This morning we encountered another medical mystery here on the Marion homestead. Shortly after breakfast, while I was in the kitchen finishing up bottle-feeding Bounce, our recently-recovered polio-stricken house lamb, my teenage son Eli came in from outside chores to inform me there was a downed sheep in the calving barn corral.

Eli takes care of the bulk of our farm work this winter, and every day when he’s finished feeding, watering and inspecting the animals in their various paddocks and shelters, we talk over coffee about how everyone looks and if there are concerns about anyone’s condition. With herd and flock animals like we have, it’s relatively easy to spot problems (or more positive situations like lambs being born) because an animal that is ailing or under stress will generally separate itself from the group in some way.

No animal in the past few days had been slow or weak and Eli hadn’t noticed any roughness among the rams and bucks around the hay feeder, which in some periods of especially rambunctious activity can result in smaller animals being injured and limping around for a few days. Though he assured me the sheep in question was not an expecting ewe, I was pretty sure that’s what we’d find as I followed him down to the little three-sided stone barn that all of our sheep and goats share in the cold months.

Unfortunately, Eli was right. The downed sheep, alive but very ill, was Loki, my precious bottle baby from last spring, still a very diminutive and timid boy. Worse still, a dead goat was also lying in the corral – a tiny premature kid, evidently very recently aborted by one of my dairy does. What kind of horror show was I suddenly in? I thought to myself.

With my assurance that Loki wasn’t injured, but sick, Eli quickly lifted him into a small private pen in the back of the barn. While he gave the weakly-standing Loki some fresh hay and water, I went into the pasture to find who’d delivered the early baby. Cream, my smallest, oldest dairy doe, had blood on her tail and legs, so I brought her into the hospital pen as well. I went into the storage area of the barn to fill feed bowls and give my patients some grain, some mineral salt and some baking soda. This time of year, the rapidly thawing fields give animals sudden access to fresh grass, which can cause the rumen to bloat, a condition in which the first stomach can’t digest a new and different food source and produces an abundance of gas dangerous to the animal. It looked to me like bloat might be Loki’s ailment, at least, and nibbling baking soda can settle the gas in the stomach.

In one corner of the storage area, I also had a stack of boxes filled with butternut squash harvested in fall, and saved to feed to the animals on days when it was thawed. Squash is a great favorite of sheep and goats, and they’ll dive for a fruit and eat and eat until their faces are orange. Since the weather has been warm this week, I thought the squash would be nice and soft and a perfect treat for my sick ones. When I opened the box, I found the squash covered with mold – and that’s when I solved the mystery.

Two days ago, on another temperate morning, I instructed Eli to empty a few boxes of squash into the pasture. I hadn’t looked at the squash since the weather had warmed up, and I didn’t think about the possibility that a week of thaw would be enough time to grow mold on the unfrozen fruits. Likely both Cream and Loki enthusiastically ate their fill of the spoiled squash. According to my goat manual, mycotoxosis, or poisoning from molds, is a common cause of abortion in otherwise healthy does, and can cause respiratory problems, internal bleeding and abomasum issues, as well. Loki definitely appears to have a tender abdomen, which hints that his abomasum, or fourth stomach, may be irritated. But both animals are up and eating, so my hope is that the toxins will be out of their systems in a short time without doing further harm.

So, the mystery is likely solved, which is a good thing. The bad thing is that I’ll be watching the rest of my quash-eating flock for spontaneous abortions and other ailments in the next few days.