From Ewe to You

Monday, March 8, 2010

Dangers vs. freedom

This past weekend marked an exciting but scary time in our annual farm cycle.... There comes a time every spring that we must make the decision to let the new mothers and their lambs out of the barn, and Saturday was that day. We always want to protect the lambs for as long as possible: in the confines of the barn, we can control the temperature, we know that no eagle will swoop down and take off with a lamb, nor will a coyote help him or herself to a tasty meal, and we can keep track of whether all the lambs are warm and fed. Once we release them to the outside world, we have much less control and many more threats and worries - it is a hard decision to make....

On the other hand, when the weather begins to warm up and the sun shows itself, it's hard to feel good about keeping the lambs confined. By the time they are a week or two old (which is now true of most of our lambs), they really want to run and play with their "friends" - and they need space to do so. Trying to run and gambol under the hooves of their dams is hard to do without getting stepped on or worse, so the pressure is there to let them out.

Although this freedom was not our Official Plan for Saturday morning, it was a lovely day, with bright sunshine and moderate temperatures melting the snow. It was just impossible to feel good about keeping them locked in any longer.... By ten in the morning, we were removing panels to give the ewes and their lambs access to the great outdoors - and they loved it!

Before long, we welcomed friends to our farm who came to see our lambs run and play, and the lambs did not disappoint! Because of the beautiful weather - at least for Iowa in March - the lambs began to gather together and run in groups, jumping and twisting as they went. I have never watched lambs play in this way and not had a smile on my face. It's a really hard thing to photograph (I am still trying!) but once you've seen it, you are hooked! It is this joy for life displayed by the young lambs that can drag a sheep owner into the world of sheep breeding!

Feeding time brought another first: lambs discovered that when their mothers go out to the outdoor feeders for grain (for the first time since giving birth), the lambs have the hay feeders to themselves! For a few minutes, there is no pushing or shoving by the bigger ewes to get at the feeders, and the lambs took full advantage! Some were actually interested in eating the hay, but others were more interested in jumping on top of the feeders, using them as part of their play. Either way, watching their antics continued the joy of having set them free....

It didn't take long, though, for the lambs to tire

- they are still very young, remember - so many decided to take advantage of the weather and found a cozy place to nap in the sunshine in front of the barn. Even the presence of the big llamas didn't intimidate them. Both Luca and Chachi are good with lambs, although Luca enjoys them much more than Chachi does.

The lambs and their moms have all had access to the bigger world for two days, now. All lambs are still accounted for, and the ewes all seem to be continuing to shoulder their part of the responibility of keeping their lambs safe - with the help of the llamas, of course. With only five ewes left to deliver their lambs, my job is beginning to shift from lamb delivery to sheep care. I continue to walk through the barn, checking on sleeping lambs (to make sure they are still warm and not suffering from hypothermia), watching that all of our new arrivals are moving normally (nobody got stepped on), and that all is well. It won't be long before they sample their first taste of fresh grass in the pasture - at that point, it will be impossible to keep them in at all! They will live in the pastures, and if I want to check on lambs, I will need to visit them there! But that is at least a few weeks off yet - for the time being, I can still enjoy seeing them just a short walk from my back door.

12:10 pm | link Comments

Friday, March 5, 2010

Dodging a bullet

It's getting late in the lambing season: I am tired, working on a perpetual lack of sleep (bottle babies and midnight barn checks don't help), and the workload is the highest of the entire year with so many mouths to feed and bodies to care for - many of them individually penned. Much of what I do is done on automatic: weighing out grain, filling water buckets, checking lambs, etc. At this time of year, it seems endless some days. Although I try to keep my mind in the game, I have to admit that by this stage, my mind sometimes just wants to sleep....

So Wednesday afternoon, I was taken aback: when I opened the front door to the barn for the noon bottle feeding, I found that the ewes waiting to deliver (currently housed in the deepest part of the barn) had made a jail-break! They were loose in the "people areas," rummaging through grain buckets, looking for anything they could find to eat. How could they have gotten out?! I must have failed to latch their pen gate - or they figured out a way around the latch. In any case, they were loose and gorging on anything they could find....

Now, you have to realize that it's not as if they're starving! We not only provide our sheep with the highest quality alfalfa during gestation and lactation, but they actually get more than they need - we feed them extra so that they can select the best parts and leave the rest! These are some really spoiled sheep we are talking about! So for these four girls to make a break for it and gobble down grain like they were victims of starvation - well, it was just plain crazy!

But sheep are like that.... A couple of years ago, we had four ewes who had just delivered their lambs break out of their pen (in that case, they had figured out how to unfasten the latch) and gobble down the grain that had already been measured for that day's feeding - about 15-20 pounds of it. We didn't know which one ate the most, or whether they all had eaten equal amounts. An overload of grain can kill them, and it doesn't take much. One of them must have eaten only a little - she fared pretty well with a nasty case of indigestion for a day, and then she returned to normal. Two others got pretty sick for nearly a week, but we kept dosing them with bi-carb, and they eventually pulled through. The last of the four was not nearly so lucky.... We worked with Faye, frantically dosing her with bi-carb and other medicines from the vet that might help, but after four days she passed away, leaving twin ram lambs who ended up as bottle lambs - a really sad situation. It doesn't take much grain to cause a nasty case of acidosis that can end up taking their life - as in Faye's situation.

So, when I saw these four ewes - Ivy, Ireland, Gretta, and Geist - cleaning up the grain at the bottom of the five gallon weighing bucket, all I could think of was that I was going to lose one or more of them, too, and maybe their lambs, because of this stunt. I was furious! Ivy has been the source of trouble in the past (see some of my blog postings last October that dealt with some of Ivy's antics), and all I could think of was that she had led the group into a situation where I could lose all four of them, plus their six lambs! It was nearly unbelievable! I couldn't remember how much grain I had left in the bucket, and I had no idea whether that grain had been eaten by one or all four. It was a mess!

But, in the end, it has turned out OK. I have been watching them like a hawk since it happened, and it seems like the best possible outcome to this bad situation. There must not have been much grain in the bucket, and they must have shared it fairly equally.... All four ewes are behaving normally, and it has now been nearly 48 hours since their "grain raid." We have since added a double latch to the pen to prevent any future escapes - which, of course, makes feeding and caring for the flock that much slower when I need access to the sheep. I need to protect them from themselves, though, and this latching is the only way to make sure they stay where they need to be during this crucial time. Before too long, they will have had their lambs and will be back out with the rest of the flock, far from where we weigh and measure their feed - the best place for them to be. But until then, we'll do what we can to keep them safe - and we'll remain thankful that, this time, we dodged a bullet....

9:53 am | link Comments

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Playing the odds

I have delivered a lot of lambs throughout the last ten years.... I didn't think there was much that could surprise me anymore, but I was wrong. Yesterday, when Celeste went into labor, the whole experience was one huge surprise!

But let me set the scene before we get to what happened. A couple of years ago, two weeks before we began lambing, our shearer brought in a disease, soremouth, that spread like wildfire throughout our flock. The disease itself is very similar to chicken pox in people, but the lesions tend to come out most heavily around the mouth (hence the name). Once the ewes got it from the shearing equipment, they spread it to their lambs as they licked them off at birth. The lambs eventually got it so badly around their mouths that they couldn't suck, but before it got that bad, they infected their mothers' teats with the sores. Those sores on the teats then caused mastitis (an infection of the mammary tissue). As a result, that year we lost lambs who wouldn't suck, and we lost a lot of bags (or at least one side) on many of our best ewes. It was a mess - one I would love to forget!

Last year, we culled out (sent to auction) the ewes who had lost their entire bag in the soremouth outbreak and could no longer feed lambs. Bottle lambs are just too much work and too expensive to make a habit of it. We did keep, though, three ewes who had lost one side of their bags - they were all good ewes, and we hoped to get another ewe lamb from each one before we sent them along to auction, too. We figured that they could at least feed a single lamb - or one of twins, and we would then bottle feed the other. Celeste is in that group - she lost half of her bag to mastitis in the soremouth mess, and milk tends to come in very slowly on the other side. She carries recessive color, although we have never had a recessively colored lamb from her. She has also won Grand Champion Fleece at the Iowa State Fair more than once - I would love to have a recessively colored lamb from her, to pass those genes down to more ewes....

So, last fall, we bred Celeste to our new recessively colored ram from California - Goliath. We had a 50% chance that it would be a ewe lamb, and a 50% chance that it would be colored. Remembering back to my statistics class in college, I think that meant that we had a 25% chance of getting the colored ewe lamb I wanted - not a strong likelihood, actually. On the other hand, if we had sent Celeste to auction last fall, we would have had no chance, so she is still here! We knew she ultrasounded with only one lamb, so there would be only one chance to get that colored ewe lamb - it was a yes or no shot, and whatever it was, I knew I would most likely have to bottle feed it for at least the first few days.

When Celeste went into labor yesterday, things started out pretty typically.... She kept digging like mad to make her labor and delivery nest, and kept lying down and standing up because she couldn't get comfortable. Usually, after a bit of this up and down, the amniotic sack will break and the ewe will move on to pushing the lamb out - otherwise, she pushes the intact water bag out ahead of the lamb, and you eventually see that instead of the lamb. One way or another, you see either a gush of water or the water bag. At least that's the way it's always been - but not yesterday. I waited for hours, watching her dig less and push more, but all that I could see was an occasional glob of thick, paste-like stuff. This was definitely not normal!

I decided that the only thing I could really do was see if the lamb was coming down the birth canal by gloving up and going in - something I do without much thought anymore. I've done it so many times, and the result is always the same: you either feel the lamb, or you feel the water bag (like a water balloon) preceding the lamb. Yesterday, however, I felt nothing.... further back, more nothing.... and then eventually I got to something that felt like Astro-turf! I kid you not - it felt just like indoor-outdoor fake grass - kind of crunchy and crinkly. Definitely not what I thought I should feel! I decided to call the vet: I had too much riding on this one lamb for something to go wrong. Of course, my vet was tied up, but they sent out good ol' Doc Robinson, who was helping to cover the office.

The funny thing is that Doc Robinson thought I was crazy - I could see it on his face as I told him the problem - until he reached in there himself! Even he admitted that this was the strangest situation he had seen in a while! He finally figured out that the crunchy stuff that we felt was, indeed, the amniotic sack - he broke it and delivered the single lamb: a recessively colored ewe lamb!! I don't know how we got so lucky, but we did, and both Celeste and Jareau are fine. I was up most of the night carrying bottles up to the barn for Jareau, but thankfully, we had several ewes deliver yesterday, so there is plenty of colostrum to go around.

So, thank you, Doc Robinson, and thank you, Celeste, for defying the odds and bringing us this beautiful colored baby ewe lamb. To be honest, it isn't often that I take this kind of gamble, and even less often that it comes out in my favor!

12:27 pm | link Comments

Monday, March 1, 2010

A good time to be a shepherdess....

This time of year is hard to explain to people who don't have sheep.... It is most certainly the busiest time of year, being on call twenty-four hours a day to help deliver, dry, and settle our flock's newest members. Quite often, my sleep comes in two-hour increments as I continue to check on a laboring ewe throughout the night in our cold, sub-zero Iowa temperatures. Yet, this is also probably the best time of year: a time to watch as our flock grows overnight -- and as the many life and death struggles most often favor life, as that spark in each lamb pushes to live.

This week, we have passed the peak of the bell curve of births:

the majority of the lambs have now been pushed into the world, and ewes are no longer going into labor in groups. We were able to take time this past weekend to clean the barn a bit and enjoy the fruits of our labors to this point. Several friends stopped by to see our new arrivals (see Nicki cuddling with our two bottle lambs at left), and we found time to breathe again - something that, last week, seemed a far-off dream!

We have had thirty-eight lambs born so far this spring, with another sixteen yet to come (likely twelve this week, and the other four spread out through the rest of the month). The barn is filled with "lamb piles" during nap times as the lambs share not only company, but added warmth. Sometimes, they pile tightly together, one on top of the other like puppies in a litter, keeping warm as the barn temperature drops.

There are times, like in the photo at the right, when we look at one of these piles and have to pause to figure out which body part belongs to which lamb, sorting out the legs and heads of each in our mind's eye! Even when the barn is at a toasty fifty degrees, lambs will sleep in close quarters, unwilling to spend time alone even in sleep, reflecting just how deeply ingrained a sheep's herding mentality is.

The best place to see these groups of lambs is in our "creep area," so called because the lambs can creep through the gate into the area that is constructed to keep the ewes out. This is a lambs-only area that has the highest concentration of heat lamps, the most light, the best grain, and the finest alfalfa hay - everything to attract the lambs to come in and stay awhile! We've purposely put this area within easy view of the the barn's entrance so that we can easily keep on eye on our flock's youngest members.

The ewes, of course, are not always happy with this arrangement.... They would mostly prefer that they had access to this area, too - not only because they want the feed that they can see but not touch, but also because they cannot get to their lambs! In fact, last night at about midnight, I was awoken from a deep sleep by a ewe calling and calling for her lamb.... It was obvious to me that she was frantic, and I became worried that perhaps the lamb had spent too long a period outside without nursing (which can cause a lamb to die of hypothermia). I rushed out to see if the lamb was OK, or if help was needed. Honey was literally panicked at the fact that she could not find her lamb - running to and fro, calling and calling, and searching every corner of the barn. Well, I discovered that we had appropriately named her lamb, Jypsi - she was on her own, wandering among the lambs in the creep area, totally ignoring her mother's frantic cries! Once I encouraged her to at least go out to show her mother that she was well, Honey calmed down and we all were able to go back to sleep....

So, although our six weeks of lambing is a tremendous amount of work, it is also a tremendous amount of joy.... Once we get enough sleep to open our eyes, it is impossible not to get caught up in the magic of the moment. Our flock of forty-eight two weeks ago now numbers eighty-four, with more to come! Little lambs born just a few days ago take their first taste of alfalfa chaff and find it delightful - they kick up their heels, gamboling their enthusiasm. Young lambs play King-of-the-Mountain on top of the resting ewes, pushing each other off, and dancing with joy at their victory. I could go on and on.... Yes, it's definitely a good time to be a shepherdess.

10:47 am | link Comments

Friday, February 26, 2010

January

When faced with an intense lambing season like we have had this year, with many ewes due on the same day, sometimes all you can do is the best you can and hope that it all works out.... Sometimes it does, and at other times it seems that everything is working against you. Although we spent hours trying to save Joshua, even with four ewes delivering yesterday (or was it the day before? -- it's all starting to run together!), Joshua finally gave up the fight and died yesterday morning. No matter how many times we experience death or how prepared we think we are, each death brings sadness and guilt - wondering whether we could have done anything else....

But in the middle of lambing season, we don't have the luxury of taking a lot of time to wallow in sadness or self-pity! There are more lambs to deliver! And in the last two days, they have been coming and coming.... In a twenty-four hour period, Belle, Geode, Honey, and Genoa delivered a total of ten lambs! It is starting to become an issue of where to put them all - but we finally figured it out!

But, again, all of these lambs didn't come without issues.... In general, things went pretty well, but Genoa wasn't going to let things go that easily! After delivering two black ewe lambs, she delivered a third white ewe lamb who looked just like Genoa did as a lamb. As she cleaned them up, everything seemed to be going well - or so we thought! But as they started to dry, Genoa began to favor the black lambs, June and July, and ignore the late-coming white one, January. Before long, she was not only ignoring the white one, but had decided that January was not her own lamb - butting her away every time she tried to nurse.

Now keep in mind that although our barn temperatures are hovering between thirty and forty degrees (F), that's still pretty cold for a newborn lamb who is not getting the nutrition it needs. We tried several tricks to get Genoa to take January back: rubbing her against the other two to blend the scents, taking the other two away for a couple of hours so that the only lamb she has is the one she doesn't much like, and switching the coats in hope of mixing up the look and scent of each lamb. But nothing seemed to work. By late yesterday, it was clear that if we left January with Genoa, the lamb likely would not live long - so we brought her into the house.

I don't normally like to bring lambs into the house.... Doing so ensures that it will have no ewe to look out for it once released back into the barn. Also, we have three dogs in the house, so trying to keep a little lamb safe is no small feat. On the other hand, a little newborn lamb needs to be fed on demand for the first couple of days, and with as little sleep as I have been getting, I figured that it would be a whole lot easier to hear her crying for her bottle if she was here where I could hear her.

So, January is officially a bottle lamb. Geode and Honey were kind enough (through a bit of wrestling) to donate some of their colostrum (the rich first milk that comes in for the first couple of days after birth, before the true milk that follows) - without it, January would likely have died. She is beginning to understand that when she calls, it will take a few minutes for me to get there. And she's also beginning to get the hand of drinking from a bottle - something that doesn't come naturally to lambs.

The plan is to get her on a schedule in the next couple of days, and then take her back out to the barn on Sunday or Monday and let her mingle with all of the other lambs in the "creep area" - where lambs can come (and ewes cannot) to get high-nutrition grain and pellets, and the very best alfalfa, helping them to grow to their potential.

Oops - I hear January calling for her next bottle! I'd better go answer her cries! I'll give you an overall update on lambs on Monday....

10:16 am | link Comments

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