More Lambing

Yesterday’s post ended with Lamb #38. As of this evening we’re at #60. I’ll fill in a few of the others here.

In the last post I said that Betty rejected one of her lambs after it got on the other side of a gate. I’d rather have lambs raised by a ewe than bottle feed them. Ruth lambed at around 1:30 a.m. the following day and one lamb died right at birth. I repeated the process I did with Terri’s lamb the previous day, although this time I used the dead lamb to cover Betty’s lamb with membranes and slime. Ruth thought that it smelled right and she started cleaning the new lamb. Success!

Meanwhile, Raquel lambed with triplets.

Aphrodite had a BFL X lamb that weighed 13.4 lbs!

The following day three Farm Club members came to help with lamb tasks. That was much appreciated. By this time there were ewes and lambs in overflow pens everywhere so we were able to start moving some and cleaning pens. Before moving we give each lamb a BOSE (selenium) injection, ear tag it, and band the tail. We had to pay attention to the lamb numbers since we had moved rejected lambs to other ewes and needed to make sure we could correctly identify the biological mother of those lambs.

I had discovered that morning that one of Raquel’s triplets didn’t look so good. I thought that they had all nursed, but now I realize that with all that was going on (another story) I hadn’t paid close enough attention. At this point he was weak and cold. We tried bottle feeding him, but that didn’t work. I ended up tube feeding that lamb twice and after that he was able to get up and nurse on his own.

I set up a heat lamp and all three lambs cuddled up under it.

During the night Patsy (the ewe in the last post who lambed with 4 and 8 pound lambs) died. I had seen that she wasn’t feeling well and started her on antibiotics at the advice of the vet but it was too late. We took her for a necropsy and I’m still waiting for the final report. (Preliminary report shows infection and uterine tear.) Her death leaves two more bottle babies so Farm Club members helped feed them.

They also were there to watch another birth.

Hazel and Jade are still our friendliest sheep.

The next morning Belle lambed. Belle is owned by my 7-year-old granddaughter who lives in Texas. This blog post from 2019 tells the story of Kirby showing Belle as a lamb and has one of my favorite photos of her with Belle and the pink ribbon she won. But back to the present. Since Belle is registered to Kirby, the lambs are also hers. She named Belle’s 2021 lamb Beauty and she is still in the flock. I texted photos of these lambs to Kirby and she asked if she could name them. She wants to name the ram Beast and the ewe Rose. Do you catch the theme?

This is the ewe lamb, Rose.

These are Patsy’s lambs that are now bottle fed.

I have started taking photos of lambs to have them for the website. The crossbred ones aren’t listed on the site, but they sure are photogenic.

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)

Still Lambing

In my system the sheep lamb in the barn (or are taken to the barn shortly after lambing if they were outside. After two or three days in a lambing pen (jug) I move a group of two or three ewes and their lambs to a stall in the horsebarn part of our barn. I think that gives the lambs time to realize that it is important to stick close to their own mom and it gives the ewes time to not worry so much about other lambs bothering them. The ewes can be somewhat aggressive to other lambs and the lambs figure out that it’s better to avoid the other ewes. After a few days they all mellow out and don’t really care anymore.

This time in the stall also gives me a chance to keep a better eye on each ewe and lamb so hopefully I can be aware of any problem that arises. After a few days in the stall they the ewes and lambs go into an area of the barn that is separate from the pregnant ewe area. As more lambs are born, the pregnant side gets smaller and the lamb and mom side gets bigger.

Right now the ewes and lambs have access to the green field that is behind my weaving studio/shop and that gives the lambs a controlled environment in which to learn about the electric fence. The pregnant ewes are on the main pasture. I wrote in one of the last posts how unusually this is because usually when we lamb it is wet and soggy on the pasture and behind the barn there is a lake. That is why I developed this system of where we lamb and how we move the sheep through the first couple of weeks. Wishful thinking that we will get some rain and we can count on that to grow some more grass!

This post has changed focus from whatever I had planned when I started two nights ago to random photos of lambing season. I guess I got distracted and too tired and didn’t get back to it until now. That is Fandango who lambed two days ago. She is one of the oldest ewes here—lambed with twins.

The ewes and lambs that are out of the barn are on the small field behind my shop. This is Jillian and her BFL-X triplets. I never registered Jillian because of lack of color and face markings but she has nice fiber so I kept her. I choose to breed the few ewes that aren’t registered to the BFL ram.

This one is a 3/4 BFL cross. He has the BFL ears.

A yearling ewe named Trina and her lamb.

It’s too late to finish writing much here so I’m going to end tonight with a couple of lamb photos and some daffodils. More tomorrow.

More Lambing Photos

I am not used to pasture lambing. In a Normal Year the pasture would be wet from November through February or March. It’s hard to remember Normal Years, although the last couple were close. In those Normal Years we lambed in the barn and corral areas because the sheep aren’t on the pasture during those months. This is flat land so water doesn’t drain away—it has to percolate through the soil, and there is a clay layer here so if there is a lot of water it can stay on top for a long time. In those Normal Years, it would be mid-March to April when we put the sheep out and there are plenty of annual grasses and forbs to feed them while we’re waiting for the perennial clovers and trefoil to really start growing well. The last couple of years seemed close to normal at least compared to those previous several years of drought. So it seems strange to me to have lambs in the pasture right now and my managment is set up more for barn lambing.

On Saturday afternoon all the sheep came to the barn except for Alice who had two lambs in the farthest paddock. I needed to get them to the barn. I had to get Dan to help with this becuase Alice was too frantic if I picked up both lambs to carry them and one of them was not on it’s feet yet.

This is the view I am always checking to figure out who is going to go next and be able to put those ewes in while they are in labor. Its actually more about behavior in combination with the physical appearance.

When I went to the barn yesterday morning Ears had one lamb. She delivered two more shortly. These are BFL-X lambs and big (7.4, 10.4, and 12.8 lbs). That’s 30 pounds of lambs!

Jasmine was next with twins. I found myself mutli-tasking here. I had an upcoming Zoom class at 9 so I had arranged to Zoom with my grandkids at 8:30. I took Zoom to the barn with me and they watched one of these being born while I was trying to also watch what they were showing me.

Those lambs cleaned up nicely.

So did Ears’ lambs.

Trina was next that morning. She is just one year old right now and she had only one lamb, which is expected for a yearling.

That brings us to this morning. I’ve been watching Raquel and even put her in the night before. Her due date was a few days ago, she is an old sheep, and she has had triplets more than once, so I wanted to keep an eye on her. She had one lamb when I went out at 5:30. We now have a couple of barn cameras and I checked the camera when I woke and thought that maybe I saw something. While I was waiting for the second I walked out in back.

The ewes are usually bedded down, but they thought they were maybe getting an early breakfast so started getting up when I walked back there.

This is a common site, Amelia and her daughter from last year are often lying together.

So are Ellie and her daughter.

In the very back there was a ewe with two lambs. I was able to carry one and the ewe and other lamb followed.

Terri lambed in the afternoon. This is the first but she eventually had another. Look at those horns! These are number 26 and 27.

There is the views from the barn cameras on my iPad from earlier today. I’m heading back now because I have 3 ewes in the pens in labor.

LAMBS!

Lambing seems off to a slow start. Usually the barn is full a few days after the first lamb is born, but not this year. The first due date I had marked on my calendar was today, February 26.

The first lambs were born February 20 - a set of twins to Zinnia and sired by the ram we picked up in Oregon, Ruby Peak Tamarisk.

Here is how that little yellow lamb looked today, 6 days later.

Four days later I checked the barn in between Zoom meetings and found this scene. Two ewes and two lambs. Upon closer inspection I knew that only one of these ewes had lambed. Ginger is the one on the left and these twins were hers. But Dilly was in early labor and sometimes the ewe’s hormones take over and they are anxious to mother a baby. Can you see how confusing it could be for the shepherd to sort out lambs? This is why I think it is important to keep checking the barn and when I think a ewe is in labor I separate her. These are two experienced moms but if there is a young ewe involved she might completely lose track of her lamb if an older pushier ewe intervenes. Even with these two if I’d been there an hour later I might not have known which lambs belonged to which ewes.

This is Ginger with her twins, sired by Axle. There are photos of the sires on the Ram Page.

Dilly had her own lambs but then Ginger thought maybe they were hers. You have to realize that this desire to claim lambs from another ewe doesn’t last long. In fact not long after this Ginger was hitting the fence when those other lambs got too close. It’s only possible to get an orphan lamb grafted onto another ewe with a lot of work and skill (and luck) involved.

One of Dilly’s twins.

Later that night (actually the next morning at 12:30 a.m.) Anise lambed with twins. The black lambs are crossbreds sired by Peyton, the BFL ram. See his photo on the Ram Page

This morning Betty lambed. There is another reason I like to get these ewes into the lambing pen before they lamb.

The lamb on the right is that one in the photo above after Betty got her cleaned up. The one on the left is how they look if they are delivered in a clean pen.

So my goal every time I go to the barn is to figure out which of these ewes is the next to lamb.