Thrice as Nice
Triplets! Prissy, our last pregnant ewe, delivered three strapping lambs at noon today.
Impossibly tall (all newborn lambs appear this way to me, and each time they first stand dripping in their birth fluid I’m flabbergasted at the length of their legs) and mostly white, they appear to all be strong and well-sized. I feel wealthy and blessed in a most primal way. Having healthy animals born in your pastures is such a viscerally successful, rich, full feeling. Three vigorous lambs born to one mom on a sunny day in early spring, shoots in the garden and rain predicted tonight. Things don’t get a whole lot better.
They are one ewe and two rams, mostly white. One of the rams has tiny grey spots and a brown freckled face. These three are a triumph of planning for me, as I’d previously been quite haphazard with the genetics. Planned breeding somehow seems like math, which I fear unreasonably. But – I added two rams and two ewes last November, hoping to breed into my flock more size and more white fleeces. We started the farm with tiny little Finn-Rambouillet black sheep that were absolutely adorable and had very soft wool. They’d been inter-bred for color so long that they’d reverted to a sort of wild Romanov and lost size. Perfect first animals for me, all were small and easy to handle – especially nice since I was just learning to shear! However, raising any for meat was out of the question. The lambs were simply too small and slow growing to make anything but self-butchering worth the money, and while we’ve crossed that bridge with ducks, geese and chickens, I’m not sure we’re up to it with the darling lambs. (Whether I can bundle them into the stock trailer and send them off to the locker is yet to be seen.) In addition, I had come under the spell of hand-dyeing and needed more white wool with which to conjure magic in my stock pots.
Prissy, a voluptuous pure white Rambouillet, was one of the new ewes, a large fine-wool French Merino. She went into the Love Shack with Steeplechase, a Finn-Rambouillet-Dorset with fantastically long white-and-brown locks, and Petey, an Icelandic-meat cross with still longer white crimps. From the looks of the lambs, Steeplechase got to her first, but either way, it’s a victory! Big white lambs. Meat and fleece. White to dye. I’m starting to feel like I know what I’m doing with the sheep.
Temps were in the low 80s, a lovely climate for birth. The wind was almost oppressive for farm work, but kept the flies off the wet, sticky lambs who might otherwise suffer flystrike on a day so warm. Teetering on their stick legs, the babies had to labor mightily to not get blown over. After Prissy’s aggressive cleaning and a brief suckling, they succumbed like rag dolls to sleep, nestled in a tight circle around their spent mother. Well done, pretty mama.
