April 2012

Life at Green Farm gets a tad chaotic during April, as it’s lambing time and absolutely every other activity is governed by when and how our small flock of 14 ewes decide to bring their lambs into the world!

Kinky the ram joined the ewes on 15^th November last year, and, from our guarded observations, had ‘tupped’ all of our 14 ewes in the space of a few days.  Since the ewe’s oestrus cycle is 17 days, we’d expect the lambs to be born in roughly an equal time span, 147 days later – starting on or around the 15th April.  All the ewes are pregnancy scanned during their third month of pregnancy, so we knew what should be delivered!  So at the start of April, we swept and vacuumed and pressure-hosed the lambing shed, set up a ‘waiting area’, some ‘mothering-up’ pens and a ‘turnout’ communal area for the ewes and their lambs once they’d firmly bonded.  How organised is that!  And the weather was lovely.  So we weren’t in the slightest concerned on the morning of the 13th to find ewe number 608 in the field suckling her already boisterous triplets.  Into the shed they all came (perfect timing to miss the nasty weather that followed a few days later), and we settled into our 4-hourly check pattern – I get the 4a.m. slot, which gives me the perfect opportunity to enjoy the dawn chorus on my way back to bed again!

Since the triplets were the first born lambs, there was no opportunity to foster one of them onto another ewe with a new-born single, and 608 is a strong, milky ewe well capable of rearing 3 lambs – though we were prepared to step in with a bottle if one looked as though it was getting the short straw (ewes, of course, only have two teats).  Incidentally, the combined weight of the newborn lambs was 12.1kgs, so they weren’t exactly weaklings!

We have a simple routine for all new births:

• Lamb’s navel is dipped in iodine (to sterilise and dry the umbilical cord)
• Check lamb’s eyes (for entropion), mouth (for suck reflex), anus (it can be covered by a thin membrane), limbs (to ensure no fractures or deformities) and belly (full tummy = the lamb has sucked)
• Weigh lambs
• Check ewe’s rear end to see whether afterbirth passed or not
• Check ewe’s teats to make sure they are working

Next morning we awoke to find 609 (sister to 608) suckling her twins (5kgs and 4.2kgs), then, 3 days later my favourite ewe, 605 – Meggie, delivered her twins (4.9kgs and 4.7kgs).  The following day, a single born to 665 required a little help – not surprising as the ram lamb weighed in at a very respectable 5.5kgs.

The following day, a set of twins from 601 (4.9kgs and 4.3kgs) and 669 (4.9kgs and 5.1kgs), all twins born naturally – but the last lamb presented our first problem, a watery eye which on inspection was due to an in turned eyelid (entropion) so that the lashes were rubbing on the eye.  Left untreated, this can lead to an ulcerated eye and a lot of pain for the lamb – on this occasion I was able to gently ease the lower lid away from the eye and give it a firm pinch – just enough to cause a little swelling which would stop it turning back in again.  We noted this, so that we could keep an eye (no pun intended) on the lamb during the next few hours.

Then a quiet 3 days of twice daily feeding the ewes, strawing-down the floor to keep everything fresh and clean and making sure the hayracks and water buckets were kept topped up, leaving me with plenty of time to sit in the straw and watch the 12 lambs pinging around the shed, including the odd one that developed a weird taste for my Wellington boots!

Next to lamb was number 10, a maiden ewe who quietly delivered her twins (4.3kgs and 3.7kgs), then 621 and 917 each delivered their sets of twins (5.1kgs and 4.3kgs) and (5.1kgs and 5.2kgs) respectively, with 917 requiring a little help to deliver her lambs.

By this time, 9 days into lambing, although a bit bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, we were well into the swing of things and thoroughly enjoying the lambing season, not quite believing how well it was all going.

Following a quiet two days (but for the happy bleating from the shed), ewe number 661 gave birth to a strapping ram lamb, weighing in at 5.6kgs, and born without any assistance.  Two days later 602 delivered a pair of lunchtime twins at 5.8kgs and 4.9kgs, quickly followed by a sturdy 5.5kgs teatime single from 630, a generally lazy ewe that I had been slightly worried about due to her rather expansive waistline – a fat ewe is never a fit ewe.  Early next morning I found her lamb listless, with a damp chin and empty tummy – classic signs of Watery Mouth.  Any lamb that doesn’t suck sufficient colostrum from his mother during the first few hours of life won’t have a passive protective immunity, and so is easily overwhelmed by toxin producing bacteria, no matter how scrupulously clean the lambing pen is (and, let’s be honest, most aren’t).  The outlook is generally poor for watery mouth, but he was still warm (hypothermia can quickly kill a lamb challenged by disease) and I hoped we’d caught him early enough to stand a chance of saving him.  We gave him an antibiotic injection, and then tubed him with electrolytes and glucose for rehydration and easily absorbed energy.  An hour later he was looking brighter, so we fed artificial colostrum by stomach tube, and repeated this 4 hours later.  He’s still with us, and is now one of the more boisterous members of the lamb gang!

Day 14 in the lambing shed, and just 2 ewes left to lamb – one looking very imminent, the other … well, not looking at all imminent, despite having been scanned for twins.  Ewe 662 started digging in the straw in the early evening, classic ‘nesting’ behaviour, but 4 hours later had still not produced anything – so I did a quick investigation, all was lined up perfectly: a nose and two front feet.  Another hour passed and the poor ewe was beginning to tire.  Time to help.  The lamb was perfectly presented, but just needed a bit of a pull to drag his vast bulk into the world.  At 7.1kgs, I think this is a record for us.

There’s always a bit of controversy around the subject of tailing and castrating lambs, and justifiably so as if done incorrectly can cause a great deal of suffering to the lamb.  There are strict rules about when and how these procedures are carried out – all of this is explained in The Breeding Flock DVD.
We don’t castrate our ram lambs – they are left as nature intended and we’ve never had any problems.  They are weaned long before they reach sexual maturity (which occurs at around 5 months), and reared separately from the ewe lambs.  As a pedigree flock, we’re always hoping to produce ‘stock ram’ quality boys, and those that don’t reach this standard are generally slaughtered at around 20 weeks, though we have kept some longer and never had any ‘ram taint’ whatsoever.

We do, however, ‘tail’ all our lambs.  The Hampshire Down has a naturally long tail which, combined with a thick fleece, would provide the perfect breeding site for maggots in the spring and summer months, regardless of our efforts to protect them from flystrike (we had one case of flystrike in April last year, a full month before shearing).  We use the rubber band method about 36-48 hours after they’re born, carefully applied to ‘skirt length’, to ensure that the ewe’s vulva is well covered from flies in the summer.

Now, some of you may have noticed that I finished my ‘lambing diary’ at 13 ewes, with their 23 lambs – but we of course have 14 ewes.  We are still waiting for number 20 to produce her lambs!  She scanned for twins, but as she has yet to ‘bag up’ fully and shows no other signs of imminent lambing, I suspect she conceived on the 2^nd cycle.  Otherwise, if she does turn out to be barren, we will have to ask our vet to carry out investigations to find out why.

Apart from this one tail-ender, I think this has been our best lambing season yet.