's so super friendly that he's destined to be a wether and a local family had their hearts melted by him. The little rascal layed down right at their feet and any time a family member moved, he followed looking for scritches.
So, are they horns or scurs??

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.

Website is live!

After what seemed like many months of us and the web designer procrastinating, she came over yesterday and taught us how to upload and make changes to the website. I'm so thrilled. Keep in mind that we're still adding content (such as the color genetics of each sheep). But stop on by and see what you think.

Tim says Whoohoo! You can find us at http://contentedbutterflyfarm.com/ so take a look.

I'll do another post catching you all up. Sage had two ram lambs, we dealt with a broken leg (on a lamb that is) and other fun times.

Mini Baby Explosion - catching up

Sylph lambed on April 28th and gave us a little girl. Sabbath Farm Sylph was bred to SheltrgPines Uber. This little girl is going to be grey. She already had sugar lips when she was born.


The next day, Wednesday, April 29th, Maybelle Sabrina gave us a little girl as well. Sabrina was bred to Contented Balder and gave us a little moorit girl! I know now some of Sabrina's genetics! Wahoo!


That same day that Sabrina gave birth, Sabbath Farm Celebrian graced us with her twins! Both girls.

Celebrian was bred to Underhill Bach and gave us a really crimpy moorit/possibly fawn girl.

The other I believe will stay moorit. Of course, time will tell and we'll see what we get.

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).

Helle's lambing debut

Contented Helle is one of the first lambs that have been born on our farm. This is her first year to lamb for us. Last year we put her in with one ram and he turned out to be a wife beater (he was very yummy - no wife beaters on this farm). She then was popped into another breeding group, but I think she was still way too wary of the ram to settle. This year, she was given to SheltrgPines Gulliver and settled.On Monday, April 13th, she gave us two ram lambs. The chocolatey ram lamb with the splashy looking face was the first to be born. He's going to have some really big horns. He already has some buds pushing out of his head. I'm thinking that he's going to be a musket (oatmeal) colored lamb as he's already looking kind of light around the neck when I part the wool.

The second lamb (who still had birthing fluid on his hip when I found them) is a ram lamb who at this point is looking very black. Here he's lying down on the step up to the hay feeder. You can see a real close up of mommy's ear and a portion of her eye. She was looking for some cookies.

Here's a shot of mom and the boys. One taking a snack while the other looks out the doorway.

Mulan's 2009 babies

Mulan finally came through and gave me some lambs. I've been watching her get larger and larger and her bag has been quite full for a while, so I figured she was going to be the first to go. They always like to keep me guessing. Underhill Mulan was bred to Contented Balder, an as yet unregistered offpspring from Sabbath Farm Celebrian and PaintedKnoll Zwieback.

Mulan gave me one ewe lamb and one ram lamb. So far they're both moority looking.

Mulan is a good, protective mommy. Excuse me, is that camera going to hurt my baby? No? Okay, progress with the pictures.

The little boy is a nice chocolately moorit. His horn leather is very small, so he may just have scurs. Mulan carries the half-poll gene.

The girl has a few white hairs on her head and there's some light fibers by her ears, so she may become a musket.