The Soay Sheep Chronicles

I never can predict when owning Soay sheep will enrich my life in a new and different way. Last Wednesday an e-mail showed up out of the blue that read, in total: “Here is a photo of yorkshire soay in the snow and being bottle fed.” That’s it, no signature, no mailing address, no explanation of why I was the beneficiary  of the photographs, only a return e-mail address and the pictures.

Ever wonder what Yorkshire soay look like in the snow?  

Intrigued, I return e-mailed:  ”I have an embarrassing question to ask:  I do not recognize your name.  It sounds vaguely familiar to me but I am drawing a blank.  I guess that is what happens when a person turns sixty years old! So, to be blunt, who are you?”

That same day, but in the middle of the night, back came this note from Anne: “Hi Priscilla [at least we knew each other's names by then].  I’m also the wrong side of 60.  I’m from Yorkshire and have a flock of 12 soay and other beasts as well as a husband. We are from near the town of James Herriot, the vet author (you may have heard of him). He used to be our vet as well as my customer and his old practise still services our animals. I taught with his daughter at school.”

What a lovely surprise!  My father was a large animal veterinarian in Iowa and my family fairly worshipped the most famous veterinarian in the world.  We read and re-read his books until they fell apart.  Mom cross-stitched the endearing four-line hymn that provided titles for four of Dr. Alf Wight’s [a.k.a. James Herriot] books and the sampler hung over my parents’ living room fireplace for many happy years, a quiet reminder of the centrality of animals to our lives.

As you can imagine, I was immediately drawn to with this new person in my Soay life.  Anne and I continue to exchange notes, and I relish the thought of learning more about her animals and how she tends them.  With luck, she will remain agreeable to sharing her Soay lore with you.  For example, Anne sent me a dandy picture of her hay feeder, a somewhat different design than we have.  I intend to use her photo in a post, already in draft, about hay and hay feeders – nice timing.  In exchange, I hope to address her curiosity about how Soay have developed differently over here, a topic on which U.S. Soay breeders can expound for hours and hours and hours, can’t we?

Without further ado, allow me me introduce you to my new friend Anne.  Here she is holding her adorable Soay lamb, Young Bonny:

Welcome to The Soay Sheep Chronicles, Anne!  Please feel free to participate in this blog with your comments and explore the websites you can find by clicking on the links in the right hand column of this page.  I am delighted you found me all the way across The Pond in the American Wild West.

For now …

Will Rogers once said, “The best doctor in the world is the veterinarian. He can’t ask his patients what is the matter–he’s got to just know.”  Will Rogers was right, but his vet almost certainly relied on a good thermometer as a substitute for a patient interview.  

When we have a listless lamb, one who is not up and nursing robustly pretty quickly after birth, we may need to call a vet, but before we do, we take advantage of the best, most cost-effective diagnostic tool we’ve got – the plastic digital  thermometer from some place like Target or Walgreen’s waiting there in the Lamb Kit.  The thermometer often can confirm what is wrong even though the lamb and ewe cannot.  In the rare circumstance where we have had lambs in trouble, the first thing we do is take its temperature.  Odds are the lamb is cold and that almost certainly means he is not nursing at all or not nursing enough to get the bonfire in his tummy going.  If we can get him eating, he should come around.  And if not, we know the first thing the vet is going to ask is, “what is the lamb’s temperature?”  So that is where we start, and here is an example of an inexpensive thermometer, this one available from Target. 

In our experience, lambs with temperatures between 102.0 and 104.0 Fahrenheit are almost certainly okay; they are eating; they are turning milk into fuel to keep them warm and healthy.  Last year we had almost 40 lambs and with two exceptions, their temperatures when we first assessed them were just fine.  The two lambs in distress each had temperatures lower than 102 the first time we checked them. In both cases, it was urgent that we get the lambs up and nursing and pronto.  Cold lambs do not live very long, period.  Remember the blue gloves?  We put them on and took the lamb back to the ewe’s udder and did our darnedest to persuade the little guy to eat.

We had mixed success.  One of the lambs seemed lethargic after the first four hours and his temperature was 101.8 degrees, not alarmingly cold, but low enough to check on him frequently.  Although we did not actually see him nurse, when we came back to check on him a couple of hours later we could tell by feeling his belly that he had gotten a little milk.  This was confirmed by taking his temperature, which had risen to 102.6 degrees.  He only weighed 3 pounds 15 ounces at that time, so we were relieved to see such a wee one fighting hard to make it, and he did.  By 11 hours, his temperature had risen another .2 of a degree and from then on he was fine.  

The lamb we lost, by contrast, had a temperature of only 100.8 the first time we assessed her shortly after birth, critically low.  Although we immediately gave her NutraDrench, tube-fed colostrum-laden milk stripped from the ewe, and put the lamb under a heat lamp, she did not rally, never could get up and nurse on her own, and never showed any signs of being able to survive.  Her temperature fell to 100.4, then 99.6, and she died.  It was our first face-to-face experience with the concept of “failure to thrive” and a blunt reminder that even with the renowned hardiness of Soay sheep, not every lambing has a happy ending.     

A note about thermometers.  They do not feel any better in the lamb’s little bum than they do in yours, so give the lamb a break and apply just a smidgen of KY to the tip of the thermometer.  You could use Vaseline as well, but KY works better if you make and use one of Steve’s Pretty Good Goo Syringes.  Read on.

After the first time Steve wasted the better part of a tube of KY trying to squeeze it out onto the tip of the thermometer, he rigged us a nifty applicator by fitting a 6cc syringe with a 16 guage needle, breaking off the tip of the needle, smoothing the rough edges of the now-blunt end with emery paper, and filling the syringe with KY.  With the needle guard back on, we can keep our Goo Syringe around forever.  It also comes in handy when we are applying eartags to lambs and adults.  

For now …