Faces in the Barn

We're up to 66 lambs now. Here are some of them.

March Came in Like a Lamb

March!Western redbud near the house. I wish it would bloom all spring.These are Mae's lambs.Sisters from last year, Jade and Jillian, waiting to go to the pasture. Jade wasn't bred but Jillian is pregnant.Sending the pregnant ewes out in back. These are yesterday's lambs:Loretta and a single ram, standing. The one on the ground is the lamb that Raquel rejected a couple of days ago. I successfully "slime grafted" her to Loretta. More about that in a future post.Later in the day Alexandria lambed with little tiny lambs, both under 5 pounds, but vigorous and healthy.Cascade lambed with a single ram last night. That lamb is to me an average size but weights only one pound more than Alexandria's combined.Here is the status so far. Color coding for girl/boy. BT means that the lambs have had BOSE (selenium and Vitamin E supplement) injections and their tails have been banded. Sires are Ringo, Rotor, Nash, and Faulkner. Only 26 ewes left to lamb!

Meeting the Flock

There were unplanned lambs born January 23. I have kept those three lambs with their dams separate from the rest of the flock while it was raining and the sheep were in the barn area. Last week as it was drying out I put the flock on the pasture and then turned the new lambs out with them.One thing I watch for when putting lambs in the pasture for the first time is that they don't get tangled up in the electric fence. I'm glad to see when they touch the fence because I know that they will have learned to avoid it.This looks worse than it was. The whole incident was very brief and then......the nearby lamb was off and running.Bertha, one of the yearlings thought this looked like a good game......so she kept up the chase.

Eventually this lamb found his mom who hadn't been particularly concerned about him.

In the meantime the other two lambs stuck near their mom. I'm going to use colored tags again this year to give me more information about the lambs at a glance, mostly about sires. However, these first three have an unknown sire and the ram lambs (gorgeous as they are) have been banded. That's what the red tags mean--wether.