Lambing season extended

 We thought we were done with lambing this year when we noticed a couple of our older girls looking a little...rounder than usual. Patch and Nina were looking pregnant. When both girls "bagged up" with milk, we knew there were lambs on the way!

  Early Saturday morning, Nina surprised us by showing up with this little girl.

  Nina was one of the original group of sheep brought here a couple years ago. She was the only female that had not lambed. With her larger stature and bossy nature, we were wondering if we had a rare hermaphrodite sheep who looked female but lacked the internal plumbing for lamb making. Not so!

 

  This girl is a decent size and seems very healthy. Big Onion's family was in town visiting the farm when the baby was born so we gave them naming rights as long as they stuck with the 'B" theme. They chose the name Belle.

   Little Belle has been doing great, and Nina is a wonderful mother. She keeps the baby close and has never once wondered off and lost her baby like some sheep around here.

 We are still waiting for Patch to pop. She has been bagged up now for more than two weeks, and the anticipation is killing us! Big Onion's mother was so sure she would have her lamb while they were here and checked on her several times a day, but Patch is working on her own schedule. Judging by her size and age, we are keeping our fingers crossed for our first set of lamb twins any day now.

Three generations of HighTail ewes: Patch, daughter Fancy, and granddaughter Basil. Here's hoping Patch makes Fancy an auntie very soon!

Pretty Baby Basil

Just thought I'd share some pictures of this pretty little girl....

We had a really funny moment with this baby one morning a few weeks ago. I had dumped a scoop of feed in the goat yard for the sheep. Well, the whole flock went rushing in, including Basil's mother, Fancy. Poor little Basil got separated from her mother in the scrum and ended up outside the goat yard confused and calling out for her lost mother.

  I stood back and waited to make sure mother and daughter got back together. Instead, Patch who is Fancy's mother and therefor Basil's grandmother came back out and stood by the distressed lamb.

  I swear you can see Grandma rolling her eyes here thinking, "Where is that daughter of mine? She needs to come get her kid!" Eventually, Fancy realized her daughter was missing and came out to claim Basil from Patch, but I have to imagine that Patch had a few choice words on proper parenting for her wayward daughter!

How (not) to milk a sheep

Little Rhubard a.k.a. Ruby has been with us for about a week. It quickly became clear that this youngster was not old enough to live on grass alone as her gut became more swollen every day with undigested food and her back felt more and more bony. At first we tried powered lamb milk replacer, but she was having none of it. We do have a freezer full of goat milk, but there is such a close connection between CAE (which our girls have) and OPP, the sheep version of the virus, that we were reluctant to feed this to the girl. Everything we read assured us that pasteurizing the milk would kill the virus though, so yesterday I cooked up a batch of milk for Ms. Ruby. 

 Worked like a charm. 

We also added a bit of olive oil to the milk just in case her swollen gut was the beginnings of bloat. 

 Ms. Ruby loves her goat milk, but feeding pasteurized goat milk to a baby sheep is less than ideal in my book, so today I set out to try and get some actual sheep's milk from Patch, one of our nursing mommas.

 Step 1: Get the sheep into the goat pen.

I'd love to say that I called in my trusty herding dogs to move the sheep into the pen, but none of us are to that point in training (myself and the sheep included). Thank heavens those sheep will do just about anything for a mouthful of sweet feed...including following me into hostile territory. I swear Jenni in the foreground above is just itching for me to turn my back to she can give those ovine intruders a taste of her horns.  

 Step 2: Catch the sheep and get her into the milking stanchion.

Suffice to say this was easier said than done. At this point, the smart thing for me to do would have been to exhaust the remaining sheep, who kept trying to climb into the feed bucket on the stanchion, Ruby, who kept trying to climb into my lap and suck on my elbow, and the various ducks, geese, turkeys, and guineas who were were just generally making a nuisance of themselves. 

 I was smart enough to exclude Josie from the party. She was less than pleased at this. Not only were the sheep in her space, but there was a sheep on HER stand, eating HER food. Completely unacceptable. After about 10 minutes of staring goat-daggers at my back, she took to banging her head against the gate then rubbing her horns back and forth on it in what I guess was supposed to be a threatening manner.

Meanwhile, I was trying my best to milk poor Patch who was being just as quiet and patient as could be amid the chaos of barnyard mayhem and my fumbling at her nether regions. After cleaning her utter of god know what she's been laying the past month (Yick!!), I did my darndest to get a grip on them tiny teats with zero success. I'm tell you, her nipples were so small, I couldn't even get two fingers around them. I even tried my homemade vacuum sealer milking contraption that works like a charm on the goats. Still no luck. Not a drop. The expression 'blood from a stone' comes to mind.

I finally went back to hand milking which was more like nipple pinching and was able to get one drop of milk at a time. I'm not kidding here. ONE DROP of milk per squeeze. At that rate, it'd take me about 3 years to get enough milk for one meal for Ruby.

 At that point, I decided to forget it and made myself feel useful by de-wooling the rest of Patch's leftover winter fuzz and giving her crusty rear a good cleaning.

 Safely back on the ground and reunited with her daughter, Miss FancyPants, none the worse for my failed efforts. I guess at this point I should give up on dreams of sheep milking and stick to the goats. The only thing I can think that might make it easier is if I pull Patch from Fancy for a day and let her build up some steam in that utter before trying again. Honestly though, I just can't see it working much better. There is just nothing to get a grip on down there.

Plus, how could I possibly hope to succeed with THIS looking over my shoulder. Jeez.

Just a little off the bottom

Sunday was a big day here on the farm....a sort of sheep spa day.

I had noticed a while ago that one of our new momma sheep, Rose, was limping. After catching her and getting a good look, I found that she had a mild case of hoof rot. Ick! Hoof rot is basically an infection of the hooves. It's pretty easy to tell when an animal has hoof rot. It smells terrible.

I also noticed that Pepper's feet were starting to turn out on one side so it was decided that we would have our first ever sheep hoof trimming day. So exciting!

We gathered all our tools, hoof trimmers large and small, some soak for rotty feet, a lanolin protective cream, penicillin injections, and I even stole some of the dog's grooming tools to try and remove some of the scraggy, nasty wool chunks hanging off the girls. Can't have unkempt looking sheep now can we?

The next step was getting the girls into the newly secured goat yard and catching them one by one to trimmed. Easier said than done. It took 3 people, a sheltie, and my handy stock stick to catch each sheep one by one.

 Our first victim was Maggie. We wanted to get her done so that she and the newest lamb ewe, Emma, could be put out first and not get run over or smashed. Maggie was actually happy to eat while I trimmed her hooves and our wonderful friend, A, removed loose wool.

Just like a day at the spa. 

 Big Onion was busy taking pictures of ears. This was to help us figure out their previous owner's ear notching system and get her birth records on each sheep.

At first we were putting the girls up on the goat's milk stand, but after Whoopi decided she would rather rest her...ahem....girl parts on my back (don't think that stain will ever come out!) than stand on three legs, we switched to laying the sheep down to work on them. Sheep are kind of amazing in that the minute you overpower them and get them off their feet, they just go limp. Go check out videos of sheep being sheered if you don't believe me. They just turn into giant wooly rag dolls...that fart and burp a lot.

 Even a couple of the babies got their first trimming. Fancy put up with it like a champ, but Optimus was a total handful, bucking and kicking the whole time he was held. Take note of Luna sacked out asleep in the background of this pic. That right there is a good stock dog, ready to work at a moment's notice, but completely fine with just being around the stock and chilling when not working.

Halp!

How can you help but love on something that cute? Even if your affections are neither appreciated or returned. 


In all, we had four girls with bad hooves. All got treated with penicillin and foot soaks. We will have to check them again in a week or two. We also tried to steal a little sheep milk from the mommas that were nursing babies. We learned that it is a lot easier to milk a goat than a sheep so the lambs are in no danger of us stealing their dinner. 

Fancy That!

I would like to introduce you to our first lamb....

Fancy 

(a.k.a. Miss Fancy Pants)

She was born last Wednesday without any help from us. In fact, we got home from work to find her already dried off and on her feet, and since then there has been no stopping her. 

We had a feeling she was coming very soon. Her momma, Patch, has been in milk almost since she arrived and the last couple days before she gave birth she was laying down an awful lot. 

Poor thing had a rather rough introduction to the shelties when she was just a couple days old. 

Since the lamb was born, I have been using Sonny, our older sheltie, in the evenings to put the poultry away for the night since he is my good obedient boy and won't chase sheep unless I ask. On this particular day, Nova was the first to volunteer for evening duties so I let her come out to help put away the ducks, geese, turkeys, and guineas that had been out doing their free range pasture thing all day. Nova is younger than Sonny and even though she SHOULD have more herding training time under her belt (she was living and working on a small farm before we got her), she is a bit of a goof ball.

Nova walked very nicely out the back gate and down to the poultry pens with me. I asked her to go out and get the first set of ducks to be put away. Well, Nova took a look at those ducks, then at the sheep farther down the field and decided that sheep would be WAY more fun to chase around. She took off straight for the sheep   before I could stop her. I tried yelling a couple times but found that I was wasting my breath. That crazy girl was dead set on herding her some sheeps!

Seeing a tiny black and white wolf heading for them, the sheep took off for the safety of the poultry yard with Nova hot on their heels. Poor Fancy just wasn't up for a full speed chase and soon fell behind the flock. Nova, being the utter ding bat that she is, ran over the poor 2 day old lamb in pursuit of the rest of the flock.

At this point, I was finally able to call Nova off and have her come back to me. Fancy, in the meantime, got back up disoriented and took off at top speed in completely the wrong direction and straight for the last pile of scrap metal I hadn't trucked off to the scrap yard and the creek beyond it!

Now our creek is about 20ft below the level of the pasture and has a rather steep embankment. Fancy heading straight for it had the potential to be a serious problem. Thank heavens our friend A. happened to be visiting. She saw the problem and took off after the lamb while I got the misbehaving sheltie under control.

Fancy ran straight into the scrap pile with a bang and disappeared on the other side. By the time I got there, A. was in full lamb rescue mode trying to head off a very frightened and confused baby right on the edge of the embankment. I called out, "Just grab her!" and A. made a lunge and caught the baby just in time.

We checked her over and found that the poor gal was very frightened but otherwise unharmed. Momma Patch was very very relieved to have her baby returned to her in one piece.