Polly, At Last…
I’ve been on hourly barn checks tonight because I felt certain Polly was soon to deliver, and sure enough, at about 2:45 this morning she began the arduous task of ushering a sheep family into the world.
I missed the first birth by what looked like about 15 minutes. When I came to the barn at 3 am, Polly was fussing around a large, cleaned-off ram lamb, so vigorous that he climbed through the fence right into the pen next door. I quickly rescued him from the domain of our territorial and somewhat crabby Prissy, still penned there with her triplets.
The ram quickly figured out that to make use of Polly’s by-now ridiculously pendulous udder, he had to first kneel to grasp the nipple, and then he could stand up to suck a bit more powerfully. I’m glad he knows what he’s doing, because I’m quite concerned that his mother’s over-full teats could be heading toward mastitis. The more she’s milked out, the better she’ll be.
The two danced circles around each other for over an hour, the ram chasing the udder and Polly alternately chasing and licking the lamb and stopping to concentrate on a push for number two.
At 4:15 am, a gigantic water sac finally emerged, followed in a few minutes by, thank goodness, a nose and a foot that I could pull gently. Strapping ram number two.
Ram two is on the ground! This is a fantastic shot of how a sheep mama cuts the umbilical cord – she starts nibbling up the birth sac and when she gets to the cord she just slurps it up like a piece of spaghetti until it’s the right length. Amazing how they know this stuff! Apparently, the occasional ewe will nibble too energetically and end up snipping off a tail. But by-and-large the cords all end up about 3 or 4 inches long, just above the ground when the lambs stand.
Generally I’m not in a hurry to pull babies, but Polly is so large that I think she may have quite a few in there and so late that I’ve been concerned the babies were over-done and stressed. So I’m hovering around her, hoping to make each birth as easy as possible.
Now that I see how big these two are, I think there’s a chance she may just have twins. But right now I’m warming up in the house, grabbing some towels and then heading back down to see what’s next for our big mama.
