Chinese New Year Ram Lamb

This year Chinese New Year fell on Feb 19th and marked the beginning of the Year of the Ram.  Without any planning on our part we happened to have a ewe due to lamb on the 19th so when the alarm went off, I went out to check on her.  Sticking precisely to her due date, she had just delivered her lamb – he was still soaking wet and had not yet been cleaned.  Unfortunately this represented a hazard as it was 17F (-8C) at the time and I was concerned about hypothermia.  I didn’t want to deprive the ewe and her lamb of bonding time by taking over the cleaning but nor did I want him to freeze to death so I grabbed a towel and rubbed him vigorously to dry him as quickly as possible.  I then turned him back over to her so that he could nurse.

Lambs are born instinctively knowing to search for the teat but they don’t always know exactly where to find it.  He started nuzzling around her but every time he got close to the udder, she moved away.  This was this ewes “first freshening” and she was alarmed by the little mouth seeking her teats; she wanted nothing to do with that.  She hadn’t rejected the lamb himself – she was murmuring to him in that special voice ewes use only for their lambs, and she was interested in sniffing him – but she clearly did not understand that nursing is part of the job description.

I let them try to figure it out for an hour or so.  I prefer that animals work things out for themselves and believe that in the long run they do better with less human intervention.  But, after an hour she still wouldn’t allow him to nurse.  He was shivering and I worried about him weakening.  So, I cornered the ewe, holding her still with arms, legs and body, to give the lamb a chance.  Within a short time he had found it and I was happy to hear him slurping as he drank, his little tail wiggling his joy.

I hoped that, having experienced nursing once, the ewe would assume all of her motherly duties but it was not to be.  Over the course of the day I checked on them frequently but had to hold her down each time he needed to nurse.  The only progress we made was that instead of having to pin her in a corner with my whole body, she had relaxed enough to stand still with just one arm holding her in a headlock.  By late afternoon I was concerned that she would never “get it” and that I would wind up having to bottle feed him.  I was not enthused by the prospect, as I trudged down to hold the ewe for another feeding.  So it was with both relief and joy that I got there to find him nursing, his little tail waggling, the ewe nuzzling and talking to him.

This is the first time I’ve had a ewe not instinctively know how to care for her lamb – but now that she has fully accepted her role, she is taking good care of him.  And, after a preponderance of ewe lambs this year, we are thrilled to welcome our own little Chinese New Year Ram.

Sheep Shearing

Yesterday was another first for our little farm – shearing the sheep.  I tried to shear the cat once a few years ago.  I bought heavy duty animal clippers for the job but his fur is so thick they kept getting hot and I’d have to take a break while they cooled.  The cat tolerated it remarkably well but his patience has limits, and after an afternoon of on and off shearing, we finished with a cat that was still only partly shorn.  So I wasn’t even slightly tempted to try to do the sheep myself.

However finding a shearer these days isn’t easy either, but after putting out a plea on Facebook, I was finally able to find someone willing to do it.  He lives 3 hours away – and it cost me to have him drive down for the job – but I was very impressed with the young man who showed up on time yesterday.  His knowledge of sheep and goats in general, as well as his skills as a shearer, were unexpected.

I had the sheep corralled into a small pen before he got here:

The first “victim” was our ram:

An impressively large bag of fleece collected, even as he continued shearing.  This is one of the ewes almost done (note bag of fleece behind her):

 

It is a relief to have this done – both for me and for the sheep.  They spent the day out grazing after he left – something they haven’t been doing since daytime temperatures started to rise.  Summer temperatures here are frequently in the triple digits so shearing was not optional and I’m glad it is one more farm task I can scratch off the to-do list.

Lambs to the Slaughter…

A bird – even a turkey – is manageable for one person to raise and process in one place.  Sheep are another matter.  They weigh over 100lb each and are strong, fast, and very agile.  We don’t have the equipment to end their life humanely, or to process the meat into useable portions.  So, although we have raised them since they were lambs – and attempted to provide them an environment where they are safe, happy and well-fed – we had no choice but to send them to the slaughter house for the last hours of their lives.

If you have read the story of their arrival to our small farm, you will remember that we have no truck or livestock trailer, with which to transport them.  Fortunately we came up with a plan that worked even better than the PT Cruiser.  A local sheep rancher had a couple of ewe lambs for sale, so we talked her into delivering them, picking up our now year-old wethers (castrated males), and dropping them off at the processor on her way home.

She arrived with two bawling lambs who had only been taken off their mothers a few hours before.  Meanwhile, we had to manage our still half-wild sheep into a make-shift pen, in order to load them into her trailer.  The plan was simple;  we would herd all of the sheep into the trailer, sort the wethers from the back to the front of the partitioned off trailer, then release the remaining sheep back into their pen.  That’s mostly how it worked.

 

The big surprise came while sorting.  We were sold 2 ewes and 4 wethers back in May.  One of the wethers was eaten by coyotes in June.  We added a ram in July and decided to keep the 2 ewes in order to have a self-sustaining source of meat.  That left us with 3 wethers to send to the processor.  We sorted the first 2 quite easily into the front of the trailer, leaving the ram and remaining 3 lambs who could pass as identical triplets.  Not knowing which was the third wether, we had to examine the nether regions of all and discovered they were even more identical than we knew – they were all ewes!  Apparently the guy who sold them to us had miscounted, and we had never been able to get close enough before this to find out for ourselves that we had an extra ewe!

The ram leaps back out from trailer.

Good news indeed!  Only 2 wethers to go to the processor, less freezer space required, and — we hope — more lambs in the spring!

In the meantime, we have two new – and still very little – lambs to raise:

Coyote Attack!

Two days after our fencing was complete, and while we were still enjoying the new thrill of watching our sheep out grazing the pasture, we all left for the evening, and returned late that night.  Next morning HWA commented that he could only see 5 lambs.  This isn’t unusual – if one gets behind the others it is difficult to pick it out from the crowd, so I wasn’t alarmed, certain that all of them must be there.  After all, one of them wouldn’t wander away from the flock.

However, after finishing my coffee, when glances out the window continued to reveal only 5, I decided to take the dogs and walk the pasture, to relieve my mind that we didn’t have an injured lamb out there somewhere.  Shortly after starting out, I noticed one of the dogs very intent on a spot in the middle of the pasture so I joined her, and the sight was not pretty.  All that was left of the missing lamb was 3 legs and a pelt picked so clean it looked as though it had been professionally cleaned.  Even the flies weren’t showing a lot of interest.

Sickened by the loss, HWA and I walked the fence to try to figure out how they – the work couldn’t be anything other than a pack of coyotes – had gained entry, and it didn’t take long to find it.  While abutting our new fence to the back of the lagoon fence, the contractors had left a gap approximately 10” wide.  Our dogs had no problem walking through it, and as they are about coyote-sized, we didn’t have to look much further.  HWA found a piece of plywood in the shop that fit the gap perfectly, wired it in, and then we held our breaths for a few weeks, hoping that had solved our problem.  If it hadn’t – or if they found a different entry point – we knew they would be back.  After all, an easy source of food doesn’t come by every day.

Fortunately, our losses ended there and, months later, we still have the remaining 5 lambs.  Mid-summer we added a ram.  The original plan had been to butcher all 6 lambs before winter but we decided it is more cost effective to keep the 2 ewes and add a ram so we can make our own lambs next year, than to buy new stock every spring.  That leaves only the 3 wethers to butcher which will be easier on our limited freezer space anyway.