Lambing Finale

I am a few days late on this post because the last lambs were born on Friday and it is now Monday.

This is Meridian Roca, a yearling (born 3/4/2020) with the last lamb of the season. She delivered easily the evening of 3/26 and was a great mother from the start.

Meridian Foxy is a 6 year old lilac (coloring of gray/brown instead of black) ewe with a small (5.4 pounds) ewe lamb born early that morning. I had given up on Foxy and decided that she wasn’t pregnant even though an ultrasound showed that she was. I thought that maybe she had aborted. I had been keeping the last three pregnant ewes in a separate area but had just turned Foxy out with the rest of the ewes the night before. She surprised me with this lamb the next morning.

This is Cashew, another yearling, with her ewe lamb born on 3/23.

I may want to keep this little ewe lamb. However there are plenty of others I’d like to keep too. Decisions…

I like to keep track of lambing stats. If you look at my lambing board you will see that lambing began 2/20 with twins, six days before the first “official” due date. There was a breather of a few days and then they started coming on 2/24. There were 84 lambs born in 19 days with a high of 12 lambs born on March 1. Lamb # 86 was born 3-14 and then a gap of nine days before the last three. The lambs are color coded for ram/ewe (not very creative here, but I need something easy to remember). The birth weights are as accurate as I can be, but if I find the lamb already up and nursing who’s to say how many ounces of milk it has already had?

I “process” lambs usually the next day or maybe two after birth. They get a BOSE injection (selenium and vitamin E), a tail band, ear tags, and maybe a band for wethering. With the Jacob ram lambs it’s impossible to know at birth if they will grow up with symmetrical balanced horns (if 4 horns) or wide spread (if 2 horns). So I don’t want to castrate most of them because I’m always waiting for that perfect ram to be born but I won’t know until it’s grown for several months. However, I can tell if they are too light or dark in color to be an acceptable registered ram. The Breed Standard allows for 15%-85% color. If a ram lamb is outside that limit then I will band him to castrate. Those wethers may be sold as fiber pets or as ram companions, or for butcher. There will be another blog post coming up about the color analysis part.

We use two ear tags for each lamb. The first ear tag is preprinted with the ID # which includes the birth year. This years lamb #’s begin with 21. Ewes have that ear tag in the left ear and rams in the right ear. The second tag is color coded by sire and I have written in the ID number. This year I used up a variety of leftover tags but next year I need to start by buying new ones. The gray tags I used are too close in value to the white to easily differentiate. In the lower right corner of the Lamb Board I have my reminder of the colors.

Tamarisk lambs have orange ear tags.

Jasper’s are gray.

There are only a handful of Axle and Rambler lambs and those are red and yellow.

Anywhere you see a X P on the lamb board that means that Peyton, a Bluefaced Leicester, is the sire. The BFL-cross lambs are black so they don’t need a special ear tag to tell me who they are. The colored tags are useful not only for identifying sires, but as a back-up if the original ID tag is lost. It is also helpful to know which color to look for when I am trying to find a particular lamb—the colors narrow the search down a bit.

Ears is a BFL cross herself . She was bred to Peyton so her triplets are 3/4 BFL. The other adult crossbred ewe in the flock is Addy but Peyton is her sire and she was bred to a Jacob ram.

This sometimes seems like an overwhelming number of lambs but so far they are all doing well.

The ewes are hard at work raising all these lambs.

To finish out the stats:
89 Live lambs born, 1 long-dead twin delivered along with a live lamb. One tiny (3.4 lb) lamb died before 24 hrs..
44 rams and 45 ewes
2 triplet births = 6 lambs
36 twin births = 71 lambs (plus the dead fetus)
12 single births (including 3 yearlings)
Average weight of 73 purebred Jacob lambs: 8 lbs (Low = 3.4 and high = 10.6)
Average weight of 16 BFL X Jacob lambs: 9.5 lbs (Low = 7.4 and high = 12.8)