Circle M Farm

Cricket birthed two tall healthy lambs yesterday afternoon, a boy and a girl, which makes 4 for 4 by my pregnant gals out in the field. Petunia and Cricket, the first of my ewes to deliver in 2010, both had their twins without help from me, and both got the babies nursing without any trouble as well. Now, this is what lambing season should always be like!

Cricket is not the prettiest sheep, but she has great fleece, and she’s behaving like a wonderful mom. Here are her twins, just hours old. One ram, one ewe, no names yet so I’m open to suggestions. I was thinking Jiminy for the boy, but then what for the girl?

Sheep really do tend to need very little help when it comes to babies. (When it comes to parasites, it’s a different story, but that’s for another post…) Regardless of weather, lambs tend to do pretty well as long as their mother licks them off and gets them pointed toward her udder. For our first three years of lambing, we did no more for our lambs than pull a few out that were stuck in their laboring moms for a bit longer than we could take. But last year was just awful!

For the first time, we found newborn babies stuck to the ground in puddles (a terribly rainy night with a freezing morning), lambs trampled (by the mom or the flock?), and moms that simply would not feed their babies at all. Two moms had triplets, and one of them would only feed two (the third snuck milk from the other mom with 3, so she raised 4!). After never losing a lamb in three years, we lost three in one season, and had to bottle raise several others. Some of those that made it required four-times-daily trips to the barn where we held the mother in place while the babies nursed. It actually became normal to me to have to “teach” a ewe to nurse for at least a week. All in all, it was an exhausting and demoralizing season which drove me to do research after the worst was over.

From what I read and from talking to other shepherds, I concluded that my moms had a calcium deficiency which made them reluctant to nurse. Because nursing releases so many hormones, I felt that could also be interfering with their mothering instincts. The problem could have been that my soil is calcium deficient (I can test for that and plan to this season) and their forage was not giving them what they needed. Could be that the hay I bought from another farm was low in calcium (another shepherd who bought hay from that farm had a worse lambing season than I did). Or my sheep could have been experiencing another nutritional situation that interfered with their ability to uptake calcium (they did have some sort of external parasite that made them itch.) Regardless of the cause, which I may never determine, I decided last year to add calcium to the salt-mineral mix they nibble on year-round.

Oh, and so far I couldn’t be more pleased! Cricket was one of the moms last year who had problems – one of her lambs was trampled and she wouldn’t feed the other. This time around her twins, one ram and one ewe, are tall and heavy and she’s nursing wonderfully. She’s protective and talks to them the moment I pick one up for a snuggle. What a victory!

Such tall skinny lambs! Cricket has cleaned the birth fluids off nicely, and here she’s pushing them towards her udder. Good mom! In the process of this pushing, she’ll also do a nice job of licking off their butts as they expel their first very messy poops. It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it. The smell of poop attracts predators and flies.

And it’s a very good thing those expecting ladies are healthy! We grew our flock this year by 9 new ewes (one Tunis, 5 Jacobs and 3 Merinos) and still have 2 of our original Finn-Ramboulliets and 8 of their offspring bred for this spring. Some of the youngest might have been too small to get pregnant in the fall, but we’ll still have lots of moms giving birth this year. That means lots of wool to sell, and lots of lamb to sell eventually – ultimately, many more ways for the farm to profit.

But first, we hope to have lots of snuggly-sweet sheep families to enjoy all summer long.

Speaking of snuggly – look at this fluffy family! Petunia and her girls are thriving. Lacy and Macy look huge compared to the new lambs, though they are only days older. Lambs grow fast.