Circle M Farm

When the gardens are in full swing, it’s easy to write about the farm as though we go from victory to victory every day around here. Not so. Yesterday I lost a little lamb in what is likely the worst way possible. Flystrike.

Even the name sounds menacing, and quite aptly describes a most gruesome ailment. An animal is basically eaten alive by maggots. The green bottle fly, spawned by warm and humid weather, lays eggs in a wound or the soiled damp wool of a living sheep (rabbits, calves and other furry domesticated animals are commonly afflicted, as well). Eight to 24 hours later, the eggs hatch and the maggots start feeding. A perceptive shepherd who spots the condition soon enough can pull the maggots out one by one with a tweezer, and treat the damaged flesh with antiseptics and insect repellent. But I didn’t. Instead I found little Leo, a beautiful little black-faced, black-fleeced wether, dead in the shelter and pretty much falling to pieces while fathomless hordes of maggots writhed in the place where his tummy had been. I’d seen him up and running with the flock two days before.

The worst thing about losing him, aside from the facts that he was sweet, pretty and tiny, is that I can fault several of my own recent choices. First, I castrated some of the rams, including Leo, later in the spring than I should have. The longer you wait, the more you risk flystrike in the resulting small wound that won’t be fully healed when the heat of the summer arrives. In hot weather, flies are much more prolific and persistent in plaguing animals. I can’t know for sure that this is how he died, but it certainly looked like it.

Flies also are more abundant in wetter areas. My second mistake was pestering Shannon to get fencing up and running in our lower pastures next to the pond and slough. These several acres are soggy most of the spring, but grow grass like nobody’s business. I’d been in a big hurry to utilize that food, and we’d moved the calves and sheep down there a week ago, just when the flies were reaching their frenzied apex, because that’s when we got the fences up. The move coincided with the start of weaning by the ewes, so many of the lambs were under the stress of having less access to their mothers and their milk. A stressed animal is less able to resist any sort of mechanical or biological attack.

Indeed, several of the lambs have been suffering from diarrhea this past week, a sign that the coccidia parasites that always live in the guts of homestead animals like cows, sheep and chickens were multiplying at a rate faster then the lambs could defend themselves. Weanlings often develop coccidiosis in prolonged hot weather, because that’s when coccidia organisms thrive. Last year I lost two weanlings in a heat wave to the parasites. However, we chose not to treat the herd prophylactically this year, because we don’t deworm or use any other poisons or medicines in animals that appear healthy. For the sake of the meat we might harvest, and for the the sake of our pastures, which could themselves become toxic from excreted dewormers and antibiotics, we only treat sick animals. And I had been treating the few that seemed runny.

The terrifying thing is that now their tail ends are soiled, which is the perfect environment for the green bottlefly females to deposit eggs. (Leo wasn’t one of the sick lambs, however, and his tail was clean.) A third choice of mine that I now question, is to leave many of the lambs’ tails un-docked. Most shepherds cut the tails of their sheep short, to prevent a build-up of manure on them that could attract flies. But I’d deemed most of mine short enough this year, and felt that since I’d never experienced flystrike in my flock, I might as well spare the lambs the pain. One final choice that I absolutely do regret is that I didn’t shear my sheep before lambing in April. I wanted to spare the pregnant ewes the stress, and the flock the cold spring nights and shear in early summer. But after lambing I started planting the gardens and have not yet been able to get to the shearing (there are good reasons most shepherds shear in late winter!). So now I’ve got babies with long tails and adults with long fleeces, all of which have a fair amount of soiled wool on their back ends.

The heat, which has continued at least two weeks without breaking, has transformed in my mind from an irritation and a challenge into a threat. I fear for all of my animals and all of my crops each afternoon as the temperature builds. I’m not sure what will be left at the end of each day. I dread weather reports. I fear.

With much trepidation, I approached the pasture for my evening check on the animals tonight. All was well, every animal up and apparently healthy. I nevertheless felt defeated and deflated, as I listened to little Lina baaa mournfully for her dead sibling and for her now inattentive mother. Even within a herd, animals cluster into semi-permanent groups. Lina has lost hers and is out there on her own. But as I stood dejected among my little flock, dusk started to fall and the pasture was silently criss-crossed by dozens of the small swift bats that leave attics in town every night to come feed in our woods and meadows. Perhaps they relish green bottle flies as much as they do mosquitos. Perhaps Nature will work with me tonight. Perhaps desperation can be accepted as prayer. Perhaps tomorrow will be cooler.