More Lambs in the Pipeline

I still have six of 34 ewes which did not lamb. Impatient to know their status, I did blood draws on them and sent them in for laboratory testing.

I actually suspected none of these ewes were pregnant. Five of them don’t look big enough to be near-delivery pregnant as they should be by now. The six ewe looks gigantic, but is also very over-conditioned. I wondered if she’d just grown obese over the winter. But, it turns out she is pregnant, along with a two-year-old. This is good and bad.

 

Behold, a Camel Lamb

A long time ago, the Ewe Win blog wrote an interesting post about two distinct body types they get in Katahdin lambs, and it generated a lot of good discussion. I’d not had any such extreme variances, until now. This year, I got one of the strange “B types” discussed there. Just look at him, he looks like a baby camel, or a whippet, or a praying mantis. Or something. In my mind, I’ve been calling him the Dromedary Lamb.

 

Llama Maintenance

Last weekend was hoof trimming weekend. I did all forty adult sheep, which was a bit much, but nice to have it crossed off the list until fall. It was also a good time to capture the pesky llama. I had the sheep in the channel, and proactively, I laid down a long-line clipped to the fence on the channel end where I was working. All I needed was for the llama to wander into my snare. Then, I could lift the line and trap her. Llamas are really dumb about not being able to jump over or duck under a chest-height string.

 

Moving Portable Hotwire Efficiently

I use one variation on the “management intensive grazing” or MIG method, where I fence the sheep into small, frequently moved paddocks. This requires the sheep to eat everything in the paddock, not pick and choose the best plants and let the less palatable species grow unchecked. The method allows graze areas to rest, for best recovery of the sward. It also cuts down on parasite loads, since the sheep are gone by the time worm eggs have hatched.

MIG allows a rancher to harvest more total volume of forage than “set-stocking” or leaving animals in a large pasture for months at a time. And, it develops the quality of the pasture over time, rather than diminishes it. But there is some overhead in moving the animals every few days. I have gotten really fast at rotating their pasture. Here’s the method I’ve learned to use to maximize efficiency of my movements.

 

Late to the Party

One single ram lamb was born today. His mother either missed two heat cycles when the rest of the ewes were bred, or lost a conception and re-bred late December. I like his little eye patch marking. So that makes 45.