Posts tagged “ram lamb”

275

Posted on 2 October 2017

A couple of weeks ago, one of my ewes was uncharacteristically friendly with Bravo, and I wondered if she was in season and looking for satisfaction from him. I showed the video to Bill Fosher, and he thought it was pretty weird behavior, but suggested that if the behavior repeated when the ewe ovulated again 17 days later, we’d have an answer.

Well, today was day 17, and #139 was back at it, with Bravo looking rather uncomfortable with the attention.

To further complicate matters, we have a developing love triangle.

The brown fellow who’s trying to get the attention of the ewe is a ram lamb born at the beginning of March. I wrote earlier about the challenges of castrating young male lambs — they’re very good at pulling their testes up into their abdominal cavity when you start messing with them, so it’s quite easy to do an incomplete job. I believe this guy, #708, successfully eluded the Elastrator with at least one of his seeds, turning him into a “crypto-ram.” A testis in the abdominal cavity will still produce testosterone, making him behave like an intact ram, but the temperature up there is too high for sperm to survive, so he’s sterile. He can’t impregnate my ewe, but he thinks he’d like to. I’m not sure if she’s ignoring him because he’s young or because she’s already got a boyfriend.

The drama should be over by tomorrow morning, but I’m afraid this will repeat a couple times a month until I breed the ewes for real in December.

Categories: Dogs, sheep

Tagged: 139, bravo, cross-species romance, crypto-ram, estrus, ewe, heat, ovulation, ram lamb, unwanted attention

129

Posted on 9 May 2017

The thirteenth lamb of the season was born this morning, a single ram lamb from ewe number 177.

He was up and active when I checked on the flock first thing this morning. I’m not sure of all the reasons why spring lambing has been so much easier than the previous round in the barn, but I’m grateful for the change.

After I check over a new lamb to make sure he’s healthy and thriving, there’s a bit of necessary nastiness — inserting an ear tag, docking the tail, and castrating the ram lambs. It seems like a lot to inflict on a newborn, but Bill Fosher argued convincingly that there’s some sort of lingering analgesia from being born, and waiting even a day or two on these procedures causes the lamb significantly more pain. So after I catch the lamb (not trivial with these cheviot-sired lambs… they’re fast almost from the instant they’re born), I plop him down in my lap and start with his ear tag.

Ear tags are the bulwark against chaos and confusion on the farm: left ear for males, a different color for each year (on a 7-year cycle, based on the ROYGBIV spectrum), and a unique number for each lamb. From a distance I can immediately tell age and sex, and if my record-keeping is good, the tag number gives me access to all the info about parents, offspring, health, and performance data. The device for inserting the tags is simple enough that even I can operate it one-handed while holding a squirming lamb with the other.

If I’m quick with the pliers, the lamb barely flinches. The only real trick is to avoid hitting one of the veins in the ear. The next step is docking the lamb’s tail to prevent problems with fly strike. My understanding is that shepherds used to accomplish this with hot knives or crushing devices; the current state of the art is the application of a tight rubber band, much easier on the shepherd, and hopefully the lamb as well.

And finally, the boys get castrated, again with a band applied from the Elastrator. The challenge is making sure the testes are in the scrotum, as lambs are surprisingly good at sucking them into their abdomen as soon as you start messing with them. Hard to blame them.

And here’s #713 a few seconds after I finished with him. I’m consistently relieved to see that the lambs don’t show much sign of being bothered, and usually go right back to nursing.

Categories: Hollow Oak Farm, lambing, sheep

Tagged: 177, 713, castration, cheviot, ear tag, Elastrator, ewe, Hollow Oak Farm, lamb, pasture, ram lamb, Romney, tail docking

119

Posted on 29 April 2017

Lefty’s mother didn’t seem to be eating much, and I was worried that the benefits of shelter in the barn were outweighed by the isolation. Sheep don’t do well separated from their flock, and it didn’t seem that mother and lamb constituted enough of a flock to keep mom sane, so I decided to move them out to the nearby pasture with the expectant ewes. With Jenny Hughes’s help, the move was easy — I carried the lamb just out of his mother’s reach, and Jenny gave extra encouragement with a bucket of grain. The fact the we were moving uphill (sheep hate going down hill) and toward the flock she had been with helped as well. The two seemed to be gracefully settling in to pasture life, ewe and lamb keeping close track of one another. Hopefully we don’t get any long days of soaking rain in the near future.

Lefty still looks a bit the gory mess,

but he’s nursing well and starting to fatten up a bit.

Categories: Hollow Oak Farm, lambing, sheep

Tagged: #106, #709, Bravo's third victim, ewe, Hollow Oak Farm, lamb, Lefty, pasture, ram lamb, Romney

48

Posted on 17 February 2017

My biggest challenge so far with my first lambing season is knowing what’s normal, and conversely, what’s not, and when to intervene. The trouble is that the process of mammalian birth looks like a terribly evolutionary joke, even when things are going perfectly. A lamb is going to come out of there?? Yeah, right…

Except for the Caesarian on #132, things have gone very smoothly. Births have tended to happen swiftly, when I’m not looking — suddenly there’s a lamb on the barn floor! — and I was starting to wonder if I’d get to witness the actual moment that one of the lambs was born. So this morning, when I found #158 in fairly advanced labor, I thought that I could hang out a bit and see the lamb come into the world.

I wasn’t entirely clear how long it would take, but after the lamb’s head had been sticking out for more than 20 minutes with no progress, and the little tongue was starting to turn blue, things didn’t seem right. I called Denise, who confirmed the not-rightness and coached me through getting the lamb unstuck. I now know that the trick is to pull down on the feet, which frees the shoulders and clears the traffic jamb. As the lamb emerged, I saw that the umbilical cord was tightly wrapped around his torso, so I did a little more untangling and pulled him all the way out.

With a normal birth (I declaim, from my vast experience…) the lamb emerges crying and trying to stand, and the ewe responds by cleaning off the amniotic sac and birth fluids, and encouraging it to suckle. This time, mother and offspring were both a bit stunned, ewe from exhaustion and lamb from anoxia, I assume, so the usual dance was not getting started. The ewe wasn’t acknowledging the lamb, and he was unable to cry or stand to get her attention. I moved them into a jug, dried off the lamb, milked the ewe, and tube fed the lamb. After the ewe drank some molasses water, she started to seem herself, but the little ram lamb still hasn’t figured out how to get milk from his mom. I’ve been milking and tube-feeding and hoping he starts to get it together. So trust, but verify.

Categories: barn, lambing, sheep

Tagged: assisted birth, barn, ewe, Hollow Oak Farm, lambing, ram lamb, sheep, tube feeding

43

Posted on 12 February 2017

Unaccountably, the little ram lamb was still alive this afternoon. At my 3pm barn check, I found him out of the jug (I think I’d left the panel a bit ajar), walking around the barn bleating and trying to find someone to feed him. I’m assuming that he managed to get some milk from his mother, as he was much stronger this afternoon than he was yesterday. He’s now displaying many of the nursing reflexes, but hasn’t quite perfected his game.

His mother is still completely uninterested in caring for him, though she is not actively pushing him away. I’m hoping he can be assertive enough to get some nutrition even without her cooperation. In the meantime, I’m supplementing him with the bottle to keep his strength up.

He’s also been trying to push his way into the neighboring jug with the ewe lamb that was born yesterday. I tested him with that ewe, in the unlikely case that she’d accept him along with her own lamb, but she immediately started head-butting him.

Categories: barn, Hollow Oak Farm, lambing, sheep

Tagged: Bottle lamb, ewe, Hollow Oak Farm, lambing jug, orphan, ram lamb, sheep

34

Posted on 3 February 2017

My first lamb arrived this morning with such a minimum of fuss that I didn’t notice the birth until I heard his high-pitched bleating. Cass was moving sheep away from the feeder so I could put out corn without getting mauled, and then suddenly we had a very different project. I had Cass push the rest of the sheep out of the way so I could take a look at the newborn critter and figure out what I needed to do.

I think this image shows the lamb less than a minute after his birth, still covered in amniotic sac. The mother ewe seemed to be paying lots of attention to him, the first and most critical determinant of a successful start in life. However, a couple of the other ewes were showing inappropriate interest in the new lamb (pregnant sheep are apparently prone to stealing others’ lambs, resulting in chaos worthy of G.B. Shaw when their own lambs are born), so I hustled ewe and lamb into their own enclosure, and mom took over from there.

I escorted Cass out of the barn while I was rearranging sheep, as I wasn’t sure how she would react to a lamb or how a new mother would react to her. She stayed right outside the barn, howling in indignation that she wasn’t in on the excitement. After things settled down a bit, I let her take a look.

The ewe almost immediately started stamping her foot and making moves like she was going to head-butt the enclosure, so Cass got only a brief look at first. By evening, I was able to use Cass to hold the other sheep off the feeder without such a strong reaction from mom.

I was really pleased to see how active this first lamb has been today. It seems that he will be able to vigorously advocate for himself, even expressing interest in his mother’s stash of corn.

And finally, since the first-born is always over-documented, a couple of video snippets of the lamb getting cleaned and then finding milk for the first time.