At the border

At the border between sleep and waking, my mind plays with itself, frets, plan,s and worries. Some of the worries are ludicrous. Did I finish my homework for algebra? (Who knows – it was all irrelevant 50 years ago.) Will Simon like his birthday present? (Probably not as much as I enjoyed making it, but that’s okay.) Will my Muslim friends be safe? (I don’t know – all I can do is write letters and make phone calls to congressmen.) Do we have new lambs in the barn? Do we have new lambs that need help? Finally something I can actually affect.  But not by worrying. 

Most of the ewes are wandering around the pasture in the light of a half moon. I hear the lambs before I reach the barn. Inside I find two lambs being mothered by two moms. One lamb is up and trying to nurse, the other lies unlicked against a cold block wall. Our first two lambs! A joy and a possible problem.

I grab the step stool off the wall and unhook a heat lamp from the nail near the ceiling. I plug in the lamp over a jug and then go to get the lambs. The black ewe with the lamb who is nursing has amniotic fluid running down her udder.  The white ewe with the quiescent lamb shows no physical signs of having given birth. She has stolen a lamb. I pick up the quiet lamb, clutch it to my chest and then pick up the active lamb. Both ewes weave back and forth around me trying to stay close to their lamb. I open the door to the jug and lay the lambs under the heat lamp. Then I step back holding myself between the white ewe and the lambs, giving the real mother, number 27 orange, a chance to blunder into the pen. Then I shut the panel and tie the pen closed. Both lambs baaa.

Number 27 orange mutters, sniffs the lambs, and begins licking the quiet one. Satisfied, I retrieve a knife, several towels and Iodine from the barn cabinet. First I pick up the quiet lamb, hold her in my lap and dry her white curls then I cut her umbilical cord to about an inch and dip it in iodine. I place her in front of Orange 27 and dry off and dip the second lamb, a little boy who struggles to get out of my lap and return to his nursing.  The little girl still isn’t standing. I touch her nose. Cold. She probably hasn’t nursed yet. I express some of 27 orange’s milk into a cup and dribble it into the lamb’s mouth. She doesn’t even swallow. 

I dash back to the house, grab 60 cc gavage syringe, a short piece of plastic tubing and a thermometer. Back in the barn I fill the syringe with fresh milk expressed from 27 orange, slip the plastic tube into the lambs mouth, down its throat and then slowly squirt life giving warm milk into the lambs stomach. I slip the thermometer into the lamb’s rectum. The little red line stops at 97°. Too cold. A lamb should be between 102 and 104°.

I hurry back to the house for a bucket of hot water and meet Dave on the way out to find me. He gets the water, I return to the barn to feed and water 27 orange. Then I set up a new jug for the next family of new lambs.

Dave returns with hot water. He submerges the cold lamb up to her neck and we wait until she struggles to get out of the bucket, a good sign that her body temperature is up to normal - 102°. We dry her off with towels and a hair dryer. Then we feed her another two ounces of milk. She’s standing, her belly feels full, and no one else seems to be lambing. We return to the house and bed.

At the border between wake and sleep, my mind wrestles with itself. Sheep okay? Just checked. Grandchildren okay? Talked to them this evening.  Politics? Oh, that’s a hard one. But in the morning, after my first cup of Earl Grey tea, I’ll make some phone calls and share my worries –

White House switchboard 202- 456-1111

Congressional switchboard 202-224-3121

The switchboards have been overwhelmed with calls. If you can’t get through, try an email. Go to your Representative or Senators web page. It should give you an email address.

Our grandsons, five year old Kieran and three year old Simon helped me feed the lambs.  Two little boys against eight hungry lambs delighted everyone.

After feeding the lambs, we looked for new babies. It had been nine weeks since we had expected our first lamb; there was one ewe left. Dave an I knew that Empress was pregnant. Her udder was plumping up and her abdomen eventually spread outward into that distinctive pregnant sheep shape. She was an experienced mom, but we checked  every three hours, hoping to finally see her with a new lamb at her side. The boys found Empress in the barn lying in an open jug, straining. It was finally time.

I settled the boys in the corners of the pen behind her. Then I leaned against Empress and looked at her back end. "These are his feet." I touched each hoof as I spoke. "And this is his nose." The boys were probably completely confused, the hooves and nose were almost the same color - off white- and covered with a clear shiny membrane.

"I'm going to pull on his foot to help him come out." The boys nodded. Empress groaned.
"You're hurting her," Kieran said. Empress groaned again. "You're hurting her," Simon said.

"We have to get the baby out," I explained. "It's a big baby, so we have to help. It will hurt for a little while and then she'll feel better." I pulled down and out on one hoof.  I grabbed the second hoof and pulled. This was tighter. I eased the legs sideways, pulled. I slid my fingers behind the lamb's head, hoping to ease it out. Empress groaned again.

Then I felt the give as the lamb's head passed through the cervix. Yes! It was a big, big lamb. I dragged it out into the air and swiped my hand across it's mouth and head, clearing the membrane from its nose and mouth so it could breathe. The lamb didn't move. Empress didn't turn to look for him.

This lamb has to  live, I thought to myself. I can't have Kieran and Simon watch me deliver a dead lamb.

I shook the little body. No breaths.

I dropped it gently to the floor. No breaths.  But he did lift his head slightly. I set the lamb down and ran to the cabinet for towels. Then I began rubbing the lambs abdomen and chest, hard. After every couple of rubs I'd pause, watching for breaths.

A flutter. Then another. Yes! As the lamb began to breathe easily on its own, I handed the towels to the boys. "Rub him dry," I said. "He's a nice big, healthy lamb."

I checked Empress for another lamb but she was done. She struggled to her feet and turned to lick her baby. I clipped his umbilical cord, dipped it in iodine and then stripped the milk from Empresses teats, explaining to the boys as I worked.  Then Kieran filled a bucket of water for her. Simon dropped some hay into her pen. I tied the pen shut.

The boys both looked over the pen again before we left the barn. Empress' lamb was standing, nursing. Outside, the bottle lambs mobbed us, hoping for one more drink of milk.

20 orange

Yesterday, 20 orange lambed. It was almost anticlimactic; it had been  over three weeks, since I'd spent 36 hours worrying that she would die  if I didn't figure out what was wrong with her.

This time it was obvious that she was in labor, not just tired of being pregnant. She groaned and grunted. Her head went up during each contraction. When I did a pelvic exam, I didn't feel baby lamb parts, just the thin, filmy tissues that float around a lamb in the uterus. She wasn't quite ready to lamb yet.

I fed hay to the ewes and milk to the bottle lambs. I poured corn into buckets for each ewe in a jug and refreshed their water. Then I rechecked 20 orange's status. I could feel feet at the tips of my fingers.

I moved the dirty straw out of jugs we had just emptied of sheep. I rebedded those jugs, ready for the next moms to lamb. I hung a heat lamp over the jug I would use for 20 orange. I rechecked her pelvis.  Way back as far as my hand could reach into her uterus I could feel two hooves and a head. They weren't positioned correctly and I couldn't reach far enough to determine if they were all part of one lamb. When I pulled on the hoof, it pulled back. No matter how hard I pulled and how hard I held on, the little hoof slipped from my fingers

20 orange had now been in labor for at least two hours. I start to worry after about half an hour for experienced mothers. Two hours was way past my worry date. When Dave came out to see how we were doing, I turned the obstetrician's job over to him.

Slowly, steadily, Dave pulled on the lamb's two front legs. The head moved with them. "I think they all belong to the same lamb," he said. "Yes."

I watched from 20 orange's head as he pulled the lamb from her vulva. He handed the baby to me and I laid her in front of her mom. Then I grabbed a towel and cleaned the amniotic sack, mucus and amniotic fluid off the baby's face so that her first breath would be air.

20 orange began to lick her lamb. She licked whatever part was closest to her tongue. I moved the lamb so that she would be working on it's face as I rubbed it's abdomen to encourage those first shuddery breaths.

"This next one is tangled," Dave said. He worked one handed, eyes closed in concentration.When he pulled her out of her mother's uterus, she looked perfect, but her body was limp.  She didn't have a heart beat and I couldn't make her breathe, even by swinging her over my head.

"There's something wrong with this lamb" Dave said as he eased lamb number three out into the cold air. It was definitely dead. Small and dark brown, it hardly looked like a lamb. Dave sat back on his heels, head down.

"Well," I said, speaking through my sorrow, "at least we have one live lamb. That's really more than I was expecting after giving her the dexamethasone to induce labor all those weeks ago."

Dave slid his hand back inside of 20 orange one last time and pulled out a small brownish lamb covered with muddy brown mucus.  This lamb wasn't limp. It's body twitched. She swung her head up and sneezed. When I rubbed, she shuddered and began to breathe. In minutes she was standing, looking for her mom's udder.

Even though we use it to induce labor, the bottle of dexamethasone warns not to give it to pregnant animals. Three weeks ago when I realized that 20 orange was not going to lamb any time soon,  I began to worry what the effect of that drug would be. We'll never know why out of four lambs, only two were live births. We'll never know why one of the dead lambs seemed grossly malformed and why one looked perfect and yet they were both dead. We'll never know how the little brown lamb survived in an amniotic environment that looked more like mud than anything that belongs in a living animal.

The one thing we do know is that after thirty years of lambing and hundreds of births, we still don't know what to expect when we go out to the barn to help a ewe give birth to a lamb.

The trouble with teasers

A teaser is a ram with a vasectomy. We turn the teaser in with the ewes 17 days before we turn the fertile ram in. The teaser will, being a ram, begin mounting ewes and the ewes will begin cycling into estrus. When we take the teaser out of the pasture and put the ram in, the ewes will get pregnant rapidly.

Teasers are just like rams except for the fertility part. They are aggressive toward people. You never walk into a pasture with a ram in it without keeping an eye on the ram. They are also aggressive toward other rams. One minute they can be sharing their morning corn and the next minute they might be trying to kill each other. And finally, teasers and rams will frequently go over or through a fence to get to a flock of ewes in estrus. We spend a lot of time repairing fences that the rams have torn down.

The final trouble with teasers is that you don't realize how important they are until it's too late. Our teaser died several years ago. We didn't replace him and didn't think anything of it. Our ewes always lambed right on time.

This year, we planned lambing early so that we could go hear our daughter Laurel sing with the St. Louis Symphony on February 28. When the week of January 15th came and went without any lambs, I redid my calculations. I'd been a week off. Our first lambs weren't due until the 22nd. By February 14, only three old ewes had lambed. Finally, on February 15, 21 days after we should have had the first rush of lambs, three more ewes lambed. This morning, we had thirteen lambs in the barn. By 2 P.M., we had 16. Lambing has actually begun.

We've learned our lesson and already selected a lamb to be our next teaser. Not having a teaser will not be one of our troubles in the future. It remains to be seen whether we finish lambing before the 28th. Twenty ewes need to lamb in the next ten days. It's possible, but not something over which we have any control. Maybe that's the real trouble with teasers, they are just one more thing over which a shepherd has very little control.

Training

The first week of lambing this year reminds me a lot of our first ever week of lambing thirty-one years ago. Then we had no idea what behavior to expect of our sheep. We had watched them grazing and eating through the fall and winter, but we hadn't watched them sleeping. The first time I went out to the tiny shed we were using for lambing, and saw one of our ewes lying down and grunting, I assumed she was lambing. Dave was at work for the week, so I called an interested friend, and we spent the night sitting in a cold shed watching four sheep chew their cud, sleep, and grunt.

A week later, the first ewe lambed.

Over the years, Dave and I trained ourselves to recognize imminent lambing and the most common lambing problems - hypocalcemia and pregnancy toxemia. We knew to look for ewes who lagged behind the flock,for ewes who appeared sunken just in front of their pelvis, for ewes who seemed jittery, for ewes whose breath smelled like ketones. And we learned the techniques we could try to help the ewe lamb successfully.

A week ago, we began checking the ewes every three hours. That first night, Orange 20 wouldn't get up when I went into the barn. All the other ewes surged to their feet when I approached them; orange 20 just lay there. She came out when Dave fed them corn and hay, moving a little uncomfortably, but still moving, but at night, I really struggled to get her to her feet.  By Thursday night, I was really worried. A simple urine test would tell me if she had pregnancy toxemia
I found the keto sticks in the medical cupboard in the barn and slid one out of the tube. If I could catch a urine sample, I could test it for ketones. I pushed Orange 20 to her feet, She staggered a few steps forward and then paused, and peed. I pushed the slip of plastic under the urine stream, counted fifteen seconds and checked the chart on the bottle. The little pink square changed from a pale pink to a muddy dark pink. Positive.

Rats! Pregnancy toxemia happens when advanced pregnancy with multiple lambs makes a sheep's stomach too small to eat enough calories. The ewe can't get enough calories from her feed, so begins to metabolize her own fat for energy. That releases ketones into the blood. The ketones can cause brain damage, fetal death, lethargy and lung damage. Ewes often die from pregnancy toxemia. It is not a disease to ignore.

Dave and I gave her a shot to chemically induce labor and then gavaged her with a liter of water and propylene glycol for energy so that she would no longer have to metabolize fat. We would continue gavaging her twice a day until she lambed in 36 to 48 hours.

 Twenty-four hours went by. Dave left for a workshop in the Cities. Every three hours, day and night, I checked the sheep. I also began doing pelvic exams every time I checked Orange 20. At 1:30 A.M., thirty-six hours after we induced her, I began to worry. I checked our lambing books again. No new information suddenly appeared. I still expected Orange 20 to lamb soon.  I checked her half a dozen times in the next three hours; why was nothing happening? At one point I even considered doing a ceasarean section on this  poor defenseless ewe, even though I didn't actually know how to do one - where to cut, how deep to cut, how to hold down the ewe when I did cut. My mind was grasping at improbable straws.

And then on my sixth or seventh trip over night, Orange 20 stood up.  The next time I returned to the barn, she stood. And the next time. She wasn't afraid of me, she didn't run away, she just stood there. I grabbed a keto stick and checked her urine. Normal. No ketosis.

No ketosis, no delivery, but either Orange 20 was feeling better or we had trained her to stand up when we approached her.

After dawn

My favorite time to check for new lambs is first thing in the morning. The sun is just rising, the air is clear, the ewes and their lambs sleep peacefully in the straw. Even during the bad times, walking from the house to the barn at dawn renews me, hope seeps into my bones.

Friday morning, I stepped in the barn door and saw Mouse, one of our Jacob ewes, with a grapefruit sized mass protruding from her vulva where a golden bag of amniotic fluid should have been. Rats! A prolapse.

I grabbed her ankle and pulled her down. For such a little ewe (barely 60 pounds) she was incredibly strong. I lay on her body and tried to examine the prolapse. I couldn't even see it from where I lay, much less manipulate it. I would have to wake Dave. After a month of waking for an hour or two at 3 a.m. every night, his body had shifted to a schedule, waking around ten in the morning. Dave struggled to open his eyes when I kissed him awake, but put his feet on the floor and began to dress.

We caught Mouse and Dave held her down, a job he could almost do in his sleep. I washed my hands and pushed the prolapse back into place. The inside of a ewe's vagina and uterus is soft and warm. Folds of firm tissue make up the vagina. The inside of a uterus feels more like my fingers are searching through silken veils. My hand was definitely inside Mouse's vagina. I ran my fingers across the surface, feeling for a lamb part - leg or head, but instead found a tiny button, her unopened cervix. No wonder she had a prolapse. Her cervix wasn't effaced, or thinned, and the opening through her cervix was less than a fingertip in diameter. No way a lamb could make its way through that opening.

I pushed my finger tip into the center of her cervix, steadily pressing, hoping to enlarge the opening. Half an hour later, I had two fingers through the vaginal side of the cervical opening, but I could feel the opening on the uterine side still tightly closed. Dave and I traded places. My fingers ached.

Dave worked for another half hour. "I think I have a fingertip through the second opening," he said. "but I'm not making any progress." I took over. Finally I had two fingertips through the cervical opening, but as hard as I tried to spread my fingertips, I couldn't seem to make any more progress.

I laid my head on Mouse's thigh. "Okay, let's make a decision here. We don't know exactly how long she's been in labor, but we've been working for over an hour. If she has had unproductive labor, we could be getting to the end of the lambs' tolerance. I think we need to make a decision on whether or not to do a caesarean." I squeezed one of her nipples. A stream of milk squirted out. "She's close enough to have milk. If we call Dr Weckwerth now, we might get a live baby. If we wait, we might lose everything."

The ewe we lost to a caesarean last weekend cost us $500 in vet fees, as much as we would earn from selling five lambs. She had had two babies and they were both doing well and would each bring about $100. We had just bought $500 worth of feed with added calcium in an attempt to solve our problems. This had been an expensive lambing with fewer lambs than normal. We really couldn't afford to spend any more money on the sheep.

And yet, Mouse was a beautiful gray and white spotted ewe. Her fleece was soft and variegated, just the kind of fleece I had been breeding toward all these years. I couldn't bear to lose her. If we did nothing, we would certainly lose her. Calling Dr. Weckwerth gave her a chance. 

I slid across Mouse's body, my weight partially over her shoulders, and partially supported by my right arm. My left hand controlled her horns. Dave ran to the house to phone the doctor. 

Mouse and I lay there, and lay there, and lay there. Eventually, I began to worry that she was bloating, her abdomen filling with air. If that was happening, she might not be able to breathe. My weight might be making things worse. I grabbed a horn in each hand and we surged to our feet. Then Mouse and I fought our way across the barn to the hospital pen. I pinned her against a wall with my body and dragged the pen open. Then Mouse and I squeezed through. I released her horns and she surged forward, but she was trapped by 6 foot mesh walls. I straightened and relaxed. 

While Mouse and I waited for Dave and Dr Weckwerth, I fed the bottle lambs, fed the ewes in the jugs and the group pen, and let the rest of the ewes out into the barnyard. When I finished, I looked back at Mouse. She had a single black and white hoof protruding from her vulva!

I raced to the house. "She's lambing," I gasped. "Call Dr. Weckwerth and tell him not to come."

I dashed back to the barn, gathered towels and prepared for a delivery. Dave grabbed Mouse and wrestled her to the ground. I washed my hands and knelt behind her.  I felt around the single foot. It disappeared into the centimeter wide opening of her cervix, an opening just wide enough for a foot, still not open enough to deliver an entire lamb. 

"Call Dr. Weckwerth and tell him I was wrong, we still need him," I said to Dave.

"You call him," Dave said. "I've already called twice.  I'll feed the sheep." 

Dr. Weckwerth arrive an eternity (actually 15 or 20 minutes) later. We explained our thought processes. "We'd really like you to try to save her lambs," I said, "but also her if at all possible." Dave held Mouse down again. Dr. Weckwerth knelt behind the ewe's small body, splashed disinfectant water over her vulva and inserted his hand. He looked up at us and began to grin. Then he pulled a black and white spotted lamb from her womb.Her cervix was effaced and open. The lamb kicked. I grabbed a towel and began rubbing her speckled body. After a moment, she took a shuddery breath. I looked up as Dr Weckerth pulled a second lamb. He handed her to me across her mother's body and Dave's body. 

As I dried the lambs and Dave held Mouse down, Dr Weckwerth stitched her vulva almost closed to keep her uterus from prolapsing again. "Will we be able to breed her again?" Dave asked.

"I think this prolapse was due to the calcium deficiency, not to structural problems," Dr Weckwerth said. "I think she'll probably be fine next year."

We left the barn at 11 am. Mouse was on her feet, sniffing her lambs as they learned how to nurse. No dead moms, no dead babies. The sun was high in the sky. Hope grew in my heart.

Ease

Behind the black silhouettes of the trees, the rising sun stains the sky gold. As I approach the barn, I hear the low grumbling mutter of a ewe with a new baby. I step inside the door. Three  lambs circle their mother, tiny moons revolving around their own mother earth, tethered by her calls.

These lambs are up on their feet, well licked, healthy. I move them to a jug and their mother follows, calling to them the entire way. Clip, dip strip. I hang the water bucket in the pen and drop in a slice of hay. Then I inject each lamb with 0.25 cc's of selenium. Chores done for the moment, I open the big door to let in the day. A fresh breeze eases around the corner of the barn, lightly touching my cheeks.

I pause, take a deep breath. The weight on my shoulders eases.

With a little help

Most sheep lamb completely on their own. They go into the barn to get out of the weather, find a quiet corner and lamb.

Every once in awhile, yearlings, ewes in labor for the first time, have no idea of what is happening to their bodies and need a little help. That's why we close the sheep into the barn every night, so yearly ewes don't have their babies on the manure pile on a moonless night where a shepherd won't find them, or under a dripping corner in a rainstorm, or in the sweep of the winter wind as it rounds the barn from the northwest.

Most ewes lay down in the straw and birth their babies easily, one after another, every twenty or thirty minutes until her placenta follows the birth of the last lamb and the contractions stop.

But some moms need help. The first lamb may be very large and barely fit through the pelvic opening. Or one of the lambs presents in a more difficult alignment, not front hooves and head first. Or twins and triplets may be tangled, one lamb's head presenting with another lamb's front feet. After a long labor, the ewe may even tire out, unable to deliver her last lamb.

All of these ewes need a little help from their shepherd. When we realize that labor is not progessing as it should, we can ease extra large lambs through the pelvic opening by adding a gentle pull to mom's pushes. We can rearrange lamb mis-presentations, moving a head until it centers over a pair of front hooves, or searching about inside the mother's uterus with our fingers, to locate the front legs that are actually attached to the head ready to be pushed out the vaginal opening. Sometimes we wash our hand and arm and insert it as far as we can into the ewe's uterus looking for a last lamb, which we then pull out.

Even lambs occassionally need help. Our ewe Dolly has a low hanging udder, her nipples almost touch the ground. It took her lambs almost 24 hour to stop looking high on her udder for nipples. With a bit of our help, they didn't starve to death while they were learning. Abi, the newest black lamb, bonded with Abi, the apprentice, immediately after she was born. We bottle fed the lamb until she learned that she could get  milk immediately from her mother but would have to wait for three hours for Abi the person to come back to the barn. The smallest triplet born so far this year has been bottle fed since the -20 degree night she was born. She had trouble standing and was weak after she was born and struggled to stand and nurse. Without a little bit of help, she wouldn't have survived.

Dave checks the sheep at 3 a.m. We both do the 10 p.m. check and I wake up and go out to the barn for the seven a.m. check.  Friday evening when we realized that we had several ewes lambing, I sent Dave to bed because I had Abi to help me deliver lambs, dry new lambs, clip and dip their umbilical cords and strip their mother's nipples so that they could nurse easily. Two and a half hours later, Abi and I staggered into the house and dropped into bed, knowing that the ewes were okay, the lambs had either nursed or been fed with a bottle and that Dave would be alert in less than three hours to care for the babies in the pens and any new babies. With a little help from Abi, I got to bed before Dave woke up for the next lamb check.

Waiting for lambs - learning to dye

Abi, a high school senior, loves knitting and wool. She came to stay at the farm this week to learn about raising sheep. It should have been a perfect time-  one week into lambing, the barn should have been full of new babies. We should be cutting umbilical cords, checking for third lambs in mother's uterus', feeding lambs and their moms in their pens. We might even have had a bottle lamb to feed. We should be busy. Very busy.

This week, however, no one has lambed. We have no bottle lambs. In fact, no lambs have been born since February 7. All we have to do is check the sheep every three hours and that doesn't fill up much of a day. So Abby and I have been playing with wool. We skirted and washed a couple of fleeces on Sunday. On Monday, we dyed a fleece navy blue and began experimenting with space dyed yarns.

Most yarns are dyed before they are spun. Color variations are a part of the spinning process. But space dyed yarns have two or more color variations that are created by adding color after the yarn is spun. Sometimes the variations are simple but regular and produce a regular pattern in the knitted garment.

Sometimes the variations are complex and regular, but the knitted garment doesn't necessarily reflect that regularity. The regularity makes it easier to reproduce the pattern again and again on different skeins of yarn.

Sometimes the dye patterns are very complex. Abi introduced me to Koigu yarns on the Internet. They have absolutely wonderful color variations. We decided that reproducing those yarns would be fun. I got out my old space dyeing experiments for examples, but I'd never tried any space dyeing with such complex patterns.  We spent the entire day adding six or eight different colors to a skein of yarn. Then we steamed the yarn to set the color, let it cool enough that we could judge what we had created to learn what worked well and what didn't, and then began on the next skein. In spite of short breaks to check the sheep and eat, we only finished three skeins. Time flew.

 Space dyeing yarns is addictive. We wanted to do more. The knitting that Abby had seen from Koigu yarns had each stitch a different color. Those yarns come in dyelots of 22 skeins. That means that they only guarantee that 22 skeins will knit up in exactly the same collection of colors. They must have found some way to make their seemingly random color choices reproducible.

Dave helped us design a  machine to make our space dyeing more repeatable. We finished it last night. Today we'll try to create a repeatable pattern in lots of colors, while we wait for lambs.

Surprise!

                                           photo by Amber Walker

Saturday morning, I woke to my grandson Jasper's shouts.
"Grandma, there are two babies in the barn!"

I had just been out there, four hours earlier, and decided that no one looked ready to lamb. No one even looked as if they would lamb before Jasper and Amber had to go home on Sunday. Even thirty years of lambing isn't enough to allow me to recognize a ewe about to go into labor. You'd think I'd have learned something after all those years.

Of course, after the first ewe lambed, I expect new babies every time I go out to the barn. I look for ewes  with sunken areas in front of their hip bones. We have three old ewes who look like that, but I'm pretty sure one of them isn't even pregnant and none of them has lambed in the last six days. I look for ewes who are reluctant to get up when I open the barn door in the morning. Lots of them exhibit that behavior, but so do I when Dave turns on the light to dress in the morning, and I'm certainly not pregnant. I look for really big, obviously pregnant  sheep, but most of them are in that state.

That's why we check the sheep every three to four hours, because we can't predict when a ewe will go into labor. It seems, like Jasper, I'll just be surprised when I find new babies in the barn.

Eight lambs in the barn!

photo by Alice Ellison

It has been an exciting few days in the sheep barn. Our first set of lambs, triplets, were born on Ellie Larson's birthday and she helped settle them in the barn. So now, following tradition, we have a new lamb named Ellie.

 Jiji was named after Jiana Walker and this afternoon  Jiji had quadruplets. All are healthy and well mothered. Grandma Alice says we should name them Eeny Meeny, Miny and Moe.

When Dave came in from the 8 pm barn check he was carrying dirty towels.
Eight lambs out of three moms.

April Fool!
The last set were twins. We actually have nine babies out of three moms!

Snuggling

Usually we begin lambing after the 15^th of February and hope to be mostly done by March 15^th when the sap in the maple trees begins to rise. We check the barn for new lambs every three or four hours day and night, and we really appreciate a warm snuggle when we climb back into bed.  Last fall, when our daughter, Laurel, told us they were expecting a baby around the 4th of March, we decided to postpone lambing until the 1st of April.

Lambing in April should be very different from lambing in February and March – less snow and more temperate weather. I’m really looking forward to not losing lambs to the cold. The ewes should need less food because their lambs will only be growing and not trying to keep their body temperature 100 degrees above ambient. Finally, we’ll save electricity because we won’t be using heat lamps in every pen for the first 24 hours after each lamb is born.

Of course we’ll still check the lambs every three to four hours night and day. We’ll probably still have a bottle lamb or two and we may have ewes with lambing problems. But in April, we won’t be dealing with those things in below zero weather.

Instead, we’re spending late February and early March caring for Simon, our new human baby, and his big brother Kieran. Dave and I don’t have to get up in the middle of the night. We work in 68 degree temperatures. We change diapers instead of shoveling manure. We play with toy cars, we make muffins, we read books, and best of all, we snuggle. If we snuggled lambs like we do our grandchildren, we’d never be able to let them go.