We’re up to 66 lambs now. Here are some of them.
Faces in the Barn
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Babies in the Barn
Some of this week’s lambs:
Lilac twin ewes: Meridian Nash x Mud Ranch’s Foxglove.
Esmerelda’s twins, 75% Jacob/25% BFL.
Fandango’s BFL/Jacob twins.
This morning’s lilac triplet rams: Meridian Nash x Meridian Celeste. These bring the count to 55.
And look who came to the barn with me this morning…
…in her camo boots and pj’s.
Kirby will be helping me in the barn for the next couple of days.
Soft Scarves and a Soft Lamb
On Friday I wondered “what was I thinking?” when I set up a class for the middle of lambing time. Some days in the last two weeks I have spent most of the day in the barn but luckily the class went smoothly with only a few barn-check breaks while everyone was working on their looms.
This was a class about weaving with rayon chenille, a yarn with a reputation of being difficult to work with. I set up 4 warping frames on temporary structures and the fifth person used the one I have mounted on the wall.
After the looms were warped and ready to go I was surprised that it wasn’t all that crowded with five looms. Each person chose a different combination of colors for their scarves:
We did take a barn break or two. One lamb was born during class and two more right afterward.
Everyone finished weaving in the class time (although fringes will be finished at home) and all were pleased with their scarves.
March Came in Like a Lamb
March!
Western redbud near the house. I wish it would bloom all spring.
These are Mae’s lambs.
Sisters from last year, Jade and Jillian, waiting to go to the pasture. Jade wasn’t bred but Jillian is pregnant.
Sending the pregnant ewes out in back.
These are yesterday’s lambs:
Loretta and a single ram, standing. The one on the ground is the lamb that Raquel rejected a couple of days ago. I successfully “slime grafted” her to Loretta. More about that in a future post.
Later in the day Alexandria lambed with little tiny lambs, both under 5 pounds, but vigorous and healthy.
Cascade lambed with a single ram last night. That lamb is to me an average size but weights only one pound more than Alexandria’s combined.
Here is the status so far. Color coding for girl/boy. BT means that the lambs have had BOSE (selenium and Vitamin E supplement) injections and their tails have been banded. Sires are Ringo, Rotor, Nash, and Faulkner. Only 26 ewes left to lamb!
Nine Days In
This is when lambing season starts to take it’s toll. Everything has been going OK, but there is starting to be some sleep deficit. Thank goodness that during the two days I was driving to the Bay Area to teach classes it was slow here.
Yesterday started just after midnight when Mable’s lambs were born. All OK. I think I didn’t go back out until just after 6 a.m. and Sophia had new twins. They seemed fine although I had a little trouble making sure they nursed OK. The answer for that was to go back to the house to eat breakfast and then the “problem” lamb was ready to eat.
Mary came out to help and that help is so appreciated. We were completely backed up in the lambing jugs and the alleyway of the lambing area. (I think that’s like when you see on TV shows the gurneys with patients lined up in the hall of the hospital.) So the first thing to do was to start moving sheep around in the cycle from lambing jug to group pen for a few days to mom and baby part of the barn and field which hadn’t been set up yet. We worked on that at the same time as watching Lana in labor.
Lana had a very pretty lilac ewe lamb. Eventually, after it seemed things were taking a long time, I checked and found another lamb, pulled it, and spent about twenty minutes trying to make it live. I don’t know if it was doomed from the start or aspirated fluid during birth, but it could never get a good enough breath and it died. 
In the meantime Raquel was in labor. I have been in touch with some students at the UC Davis vet school who are interested in coming out for some hands-on practice. It’s been difficult to coordinate their schedules with sheep lambing, but they were able to come out then for a couple of hours. Unfortunately Raquel didn’t lamb while they were here but they did do some ear tagging, tail banding…
…and they listened to the normal and the not-as-healthy lungs of these twins, one of whom has been getting penicillin because he almost died from pneumonia following a difficult birth (in this post).
We finally got the ewes with the first lambs out on the pasture. Can you tell where all the mom’s food is going now?
After getting the ewe through the end of pregnancy and then lambing in good health, the next challenge is keeping an eye on the udder health. As the milk is coming in (the lesser amount of colostrum giving way to a greater quantity of milk) the udder may become engorged. If there is tenderness and the ewe doesn’t let the lambs nurse on one side it becomes a vicious cycle. Sore udder and teat…no nursing…more milk backing up…udder more full and sore. This can eventually lead to mastitis which, if not treated, can ultimately kill the ewe or at least ruin her udder.
Walking back to the house I noticed Mae standing like this. “Lameness” in a ewe who in nursing lambs may have nothing to do with the feet at all, but be because her udder is full and painful.
I went out to get her and bring her to the barn. I am amused by her response to me approaching.
This is why. Her lambs are hidden in the grass.
This is how Mae looked walking back to the barn.
This is from the front. I tied her to the fence and milked the one side, taking 7.5 ounces.
Then it looked and felt balanced. I milked her again this morning. There was another ewe in a similar situation and I had to milk her a couple of times. I have to remember to be watching for that over the next few weeks as these ewes lamb.
We set up the creep for the lambs. They can get through the narrow slots on that panel. The ewes aren’t always happy that their babies can go somewhere that they can’t follow.
These are BFL-X lambs born the night before.
The last lambing of the day was Raquel. After the vet students had left and I had finished working outside I finally went to the house. I went back to the barn to check and these lambs had been born. It wasn’t until later at the last check around midnight that I realized that Raquel didn’t want one of them. But that is another story.
Lambing-Day 2
Part of being in Farm Club is that you get a complete Lambing Journal report every night with all the nitty-gritty of what happened during the day. Sometimes it gets a little long-winded like today’s report. However my blog posts are usually mostly photos. I’m thinking about writing a post every day there are lambs, but realistically that may not happen. I don’t write one every day when there are NOT lambs, so I don’t know why I think I’ll have time to do it now.
And is this really Day 2 of Lambing? Day 1 was really a month ago when the surprise lambs were born. But I’m calling that the Prologue to lambing season. Or maybe it’s the Prequel. Anyway, I’m calling this Day 2. Only two more ewes lambed but it seemed hectic, partly because it got complicated by a dog semi-emergency. Rusty described that in his blog post just a minute ago.
This is Mae, who lambed with twins a little after midnight.
Before I went in the house at 2 a.m. I put Athena in the lambing area because she didn’t look right and I figured that she was in labor. (A good sign that something was off was that she showed no interest in the grain I offered her as enticement to follow me in.)
It’s a long story, but she probably had ketosis (pregnancy toxemia), fortunately in the early stages. After talking to my vet I got more proactive and pulled the lambs.
That black lamb is 11.4 pounds and his brother is almost 8 pounds. The only other white lamb I’ve had sired the BFL ram was this same cross–Athena x Faulkner–and there was also one black and one white. After some careful watching and TLC (interspersed with dealing with Maggie) Athena seems to be doing fine.
And how about a little more baby horse cuteness? I went down the road to visit this guy again. Here he is about 36 hours old. I got to pet him this time. So soft!
Lambs!
If you read the last post you know there is a contest about who will lamb first. No one is a winner yet because the choices didn’t include the ewe who did actually lamb first. (Don’t worry, the contest was just for the ewes in that blog post–we’ll still have a winner.)
I came home from town today to find Ears, a BFL-x ewe, just about ready to deliver. I didn’t have a breeding date for her so no lambing date either.
One lamb.
Two lambs.
Three lambs. All were up and nursing quickly. Good job, Ears!
I always look at the sheep surroundings for potential hazards. My feeders are chained to the fence or wall so they can’t fall on a sheep. If I use baling twine to tie something (rarely because I have plenty of 2′ lengths of chain with clips)…but if I do use baling twine I make sure that there is no loop in which a sheep could get a head or horn stuck. If I leave a ewe to lamb in the larger lambing area I make sure the gate is shut with an extra chain because I know a lamb can squeeze through the space between the gate and the wall. So I was sitting in the straw watching the first lamb move around and I planned to move this extra panel before I went to the house because…
…I knew that, however unlikely, a lamb could get stuck between it and the wall. 
Sure enough, that happened while I was still sitting there.
So what could be cuter than a baby lamb? (Or at least As Cute?)
How about this foal that was just 12 hours old?
He was born down the road at my friend’s house. We have to wait 5 months for lambs to be born. This foal was due on January 29 (11 months) and was just born today on February 22! That is almost a year of gestation for the mare.
Guess the Next Lambs
Da da da da da da daa. Dut, da da da da da da…While I’m typing this I’m hearing in my head a well-known Game Show tune that goes with it. However, this game won’t be quite like that one.
I have a list of due dates based on observed breeding dates. I photographed most of the top contenders. My list shows the following ewes for February 25.
Mae from the front.
Mae from the rear.
Shelby from the side.
Shelby from the rear.
Esmerelda, front.
Esmerelda, rear.
Athena from the front.
Athena from the rear.
Marilyn is due 2/26. 
Here she is from the rear. She was shorn in November. I sure like the recently shorn views better for this.
Noel is due 2/27.
Fran is due 2/28.
Fran from the rear.
Spring isn’t due until March 5 but she always looks so big I thought I’d just give you a view.
Who is this? Trick question. That is Delight who is nursing twins.
And here is Dazzle with her single. You can sure see the difference in body condition of ewes that are nursing month old lambs.
There a few other ewes on the list for the first couple of days, but I didn’t get photos of them. Maybe if I didn’t pick them out of the bunch for photos then they really aren’t ready. In any case we’ll just go with the sheep that are shown here for the prize. Yes, there will be a prize. I’m thinking about that right now. Something easy to mail. How about a pair of socks (sorry, only medium left) or a t-shirt. Your choice.
You can guess here in the comments or on Facebook. Share this post with your friends. Whoever is the first to name the first of these ewes to lamb is the winner. We should know in a few days.
Dut, da da da, da da da…
Update: I didn’t think this through very well. The first person with the right sheep will still get the prize, but to add incentive to continue voting I’ll put all the names of all the people who choose that sheep in a random drawing for something else.
Meeting the Flock
There were unplanned lambs born January 23. I have kept those three lambs with their dams separate from the rest of the flock while it was raining and the sheep were in the barn area. 
Last week as it was drying out I put the flock on the pasture and then turned the new lambs out with them.
One thing I watch for when putting lambs in the pasture for the first time is that they don’t get tangled up in the electric fence. 
I’m glad to see when they touch the fence because I know that they will have learned to avoid it.
This looks worse than it was. The whole incident was very brief and then…
…the nearby lamb was off and running.
Bertha, one of the yearlings thought this looked like a good game…
…so she kept up the chase.
Eventually this lamb found his mom who hadn’t been particularly concerned about him.
In the meantime the other two lambs stuck near their mom. I’m going to use colored tags again this year to give me more information about the lambs at a glance, mostly about sires. However, these first three have an unknown sire and the ram lambs (gorgeous as they are) have been banded. That’s what the red tags mean–wether.
Fibershed Brainstorming
Yesterday I went to a meeting to discuss how to better use our Fibershed Marketplace and to find out what’s going on within our Fibershed. Part of the fun of the meeting was gathering at the Napa ranch of one of our members, Mary Pettis-Sarley.
When I asked how many alpacas there are, Mary said between 150 and 200. They roam the hills on the ranch, accompanied by guardian dogs.
This is one of the many ranch dogs that include guardian and herding dogs. We were told that this one is only 8 months old.
Our meeting was in the greenhouse located near the field where the bucks live.
This guy seemed pretty friendly.
Before we started the meeting we admired each others fiber products. This is one of the Twirl yarns produced by Mary.
This is what I brought to share–sheepskins, buttons, yarn, and shawls from my Jacob sheep. The new Timm Ranch yarn is at the lower left.
This is a felted hat made by Colleen Simon using my Jacob fiber.
Here is Jackie showing a newly carded batt…
…and this is a piece she felted from the wool of Vicki, one of my Jacob sheep.
We were able to see the recently produced Wool and Fine Fiber Book. Each producer has a spread in which samples of their fiber is attached. These books will be circulated to designers and manufacturers who want to find out what kinds of fiber are available locally, how to contact the producers, and to learn how these fibers might be used in end products. This was an amazing undertaking by Fibershed.
Speaking of amazing things, we learned about the “projects” that Fibershed founder, Rebecca Burgess, has underway. I say “projects” in quotation marks because really these are major undertakings and far beyond the scope of anything that I ever attempt. Rebecca is not only writing another book, but is working with the Wendell Berry Farming Center on hemp efforts in Kentucky, an initiative in California to legalize the growing of hemp for fiber use, research that is underway on waterless wool washing, and the carbon research project in which we can all participate by submitting soil samples from our farms. Whew!
While hearing about all this we were also doing what Fibershed producers do best, eating and baby animal snuggling. This is a two-day old kid who needs some TLC.
One of the dogs was feeling left out.
Even Rebecca found some goat snuggling time.
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