Almost every time we had a new calf born on the farm when I was a boy my dad would announce it to the rest of the family with a “We’ve been blessed! A baby’s born!” This wasn’t an infrequent occurance; it happened around 50 times a year. I didn’t think about it then, but this wasn’t probably always welcome news to my mother who split her career between being an OBGYN nurse and helping on the farm where she took on the responsibility of teaching the newborn calves to drink from a bottle and feeding them until they were weaned several months later.
Time during lambing season moves fast and furious. Sheep are one of those industries that the more you have, the more efficient you can be. It is as easy for a shepherd and a dog to move 100 sheep to a new pasture as 5. And if you’re in lambing season and checking the ewes every few hours you might as well have enough sheep lambing during lambing season to have lots of lambs being born. That wouldn’t be practical for us here but even having only 10 ewes is keeping me busy.
I started this past weekend with only the triplets that came early due to the ram’s brief October escapade. Then on Saturday morning the little black ewe had her bouncy, spotted lamb. The two are doing fine. Now, here on Thursday evening, we have 12 live lambs on the ground. Things sort of ran together, but here is what’s happened:
Sometime early on this week I put the sheep on pasture one morning, all looking well, and came back a few hours later to find a ewe with two dead lambs laying not far from her. They’d been cleaned off, but were already cold when I found them. The mother is our friendliest sheep because she had been a bottle baby two years ago. She even has a name, Constellation, and when I found them she was about 10 yards away alternately looking over at their cold bodies with a “baa” and eating grass. I’m not sure exactly what happened, the lambs were of normal size and development but I’m pretty sure they never took a breath so they either died just before they were delivered (A disease, like toxoplasmosis, might cause that), complications in the delivery, or possibly their heart might have been beating at birth but they weren’t stimulated or strong enough to wiggle and get free of the birth sac if for some reason the mother didn’t help. If I’d been there at the time of delivery could I have save them? We’ll never know.
Before I even got them buried I noticed another ewe in early labor and brought both her and Constellation to adjacent pens in the barn in the hopes the one in labor might have a multiple birth in which case I’d try to graft one of the the twins onto Constellation. That way she’d she’d have a lamb to raise and the other ewe wouldn’t have to struggle feeding three she ended up having triplets.
There are lots of ways to graft lambs but that is another missive and each sheep and situation is different. The second ewe did have twins and I smeared one of them with some of the afterbirth from Constellation’s birth hoping she would lick it off and think the baby was hers. She showed no interest so I put the baby back with her birth mother. I knew she could feed twins. I’ve been milking Constellation morning and night since then to keep her in milk production (I get about a pint of milk each time). Since she is pretty tame, she doesn’t put up much of a fuss when being milked by hand). By keeping her in milk if there are yet triplets born I could take a more serious approach and try to graft a lamb on to her.
Then another ewe had twins, requiring no help other than the usual lamb care in making sure the get off to a good start.
Soon after, a ewe had twins but the first one was taking too long; one foot was presented, but she was making no progress. I’d already put her in an individual lambing pen so I caught her, put a halter on her and tied her up, soaped up and examined her and found that one of the lamb’s front legs was tucked back and under the lamb. The ewe was straining hard. I could feel the lamb wasn’t too large and after a few minutes of analyzing options was able to gently manipulate the lamb out into the world with the one foot back. The ewe had her second healthy lamb on her own shortly after and things moved on requiring just the usual observation and helping get that first feeding of colostrum and other after-birth care.
The cold and wet weather has make it challenging to get them on pasture but I’ve been able to keep each family in a pen with a day or two of bonding/observation time with their mother and as of Wednesday morning I had 10 healthy lambs.
I did my lamb check that evening at 11:30 and saw a ewe in early stages of lambing with the mucus plug hanging from her vulva. I wasn’t sure how long it had been since she started but I moved a few other sheep around and put her in an indivual pen in the barn where I could watch her easily. (I’m fortunate that all but one of my ewes are trained to lead with a halter since I use them in live nativities every weekend in December).
I stayed awake and checked her every half hour or so during the night and saw little change; she was up and down and pawing uncomfortably, but I didn’t even notice any strong contractions until 2:20 AM. I continued monitoring her every 10-15 minutes and when I checked her at 3:40 I saw she’d delivered a healthy lamb and was already cleaning it off. I went back in the house and came back out less than 10 minutes later with a coat and better shoes (Crocs aren’t great for most farm work) and saw she’d had another baby. It was laying flat and still while she was still licking the firstborn lamb clean. I picked up the new lamb and it lay limp, no reaction, in my hands. Knowing it was either dead or nearly so I wiped the nostrils clean, grabbed it by its back legs and swung it back and forth a couple time like a pendulum hoping the centrifugal force would clear any fluid blocking the airway. It remained limp in my hands so I put it flat on it’s back, shook and rubbed it’s chest a bit and pumped it’s front legs forward and back several times. I then laid it on the hay bedding when I saw and heard a small gasp from it. Moments later it gasped again, a little stronger, as its body shook momentarily. I picked it up and set it in front of the mother who immediately began licking it off.
And that is why it sometimes pays off to put in a little extra work and time during lambing. It saved that lamb’s life. I watched a little longer to make sure it was breathing fine on its own and once I saw it lift its head up I dipped both lamb’s navels in iodine. I hung around until a little after 4:00 AM in case there was a third as the ewe was still uncomfortably pawing the ground. When I saw a little afterbirth emerging I went to bed, leaving the ewe licking off the last one born while the first one was struggling to stand. I got up when Ann did this morning to check on them, around 6:30 and saw the firstborn trying to nurse and the second one lying on its side, weak, but alive.
My mother, raising all those calves back in Minnesota, is the best person in the world at getting newborns to nurse. I consider myself in the top 5 or 6. I put my skills to the test every few hours throughout the day today helping the lambs nurse. I’m getting it down to a system, tie up the ewe in a corner, grab a lamb and kneel on the straw with the lamb’s rump balanced against my knee. I place the index finger of one hand in the lamb’s mouth and the rest of that hand cupped around lambs neck and chest and my shoulder up against the ewes side, sometimes having to jam her into the wall to keep her still (It took a few feedings for her to realize I’m helping; she first sees me as preventing her from seeing her lambs). My other hand holds the teat and squeezes a drop of milk into the lambs mouth. Once the lamb gets the taste of the milk (colostrum, the first few days) it tentatively sucks and once it realizes it’s getting that liquid gold the tail stars to wag and it nurses vigorously.
They are weak, and the last one born seems to struggle to stand and rests in an awkward looking position, almost prone. Meanwhile, the other one “baa’s” a lot, which indicates it is hungry. But they are both alive and I’m hopeful will be fine. In addition to helping them nurse throughout the day I also split an 8 ounce bottle of Constellation’s milk between them during chores this afternoon and will be checking them again later tonight.
12 healthy lambs on the ground. We’ve been blessed!
First photo: The mother is still pawing the ground, uncomfortable, while I’m wondering if it is afterbirth making her so or a third lamb. These lambs are uncharacteristically inactive.
Second photo: Allie is a gentle babysitting “grandmother” supervising the lambs.
