Tag Archives: lambing season

Last Lambs

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Most of the lambs came as planned during the month of March. There were some late lambs, also expected, but not originally planned. That is because I unexpectedly acquired a ram in late November.

Ginger Lynn’s Eli was sired by a Meridian ram that I sold a few years ago.The breeder of Eli sold him to someone who unexpectedly needed to re-home him due to a move, so we drove to the Redding area to pick him up. When I got him here I decided to put a few ewes with him. We hadn’t bred the whole flock this year because of the pasture renovation project that has been described in other posts. A 5-month gestation means lambs in late April or early May.

Here is Eli after shearing in January. He is not here anymore because I returned him to the breeder who wished she had not sold him to the other person. I hoped for some nice lambs.

This is lamb # 2555 born April 27, the only ewe lamb from this group. Ginger Lynn’s Eli x Meridian Belle. Belle is my granddaughter’s sheep and this lamb is sure pretty, so she will stay and I’ll let Kirby think of a name.

Jasmine was next to lamb with a ram lamb but I can’t find a photo right now.

Bide a wee Hallie is ten years old and these will be her last lambs. These are two ram lambs, one with 4 horns and one with two.

Here are the last entries for the Lambing Board. Hallie’s lambs were 12 and 10 pounds!!

Belle and her lamb.

Seeing Triple

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I’ve been trying to get the lamb pages on the website updated, so most of the photos I’ve been taking are of individual lambs…and trying to make sure I can read ear tag numbers. If I go out earlier in the morning I sometimes find lambs bedded down next to their moms. There were five sets of triplets this year.

This is Janna with her three lambs–two rams and a ewe.

Bide a wee Trista also has two rams and a ewe. You can’t see the ewe very well–she is mostly black and behind the two spotted lambs.

Sweetgrass Tranquility with triplet ewe lambs.

Addy with her lambs, the first of the season. Addy is a BFL/Jacob cross.

Patchwork Amara was the other ewe to have triplets, but Sparky required intervention and became a bottle lamb. Her story is here and she features in several of the posts since then. Her brothers are 2527 and 2528 on the ram lamb page.

Sparky and me!

Lambing, the End (Almost)

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I have lamb photos to share but not necessarily in order because I didn’t keep up as lambing progressed.

The last lambs of Lambing Season, Part 1, were born two days ago, March 31. Part 1? That’s another story, but there may be four ewes due to lamb at the end of April. This is Tamara with two ewe lambs, #2553 and 2554.

Bide a wee Trista lambed March 28 with triplets.

This photos was taken three days BEFORE lambing. Trista certainly carried that twenty pounds of lambs low. She is getting grain now to help her put some weight back on and supply enough milk.

This is lamb #2545 born to SilverRain March 21. Lambing had slowed down at that point.

The lambing board shows that there was a lot of action for about a week and then days between the later lambs. My granddaughter made the notes on the board before she left on March 25.

Sweetgrass Tranquility had triplet ewes March 19.

My grandkids were here for a week and shared bottle feeding Sparky. This is 8-year-old Kasen.

I was able to finish skirting and sorting the Jacob wool be the time lambing was over. This wool is now at the mill and hopefully I’ll have some of it back by the fall.

Meet Sparky

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Lambing started only two weeks ago but is almost over (except for the lambs that will come at the end of April due to acquiring a ram around Thanksgiving). I like to keep my blog posts in chronological order, but I’m giving up on that for now. I may share other lambing photos later, but for now I’ll write this story.

It was only a week ago (Thursday, March 13), that Patchwork Amara lambed. I had put her in the evening before and didn’t see anything when I checked the barn at 2 a.m. When I went back at 6:00 I found a big lamb in good shape and a small lamb that at first I thought was dead. When I picked her up she wasn’t completely flaccid like a dead lamb would be and I could see her take shallow breaths. She was very cold.

I brought the lamb to the house and put her in a dishpan of warm water. As her body warmed she started to move her legs. After I’d warmed her enough I wrapped her in a towel and went back to the barn. I set up a heat lamp and moved Amara and the big lamb to a clean pen. Lisa was helping for a few days and when she came to the barn I gave her lamb holding duty.

I milked colostrum from Amara and tube fed the lamb.

While we were feeding her we realized that Amara was having a third lamb.

Those big brothers were 9.2 and 8.6 pounds. Sparky, as Lisa named her when she showed a spark of life, was only 4 pounds.

I found a size Small coat for Sparky, It was way too big and eventually Lisa cut some off.

Sparky was spunky enough after the tube feeding to nurse on her own. Throughout the day we made sure that she was nursing.

The next morning Amara was tired of having three lambs and was getting a bit aggressive towards Sparky. I didn’t feel comfortable leaving her there and decided that she would be a bottle lamb. That was 6 days ago.

Farm Club members came on Saturday and Sparky was a favorite.

I picked up my grandkids at the airport yesterday and we went to the barn right after we got home. Ten-year-old Kirby.

Eight-year old Kasen. The kids are taking turns bottle feeding, although the next feeding is in a few minutes (11:30 p.m.) and no one has volunteered for that one.

Sparky has had plenty of attention. The kids are taking her out of the barn and letting her run around in the grass. I tried to share a video here don’t know if I can make it work. Let’s try this YouTube link.

Today on the Farm – February 21

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I know it will make me crazy to go back and do other photos out of order, but I’m ready now for today. So I’ll do it this way and include a couple from yesterday as well. Maybe I’ll get to others later because there are stories.

Yesterday Dan decided to take out part of the tree that we think used to stand straight. Ever since that super strong wind last week this tree has looked like it’s tipping more and we’ve known that part of it looks dead. If it went down it could not only take a person with it but it would lift up the corner of the fence. It’s easier to cut down a tree than to replace the fence.

This is one of Trista’s twins born five days ago. The first time he nursed he did it while lying down. Maybe he has decided that is just the way you do things. It works when the sheep has a low hanging udder.

I was in the barn a good part of the day yesterday. I skirted fleeces in between watching ewes lamb. I’ll try to get time to post these.

This morning I knew it was time to rearrange the furniture. As the ewes lamb and I move more ewe/lamb groups out of pens they go on one side. The pregnant ewes stay on the other. It’s the only way I can keep track of who’s next and who may be in labor. There were way too many sheep on one side. It’s mud on the outside of the barn and the pasture has standing water. Until we get some dry days and some more growth they won’t go out there.

Now the ewes and lambs have a much larger space in the barn and outside to the west.

The pregnant ewes (not in this photo) have the space to the left.

In the barn. I ran out of feeders that hang on the panels so Tamara has to share her meal as bedding.

The hens looked like they were dying, but I knew that they were just happy to spread out in the sun.

I moved Amara in last night thinking that she might lamb during the night. Today was the day.

I went to the house for breakfast and to get supplies so that I could work from the barn. I had to prepare for a Zoom meeting for which I didn’t have time last night. This is one of my favorite cups. I bought it at Black Sheep Gathering last year.

My new office set up.

My view from the office.

The result. The second was one of those that may have been just fine if I wasn’t there, but I don’t know. There have been plenty of lambs born with no one around and they are up and nursing when I find them. But so far there have been two that I found dead and had the membranes over the face, one of which was still half in the ewe. This one was born while the ewe was standing and paying attention to the first. It slipped out and landed with the body flopped over the head and fluid all around. I straightened it out and it came to life. I don’t know if it would have before the ewe discovered she had a second.

That’s the day so far. We have 54 lambs and I think I counted 19 ewes to go.