Posts tagged “dead lamb”

213

Posted on 1 August 2017

I wasn’t particularly worried when Lefty hung back while the rams and his mother moved to a new paddock. He’s been a little lethargic lately, and hasn’t seemed particularly connected to the rest of the group since his mother stopped nursing him, so I typically move him over to the new grass myself. When I went over to him and saw all the flies, though, I realized that his death wasn’t an exaggeration this time.

I’m not sure what finally did him in, but his circumstances were dire from the beginning, and I’m mostly surprised that he made it this far. I hope his passing was peaceful, but in retrospect, I wonder if it was really a kindness to have kept him going so long.

Categories: Cass, Lefty

Tagged: Cass, dead lamb, flies, lamb, Lefty, pasture

134

Posted on 14 May 2017

A couple of days ago I said something about the magic of pasture lambing. Today I remembered that it’s a really bad idea to tempt fate. We were supposed to get a fair amount of rain over night, and I did my best to prepare for that; it never occurred to me that we would get a mid-May snowstorm.

Two lambs didn’t make it through the night, and I found their distraught mother with their bodies in the morning.

The snow also brought a long day of lamb triage; more stories in the coming days.

Categories: Hollow Oak Farm, lambing, pasture, sheep

Tagged: cold, dead lamb, freak storm, Hollow Oak Farm, hypothermia, lambing, lambs, May, pasture, sheep, snow, triage

85

Posted on 26 March 2017

The day didn’t start well. Bravo was acting a little funny — less committed to his breakfast than usual — and as I was walking up to check on the sheep, he ran past me and started digging in the snow. He explained the funniness a moment later when he pulled out a lamb’s leg.

I immediately suspected that I had gotten it wrong with #127, and sure enough, she had just given birth.

I think I missed the birth by an hour or less, as she delivered the placenta while I was in the pasture.

Later in the afternoon, I found more of the lamb, and as before, Bravo challenged me for it.

The lamb’s size confirmed that he was born at full term, so I assume that he was born live and Bravo did him in.

It’s profoundly frustrating to have lost a second lamb this way, so I’ve spent much of the day trying to understand where I went wrong. Ewe #127 had been in the barn with the other winter lambers since I thought she had come to the farm bred and was simply running a little behind the others. When my veterinarian came to the farm to do ultrasound pregnancy checks, she was the first ewe he tested; his conclusion was that she was pregnant, but only a couple months along, probably due in mid May. Based on this information, I moved her back out to the field with the rest of the ewes who were due to lamb in the spring.

Clearly this was a bad decision on my part, driven by bad information from the vet, and abetted by my desire to conserve my dwindling supply of dry hay for the barn sheep and to relieve some of the space constraints in the barn. The core problem is that I didn’t have a reliable due date for #127; this problem should go away if I’m even remotely observant during breeding season this fall. The more troubling conclusion is that I should probably trust my vet a little less. Like every new farmer, I’m a bit in over my head, so having bedrock facts that I can trust, i.e. the declarations of my veterinarian, is very comforting when everything else feels somewhat nebulous. In this case, I had a fleeting thought a couple of days ago that #127’s vulva was looking pretty swollen (a sign of impending labor), but I dismissed it since I knew she wasn’t due until May. I guess it comes down to Bill Fosher’s advice that animal observation is a shepherd’s most important job, and the things I see with my own eyes have to trump all other facts.

Categories: barn, Dogs, Hollow Oak Farm, lambing, sheep

Tagged: bravo, dead lamb, ewe, lamb, livestock guardian dog, maremma, mistake, pasture birth

55

Posted on 24 February 2017

Three days ago I made a passing reference to the brown ewe pulling a fast one on me, and then went on to conclude that she had not yet lambed. Veering toward solipsism, I decided later that it might be worth checking if the ewe was in fact still pregnant. Her udder was gone; she was clearly no longer pregnant, so where was her lamb? And so began a macabre Holmesian inquiry.

The week started with my finding Bravo snacking on the trailing half of a black lamb. I assumed that the lamb had been born the previous night and Bravo had done it in. I was a little unsettled by the fact that none of the ostensibly pregnant ewes in the pasture looked like they had recently given birth, or seemed distraught about having just lost their lamb. I convinced myself that their equanimity was attributable to lack of maternal instinct in first-time mothers, but this didn’t explain the absence of blood. Things got more complicated on Wednesday when Bruce crutched the flock: we got a good look at all the potential sources of the mystery lamb, and none looked anything like a ewe who had recently given birth, and in fact most showed no visible signs of pregnancy. The only possible source of the lamb, one of the Dorset-Border Leicester crosses, was very unlikely to have produced a black lamb for genetic reasons. I was almost ready to resort to supernatural explanations at this point.

When I realized that the brown ewe was no longer carrying her lamb, I jumped to the conclusion that Bravo was a lamb-killer twice over. It seemed clear that my urgency on that late-January day was well-taken but tardy — the brown ewe had lambed outside before we got her into the barn, and Bravo had gotten to the lamb before I found it.

When I shared all these threads of the story with Bill, he came up with a coherent and satisfying explanation that tied everything together. He suggested that Monday’s lamb breakfast was not a newly born lamb from the previous night, but rather the lamb delivered by the brown ewe in January. Bravo had either deliberately cached part of that lamb or lost it in a subsequent snow drift, and re-found it Monday morning. The cold conditions we’ve had since late January explain the fact that the lamb seemed recently killed, and Bill’s explanation fit with the fact that we couldn’t find a plausible mother of a Sunday-born lamb.

After convincing myself that I had lost 2 lambs to my guardian dog, I was almost happy to learn that it was probably just one. And I was enormously relieved that my instincts were somewhat vindicated, both my belief that the brown ewe was imminently lambing in late January, and that none of the ewes currently on pasture were close. A bad outcome from circumstances I was aware of feels less damning than getting blindsided.

Wednesday’s crutching confirmed that two of the ewes are somewhat close to lambing, and we plan to move them into the barn on Sunday. Today, to make some room, I led the brown ewe back to the big group on pasture, and she was received like a celebrity. Not every ewe gets to star in her own true crime drama…

Categories: barn, Hollow Oak Farm, lambing, sheep

Tagged: barn, bravo, brown ewe, dead lamb, ewe, Hollow Oak Farm, livestock guardian dog, mortality, pasture, sheep, true crime

Travels with Musti

Dogs, nature, photography, and the meaning of life, with apologies to J.S.

Posts tagged “dead lamb”

213

Posted on 1 August 2017

134

Posted on 14 May 2017

85

Posted on 26 March 2017

55

Posted on 24 February 2017