Less Work and More Work

Our 2015 lambing season has concluded with this hefty fifteen pound ewe lamb.  Isabelle is an experienced mom - she always has a single and it's always a ewe - and the lamb was scrambling up and looking for a meal in just a few minutes.



We ended with 48 lambs (from 27 ewes) of which 23 are girls and 25 are boys.  The sexes evened out toward the end - of the first ten lambs eight were rams.  I had expected many colored lambs but only got nine and of those five are boys.  We had quite a few ewes fail to conceive, also one aborted in February and another about two weeks prior to the first possible due date.  We lost one ewe to complications of pneumonia.  Despite a week of struggle on everyone's part she couldn't kick it and died leaving twin ram lambs.  Another ewe disowned one twin after a few hours which was very odd but she was adamant so there's a third bottle baby.  There are two sets of triplets and two ewes with twins who only have one teat working so several lambs are being supplemented.  Nobody risks going hungry around here.
One novel incident was a ewe with a uterine torsion.  Think of someone in a hammock that swings sideways until it flips all the way over, putting a twist in both ends. That's essentially the case here, and with everything twisted she couldn't deliver the lambs.  It happens in dairy cattle and we've seen it here in that regard but the vet said he'd never seen or even heard of it in sheep.  Oh, goody.  Every year we see some new, weird thing.  We were able to correct it by laying the ewe down, applying pressure to her abdomen to keep the uterus in place and then rolling her over - sort of rolling her around the lambs instead of trying to flip them over inside her.  Obviously we had to be super careful we were working in the proper direction!  We did it twice and it did work but the lambs had sadly expired, probably the day before.  We've been aggressive with pharmaceuticals on her and yesterday was the first day that she looked like she felt halfway decent.
So now that lambing is done I can sleep through the night again!  Woot!  All that remains is to band and tag the lambs and trim feet and deworm the ewes before turning them into mixing pens.  
In other news, we had a shearing day and got started on the fiber flock which wasn't bred to lamb this year.  Being under less physical stress really shows in the fleeces - they are all looking really nice this year.

Angel.......I think.  I don't recall exactly.

Taffy, a Border Leicester cross, with the belly wool already shorn away and set aside.

She has some gray fibers creeping into the black.

This is a really big lovely fleece and I have it earmarked to go to the FLFF fleece show and sale.
So now I have a good bit of work lined up....literally.  Thirty-eight fresh fleeces, many already reserved from the website for hand spinners and some destined for the fleece show and sale at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival in - gads - a hair over two weeks.

Tomorrow's job - assembling the multi-teat nurse bucket and getting the bottle lambs familiar with it.  Feeding time has turned into a crazed free-for-all with the greedy little thugs eager lambs literally leaping over each other, pawing and butting and trying to gnaw the plastic teat out of the other lambs' mouth.  There's no such thing as teaching them manners so we need to change the scenario to work better.

The little dickens grow up so fast!

Lambies Everywhere

It's been a busy three weeks!  We're getting down to the wire now - one ewe left to lamb!  Woot!  Her udder says she is still several days away from doing the deed so I can sleep through the night for a few nights.  Waahoo.

Here's one of the most recent arrivals.  The ewe is Star.  Her lamb is quite a survivor.  His twin sadly expired a few days before birth for some reason and when it was stillborn I assumed the other lamb would be deceased too, but no!  He came out hale and hearty.

Ivan is tired of all the constant hubbub in the barn.

"Wake me up when it's over.  On second thought......don't bother."

 

Morning and evening feeding time gets the ewes all over to the hay feeders so the floor is clear.  It's a green light to the lambs for some racing and bouncing.



 

More pictures soon!

 

Just Like Clockwork

Mother Nature doesn't deviate from the norm too often.  Lambing season began Sunday night at chore time with a pair of twins from Merry, a first time Cotswold mom.  She was a few hours shy of 148 days.  The lambs were perky and she was very engaged with them so we were off to a good start.

As it stands right now we've had 7 ewes lamb giving us 1 single, 4 pairs of twins and 2 sets of triplets. The triplets and 1 set of twins came this morning between 12:30 AM and 3 AM.  That part wasn't too much fun and just to make it more trying the temperature in the barn hovered around 20 degrees.  Better than the STUPID 10 DEGREES outside.  Hard to get born and face a drop of 80 degrees from what you're used to.  Lots of towels and a brief trip to the house for 1 lamb to get warmed up and we're pretty much on track at the moment.

One of Luellen's boys.

His brother, from between mom's front legs.

 

One of Kelsey's girls.



 

Sweetie's triplets.

Some family R and R.

Honestly, he's cute.  This makes him look like a demon lamb from the Exorcist or something :-(

One of Fiesta's triplets, resting up.

Having a turn at the buffet table.

"Mmm, that was good!"

Lambey cuteness.

Luellen's second boy, learning that he can make lots of noise!

"Didja hear me?  I was yelling!!"

Tahiti and her boys.

 

Some of the girls waiting their turn.

 



Let's hope they like daylight instead of the wee hours.

Get Ready, Get Set..........

Today is day 145 since the rams were put with the ewes.  Sheep gestation is normally considered to be 148 days so we're getting close.  I start going to the barn at 2 AM about now just to check.  I had a baby monitor/intercom type pair of units that worked great for years...until they suddenly didn't work any more.  The new set I got promised great things but failed to give me clear audio of the barn.  Probably too much interference on the wires and so I've resorted to middle-of-the-night forays. 

We've done the usual pre-lambing activities:

- Clean out the barn and bed with fresh bedding.  All those uneaten haystems we scooped out of feeders for weeks during the winter are pressed back into service as bedding.

- Start adding Deccox to the mineral mix to reduce the quantity of coccidia the ewes are putting into the environment.  The lambs will also be eating that directly as soon as they start tasting the minerals.

- Order baby lamb ear tags.  This year we're going with little brass ones that clip into the ear and leave no open edges.  This also necessitated a new tag applicator.  These things are never interchangeable.  The plastic roto-tags we've been using are getting pulled out too often when the open end gets caught on fence or feeder wire.  Besides having to use process of elimination to figure out what that lamb's number used to be I hate seeing mutilated ears.  The downside is that these tags are really little and you have to be holding the lamb to read them.  We'll see how that goes.

- Order more rubber teats for the bucket feeder.  Bottle lambs are inevitable.

- Order milk replacer.  That's arrived at the Mennonite business that can get it for us but we have yet to go pick it up.

- Clean out all the lambing jugs.  These little pens where mom and babies bond for a few days tend to be a catchall for things that have no regular place.  A big junk drawer in a way.  Shovels, pitchforks, pickaxe, wheelbarrow, sheep chair, a couple of odd boards, empty feed bags, feed bags full of used baler twine...... all get moved to another location and the pens cleaned of bits of hay, cobwebs, the stray burdock or curly dock that got pulled out of a hay bale and tossed in there....

- Locate the extension cords for the flourescent lights over the pens and check to make sure all are working.

- Check the supply of BoSe, needles and syringes, iodine, tail docking bands and print new pages for recording ewe/lamb info. 

- Put the baby bumpers on the big water tubs.  In the event that somebody sneaks a lamb out while I'm not looking I won't have to face the tragedy of a baby staggering around and falling into a water tub with hideous results.

The girls are doing their part - eating and resting and eating some more. 

Getting wider.

Talk about your "baby bump."

 

And Clem is helping them hone those mommy nuzzling skills.

 

 

We should have a betting pool on who will go first.  Way more fun than basketball brackets.



And First Across the Finish Line is......

.....Kahlua!  I would have put money on four or five other ewes first but Kahlua had a pair of twins up and walking around at bedcheck last night. 

A ten pound black ewe lamb and an eleven pound white ram lamb

 

 

They are sturdy and perky and a good start to lambing if you don't count all the other stuff that's already been going on.  

There is supposed to be a low pressure system developing over the weekend and those always bring on births, whether it's lambs or calves.  Judging from the size of many of the ewes it looks like it will be a very busy week.  And just to make things even more lively, the contractor is finally able to come start our main bathroom renovation....Monday!  Yay!  It's been a project that's needed doing for some time since it's in the original (well, pretty well used now) 1964 condition. Once he agreed to put us on his schedule we started ordering and accumulating all the things we need.  But oh crap, that means I have to strip the bathroom bare - closet, medicine chest, countertop, walls - and put. it. some. where.

Meanwhile, spring has NOT sprung and we're still getting snow off and on all day, every day.  Still, the redwing blackbirds have started returning.

 

And that means the poor cats are saved from boredom and can watch Bird TV allll day long.

 

 

Must. Fight urge. To join them.



A Loss and a Win

Lambing season hasn't even begun yet and we're having problems and losses.  Knowing that the poor quality (too mature) hay is not nutritious enough for pregnant ewes we've been supplementing with a grain ration earlier than usual.  Even that hasn't fixed the situation for everyone and we've treated a few more ewes for ketosis symptoms through the last week.

Saturday night a Cotswold ewe named Hazel appeared very bloated at the barn bedcheck.  She wasn't in any respiratory distress so we drenched her with sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) in water in case her rumen was getting a bit too acid from the grain ration.  She looked better in the middle of the night, but was bloated again in the AM and off feed.  This time we dosed her with the ketosis treatment and by the time we got done making her take it she was breathing pretty hard and quite depressed.  To make a long story short, the vets made three visits to the farm to give IV ketosis therapy besides our oral dosing and while she got a boost in her attitude for a brief time she remained off feed and also didn't want to drink.  Blood tests showed a low ketone body count so the condition should have improved with treatment.

By this morning it was pretty apparent that she was not going to turn around and that in fact her strength was waning.  Still believing the issue to be ketosis we considered our other options for treatment of her condition.  Since ketosis is a problem of pregnant animals the ultimate course of action would be to make her un-pregnant.   Because of her girth we had to think that the lambs she carried were getting pretty much to full term.  We could give hormones to induce labor but she would probably not have the strength to deliver and a prolonged labor would be hard on lambs who were already stressed by mom's condition.  We decided to go with the 'nuclear option' of a C-section.  If all went really well, we'd have a live ewe and live lambs.  If problems did arise at least it would be in a controlled situation and hopefully someone would pull through.

We made a nice cubby of hay bales for her in the nose of the trailer and I rode there with her to the vet's.  It was a surprisingly pleasant trip with no draft to speak of and she remained calm (and standing) through our ride.  The doctor who would be doing the surgery assessed her in the trailer and agreed that this was the course that would likely give the most positive results.  We were ushered in by a cadre of personnel and I knew she was in good hands.

The end result was one deceased lamb, one live lamb and Hazel passing away after the surgery was over and she was closed up and ready to come off the anesthesia.   The doctor did everything right, I'm sure, but she had some underlying problem beyond ketosis.  While the lambs were at term, there were only two which shouldn't have made her as big as she was.  There was a much larger quantity of fluid in the uterus than is normal.  Also, blood work taken before the surgery showed an absence of ketone bodies, so ketosis was not the main problem.  A type of cancer or a pathology in one organ or another could have caused her deterioration.  Without an exhaustive post mortem the ultimate cause of her problem will remain a mystery.

So, the one bit of good news is this little girl!

 

I haven't had a chance to weigh her yet but she's full term and nicely hefty - probably in the 10 lb range.  We pulled Andy's baby playpen up from the cellar and set it up in the sunroom where The Little Princess will stay until it gets warmer in the barn.  It will make feedings in the middle of the night more pleasant too.  Of course it immediately had to be cat tested and cat approved.

 



 

We put cardboard bumpers around the perimeter to prevent her walking through the bars.  The cardboard is folded now, but I can flip the pieces up to double the height which will be necessary quickly since she will be feeling adventurous and try to hop out in a day or two.

 

 

For now she's happy to rest in between bottles.  Fortunately I could dip into my freezer stash of colostrum to give her what she should have had from a mom.  A few feeding of just colostrum and I'll start adding in some formula.

 

 

I might end up calling her Fortune since that's what she cost.   Eeesh.

It's a darn good thing she's so stinkin' cute.

The Holdout

This is Alexandria, the last pregnant ewe I'm waiting for.  Everyone else was done by the 14th.

Do you mind??  That's really unflattering.

Based on when the rams were removed from their breeding groups I know the last possible lambing date is the 24th.  I would really - really - like her to hurry up and not take till the very last day.

I'll lamb when I'm good and ready, dearie.  In the meantime if you want something to do you can go skirt some fleeces.  Or something

Fair enough.  I have plenty of that to do.

 (But hurry up.) 



Four Lane Highway to Crazytown

You'd think that lambing season would be the most bloggable time of the year, and indeed it IS - but I'm just not getting that done.  Since the 18th we have 102 lambs from 51 ewes.  Nine sets of triplets including a set this morning.  Vast majority twins with maybe 8 singles.  Had to do a few corrections on lambs coming butt-first, broadside or with various legs in the wrong position.  A few ewes needed post-partum meds for feeling crummy, and I'm supplementing about 10 lambs who are from triplets (somebody always gets shoved aside and goes hungry) and a couple whose mom isn't milking on one side so she can't support twins.

For every lambing the procedure is to get mom and lambs into a small pen of their own (we had 18 going at one time), strip milk from both teats on mom to be sure she has some, weigh each lamb and dip the navel with iodine, and make sure they nurse. Lambs receive an injection of BoSe (supplemental selenium) within 24 hours because we are so deficient here.  After 2 days of doing well the lambs are ear tagged and tail banded and mom has her feet trimmed before being released into a mixing pen.  Mixing pens hold 9 to 10 ewes and lambs. 

Chore time is controlled chaos as ever individual pen needs a ration of grain, clean water and hay, the mixing pens need the same, the ewes who haven't lambed yet also get theirs, and the group of yearlings and geriatrics who weren't bred also need feeding.  Throw in the occasional ewe who wants to lamb during feeding time, or the new mom feeling crummy who needs meds, the new lambs who just don't look perky and need to be checked over.........and we are practically living in the barn.

But... we know we're gaining since we only have 20-something ewes left to go.  One year everyone lambed in the space of 18 days, so it *could* happen. 

Back to the barn to see what's happening!

Lamb-demonium

Lambing season started Monday the 21st, which was day 147 from turning in the rams.  Right on schedule.  Since then we have been pretty darn busy, just having had ewe #26 give us a great big single.  Not quite half way though the crowd, and I really don't think the pace will stay this fast, but one year I was done in 18 days (ewes cycle every 17 days during breeding season), so....... it's possible we'll just keep at it hammer and tongs till they are done.

In the meantime, the first lambs born are already being turned into larger mixing pens with their moms and lambs of the same age.

Why yes, I am a handsome fellow, now that you mention it.

Here's one of the many new additions today.

Not looking so suave, akshully.....

Rapidly followed by his sibling.

I know breakfast is here somewhere.........

The second lamb is also white, but birth fluids can range from nearly clear to bright mustard yellow to dark burnt orange.  I've heard that darker fluid relates to stress the lamb had before being born, but really I haven't see a correlation between color and perkiness or the lack thereof.

More than half the ewes are still waiting, passing the time eating, sleeping and thinking deep thoughts.

Wide load.  Har.  You hoomans are sooo droll.

Them Hollywood starlets don't KNOW from "baby bulge".

Try carrying this load, honey.

So what's the procedure when somebody gets born?  After the lambs can get up and totter around without falling over easily, they and mom get moved into their own little pen (lambing jug) to bond and have some quiet resting time for about 2 days.  It's a perfect way for us to monitor both mom and lambs for a couple of days to make sure no one has a post-partum health issue of some kind.  We've streamlined the system to work for us, and keep almost everything we need in the lambing kit, which is actually a tote with a slot in the bottom which is perfect for setting down over the edge of a board..

This includes lamb cradle and scale for weighing, and wide mouth pill bottle with iodine for dipping the umbilical stump, which is done as soon as the family is jugged.  A bottle of BoSe for giving a supplemental selenium (a trace mineral) injection to the lambs within a few hours of birth because we are so deficient in this area.  Clipboard with chart to record all info and make notes for every mom and lamb.  There's always something notable to say about ANYbody.  Elastic bands and bander for docking tails and plastic rototag eartags for giving each lamb an ID number before the family is turned into a larger group.  Miscellaneous needles and syringes, curved forceps, eye ointment, surgical staple gun, antibiotics and other miscellaneous meds "just in case", and usually....... my giant travel mug full of coffee :-)