You Can't Always Count on Genetics

This is Ebony, a black and white Jacob ewe.

This is Hudson, a lilac Jacob ram.

Here is one of their lambs at almost 2 months old. He is lilac like Dad.

This is the other lamb at about a month old...

... and here he is at just over 2 months. He has been marked with a cull tag because of a severe split eyelid, but also, do you see how his horns are growing?

Both lambs today, at 3 1/2 months old:

I love the horns, the color, and the fleece on this lilac ram, but (as in the discussion over on Facebook) I sure wish that I could combine these lambs into one and keep just the parts I like. Look at those pretty blue eyes on the black and white ram...

...and he has nicely marked feet also.

Speaking of rams, here are a few more photos:

The photo above is of Meridian Clapton at about 6 months...

and here he is as a yearling.  Look at the photo below for horn detail on his right side.

The first thing that is unusual is how his horns go behind his neck instead of under, but there is also a fifth horn there.

Meet Puddleduck Sullivan, a 2-horn yearling ram. But is he really a 2-horned ram? I see a seam in those horns that could mean that he is a fused 4-horn. And he also has another horn on this side. People talk about 6-horn Jacob sheep, but I haven't seen any in which the 5th and 6th horns weren't scurs or some how compromised by the larger horns. After all, where would you put another full set of horns?

This is Meridian Fogerty, a another 2-horn yearling ram. I had so many rams last year that I didn't use him, but he will be in this fall's ram line-up. His horns are closer to his face than I'd like, but still OK.

One more ram. Sweetgrass Clint is Clapton's sire and here he is (above) at 6 months old.

This is Clint last fall as an adult.

Bottom line--you don't necessarily get the perfect lamb by breeding two "perfect" parents and you can't predict how the lamb will look as an adult when you buy it at 4 months old.

For more photos of how rams' horns change see my website photo gallery . By the way, Ebony, who is at the beginning of this post, stars in her own video over on YouTube. Click here  and find her video to see her having those ram lambs.

Some favorite sheep

I took a whole batch of photos yesterday morning before I went to two days of Nikon photography classes in Sacramento. I intended to write a blog post about ewes and their lambs and I took photos of family groups. After the class I'm looking at these photos and thinking...delete...delete...delete. I couldn't bring myself to delete all of them, but I did delete most. And I'm tempted to go back through the last year i-photo and do a big cleansing.

So here are a few photos that I kept and some of them aren't all that great but I like the sheep.

Summer and her triplets

Hot Lips and twins

Dazzle and twins

Lola and daughter

Faulkner

Ebony

Fogerty

Ouch!

I have been vigilant in trying to watch for mastitis in the ewes. It's not easy to spot until you see a ewe that doesn't want to get up or is lame. Lame? Yes, the infected side of the udder becomes extremely painful and the ewe doesn't want any pressure against it so she limps. Have any of you women ever had a breast infection? Then you know what I'm talking about. I am learning that mastitis in sheep can progress so quickly that you often don't see any signs until it is too late. Prevention or early detection is the answer. (Do I sound like a health care ad?) I noticed a lopsided udder a couple of weeks ago. I caught the ewe and her lambs. It was obvious that the ewe was not letting the lambs nurse on one side. I found a scab at the top of the teat--maybe something that started from vigorous lambs with sharp teeth (nursing moms can relate to that too). I used an udder cream to help soften the scab and I milked her out. Fortunately the milk still looked good--not starting to get chunky or cheesy. I kept that ewe in for a few days, milking her some, but mainly making sure that she let the lambs nurse--which she did when I used the cream on her udder. She is fine now.

Today in the pasture I saw Athena from the rear and thought that she looked a little lopsided, but not too much. I was able to sneak up on her and feel the udder. Hard. Immediate response needed. I brought all the ewes in so I could catch her and her lambs. Here is what her teat looked like:

It is hard and inflexible. A normal teat is squishy so you can actually get milk out. The good news is that the milk is still OK and I can get milk out if I milk her by squeezing the lower part of the udder and the upper part of the teat. The bad news is that it is very painful for her and she will get mastitis if I can't keep the milk flowing or unless I dry her off so that there is no milk production at all. You can't stimulate milk production on one side and not the other.

Here is what her lambs look like right now:

They are 50 & 55 pounds. Although normally I would have let them continue to nurse, at that weight and 2 months old they can be weaned. So they are on their own now and Athena is in a stall with a wether (with whom she is extremely annoyed) on no feed or water for a little while to help with the drying off process (discouraging milk production). Her udder will continue to fill with milk, but that in itself inhibits milk production. I will give her banamine as a pain reliever and anti-inflammatory and LA 200 as a prophylactic aid to prevent infection (not normally done when drying off). Hopefully without the stimulus to produce more milk she won't get mastitis and hopefully the teat will heal without damage that might inhibit next year's milk production.  Athena is a really nice ewe and I'd hate to lose her for this.

Pretty faces

I think I am procrastinating, but I like looking at pretty sheep photos...especially when it's dreary and raining outside.

This is a ram lamb but he doesn't look so tough when he still has little tufts of hair on his horns.

Hot Lips

Rosie

Faulkner's lamb

Nap Time

BFL x Jacob

Several people are anxiously waiting for the black BFL (Blue face Leicester) x Jacob lambs to grow up so that we can evaluate their fleeces. The BFL is a long-wool breed (but with a finer fiber diameter compared to other long-wool breeds) and Jacob wool is in the fine-medium range. Crossing these two doesn't mean that you get a fiber in the middle range of fleeces. Here are some photos of the BFL X fleeces and lambs.

The photos below are of the youngest lambs. You can see quite a difference in their fleeces.

By the way, I did not cross these breeds with the idea of keeping sheep for fleece. My goal was to produce a larger lamb and be able to market them more quickly at a higher weight.

Lambing: Two Failures & a Success

Here is a story from last week's lambing. FAILURE: Last Thursday a big yearling, Helen, delivered a lamb that was dead when I found it.

FAILURE: The Saturday before that a yearling, Hattie, delivered twins. Both were alive, but one was almost dead when I found it. I think she had delivered standing up and when the lamb came out the body landed so that the lamb's neck was bent back with the head behind. The lamb couldn't shake its head to break through the membrane over its face and the mom was still working on Lamb #1. I removed the membrane and the lamb started breathing. I knew that this lamb wouldn't be up right away so I milked the ewe and tube-fed the lamb with colostrum. Then I left the lamb there for the mom to clean and hoped that it would be strong enough to get up. When I came back less than an hour later the lamb was still breathing, but had not moved and was almost dead from cold.

I brought the lamb into the house. At this point it was breathing but it wasn't moving at all. Here is how I warmed it.

This is a pot of water at about 100 degrees. I wasn't keeping track of time (it was already 1 a.m.) but after the first water bath (10 minutes ?) the lamb's body temperature was at 91 degrees. I filled the pot with more warm water two more times and eventually got the lamb's temperature up to just over 100 degrees. I wrapped the lamb in towels warmed in the dryer and tube fed it with more colostrum. I was worried that if it did regain strength it would uncover itself and get cold again so I took it to bed with me. In the morning I thought it was probably dead because it hadn't moved. No. It was alive. I put it in a crate in the kitchen and warmed milk for it. I was surprised that it actually sucked from the bottle. It tried to get to its feet but that was a struggle. Eventually the lamb could get up, but it was very wobbly. I also noticed at that time that one eye was opaque and blind. I couldn't decide it the lamb was also blind in the other eye. I started thinking brain damage from oxygen deprivation just after birth. Eventually the lamb gained strength and was walking around OK, but was still blind in at least one eye.

SUCCESS: When I found Helen's dead lamb I thought about  trying to graft this house-lamb onto Helen. Helen wasn't particularly interested, but at least she didn't try to kill the lamb or get away from it. I skinned the dead lamb and used that skin as a coat on the new lamb.

Helen was not enthusiastic, but was more interested now that the lamb smelled right. The next problem was that the lamb had never nursed from a ewe and didn't show any interest. (You can lead a lamb to the milk, but...) I left the lamb there since it didn't seem to be in any danger and I thought that maybe it would at least have a mom to follow around even it I remained the food source. By the time I finished chores it was past feeding time for the lamb. I brought a bottle from the house and the lamb was definitely hungry. After a few mouthfuls and took the bottle away and moved the lamb over to the ewe. She started to root around, found the teat, and started to nurse! SUCCESS

This is the lamb with the dead coat removed.

Summer & Paulette

Go back to February 28th's post to see Summer while still pregnant. She lambed three days later on March 2.

This is Summer with her ewe lambs at 4 days old. They were 7.2, 7.5, and 8 lbs at birth.

I think Paulette will take Summer's place as "the sheep most likely to have triplets".

In this case, I know that Paulette is having triplets. She was not supposed to be bred because she usually lambs at the State Fair. However, Faulkner got in with her and this is the result. A sonogram showed triplets...and this follows quads at the fair last year!

Today started at midnight when I went to the barn for a last check. I found a small lamb near Jazz who was obviously not done with lambing. There were two more lambs trying to come out at the same time.

All are OK now although that little one is sure small (only 4 .2 lbs) and I'll have to keep an eye on him.

When I went to the house I left Laura in because I thought that she would lamb next. She was lambing when I went out in the morning, but during the night two other ewes had lambed. Fran had twins and...

Pamela had twin lilac (gray markings instead of black) rams. While I was moving sheep around and making more pen space two more ewes lambed. That's 11 lambs, bringing the total to 44.

Here is what my barn chart looks like.

This is Dina with her lambs.

The lambs are getting playful. There will be plenty more jumping lamb pictures to come.

When is it Summer Time?

There have ben 14 lambs born since yesterday morning. What fun! There will be photos and videos when I have time. I'm having a little contest over on the Meridian Jacobs Facebook page. Guess when Summer is going to have her lambs. Tell me day/hour on Facebook and you'll be entered.

This is a photo of Summer taken today.

This is what Summer thinks of the contest.

Faces

Lambing is starting out more slowly than I thought it would. According to my calendar there are over 20 ewes who will lamb in the next 4 days, but I think that some of these may have been marked, but not bred when I first put the rams out. They may be a couple of weeks later. However I am not disappointed in the lambs. I experimented with breeding to Faulkner, the Blue Faced Leicester ram, to find out if I could produce larger market lambs without having deleterious effects on the ewes. Rusty wrote about the first set of BFL/Jacob lambs in his blog. (By the way, the lambs he wrote about were born to Athena, the ewe standing in the photo in my last post. I called her Summer by mistake, but Summer is the huge one in the photo below.) Another lamb was born last night.

This is a 12.2 pound lamb!

Sparkle doesn't seem to care that her lamb is so big or that she is not spotted.

Where will you be Feb. 21?

I know where I will be. I just transferred the breeding notes from my clipboard to my 2012 calendar (while learning to use the calendar in my Mac) and look what I discovered. I knew that a lot of sheep were bred all at once, but it's more striking when I see it in this format.

That's 23 ewes due in a 5 day span. I usually aim for March 1 lambs, but I got antsy and thought I'd start breeding a week earlier. After all, my friends will all be lambing and I'll want to have a few of my own before the rush starts in March.  I thought wrong. There are about 30 more in addition to those first 23. I guess I'll be warmed up by the time they lamb.

I've been finishing up registration applications for this year's lambs. It's interesting to look at baby photos of sheep.

This is 11038, now known as Rosie. Notice how her pink nose develops pigment as she gets older.

Rosie was developing very nice horns and I had my eye on her from the start as one I wanted to keep. She got in the ram pen when she was a few months old and, in trying to get back with the ewes, she broke off both horns. They are still stubby, but stout.

Here is another. This is ram lamb 11094, the last ram of 2011, and sired by Sweetgrass Clint.

He is named Clapton and will be the sire of several lambs in 2012.

Clapton doesn't look quite so nice after shearing...

...but his fleece is sure pretty.