The Soay Sheep Chronicles

Dousing a newborn lamb’s umbilical cord in iodine as soon as possible after birth is an inexpensive way to guard against infection. Later when our lambs go back out into the pasture, they have to fend for themselves as far as scrapes and cuts go; it is not cost-effective to treat them for everything. But at the outset, when the raw cord and navel are exposed and the lamb is lying down all the time, it just makes sense to apply iodine.

We strongly recommend 7% iodine, much stronger than what you will find on display at grocery stores and pharmacies, but necessary for the dousing to be effective in the unavoidably unsanitary conditions of a lambing area. An aside: In Jackson County where we live, we have to sign for 7% iodine at the Grange (farm supply store), apparently because it can be used in meth production. They didn’t teach us that in the good old days, did they?

The applicator of choice is a contraption with the show-stopping name of “teat dipper.” Don’t believe me? Google the term and you will find pages and pages of hits for dairy cattle supply catalogs and stores. We just call it a “dipper.” Less to explain when someone drops by while we are working a lamb.

The dipper is a great invention, if sheep equipment gets your pulse going. It has a nifty hook on one side so you can hook it over the side of the Lamb Kit container and it will not tip over and spill (Big Lie #1). It also has a round cup-like opening you can press right against the lamb’s belly (or the cow’s teat if that is what you are using it for), again to prevent spills (BL #2). You can see the dipper in the Lamb Kit container in my earlier post introducing the Lamb Kit. Ours came from the Premier Sheep Supply catalog but I promise you can find them anywhere two or more dairy tools are gathered together.

Put some iodine in the dipper, no need to fill it full. Gather the umbilical cord into the opening of the dipper so the cord will get drenched with iodine. Place the round side opening of the dipper firmly against the lamb’s belly and then turn the lamb over so the iodine gets on the navel as well as the cord. Count to 3, turn the lamb right side up, and voila! All the iodine will drain back into the dipper (BL #3), where it stays put until time to disinfect the next lamb (BL #4). It is completely reusable.

Hmmm, how to say this discretely.  If you are working a ram lamb, be careful to capture only the cord in the dipper or you will have a seriously wriggling and even more seriously unhappy lamb on your hands. 

Should you have the misfortune of spilling iodine on your hands at any point in this process (go back and review Big Lies #1-4), through either innate clumsiness or a well-placed lamb kick or whatever, you will have a bright orange stain and it will sting like the devil.  You should have worn your blue gloves!  It will look dreadful. You will be convinced your days of balancing sheep chores with manicures in town are over. But trust me (BL #5?) the stain will come off if you apply rubbing alcohol promptly. The quicker you pour alcohol on it, the more comes off.  Note to self: probably not a bad idea to add a bottle of rubbing alcohol to the Lamb Kit.

As for your clothes, they too will look dreadful, but not all that different from the effect placental goo, lamb poop, adult sheep lanolin (aged), or a variety of other substances have on your coveralls.  After all, isn’t this why we wear them even though they are the single most unflattering garment ever invented?  Although I still find it hard to believe, every time one of us has spilled iodine on our clothes they came clean in the wash. And no, I am not going to write a post on recommended laundry products for shepherds. Life is too short already.

Perhaps, however, once lambing starts I will add a photo demonstrating the application of iodine for your amusement. Last year at this time I had no idea I would be doing a blog, so taking pictures of teat dippers was the farthest thing from my mind.

For now …

When I looked at the first draft of this post I nearly cancelled the whole blog in despair.  Nitrile gloves — now there’s a headline grabber.  If I did not lose you to generalized boredom, I was sure to lose you to a bad case of MEGO.

Then I remembered the “dance” I describe here, the task where the (blue) gloves come in so handy, is part of “jugging.”  All of a sudden I was no longer in the throes of writer’s block.  I was back at a 10th grade sock hop in rural Iowa, flailing to the sounds of “Devil with the blue dress on.”  Talk about random access.  

Back to the Lamb Kit. 

Nitrile gloves are the only equipment required for a task unique to the lambing phase –”jugging” the ewe and lamb.  Here is how jugging works and where gloves fit (oops) in the picture.  Stay with me and stop tapping your toes.  DWTBDO was a truly awful song and I’m sorry I brought it up.

A couple of weeks before lambing begins, we bring our pregnant ewes up from the pasture to a fenced paddock named, in a fit of originality, the “Maternity Ward.”  The MW consists of a small area near the barn where we keep the ewes at night, and a surrounding area beyond that where they can graze during the day with our guardian dogs.  This setup allows us to keep close tabs on the ewes and quickly spot the newborns.  Having a small inner sanctum also allows the dogs to “patrol” the perimeter around the sleeping quarters at night.  The combination of scent and their physical proximity to the ewes is enough to ward off coyotes looking for dinner, a bigger problem for us when the tender baby lambs start arriving.

To be sure, the Maternity Ward is a bit crowded, especially at feeding time, and once a lamb is born, it can be stressful for the ewe, especially a first time mother, to keep track of and stay focused on her young one in the general chaos.  Now we (finally) get to “jugging.”

As soon as we discover a new lamb, we move the ewe and newborn to a “jug,” one of several 5′ x 5′ paneled areas within the Maternity Ward that are warm and and have dry fresh bedding straw.  Here the mother and lamb can be alone for the first 24 hours or so while the lamb learns its mother’s voice and smell (and vice versa), and here the gloves (finally) come in handy. 

We want to avoid human scent on the lamb until it has bonded with its mom and the reciprocal “imprint” is firmly in place.  Steve wades right in, picks up the lamb with his gloves on, and starts the jugging dance, walking slowly backwards, holding the lamb low enough for the nearsighted ewe to follow closely, nervously licking at her lamb and usually gurgling and muttering a lot.  It takes just a couple of minutes to get them into the jug and is guaranteed to work as long as the ewe’s nose is close enough to smell the lamb.  This is one time when I wish I had had a camera.  There is no dance quite as odd as the 6-step the shepherd and the ewe perform in jugging.  

After the ewe and lamb are safely ensconced in their jug, everyone relaxes and the ewe gets back to work cleaning and feeding her baby, savoring the relative tranquility until the next ewe/lamb pair displaces them.

Our gloves of choice are made of nitrile, rather than rubber.  Nitrile is much stronger and just as thin as rubber, so you also can wear them to do the fine work necessary to vaccinate, tag, or otherwise handle the lamb if you do not want to work bare-handed.  Nitrile gloves are easy to locate in the farm supply store or pharmacy.  They are the blue ones, disposable and inexpensive.

Oh yes, if you have nothing better to do in late March/early April, you are welcome to stop by the ranch and watch a demonstration of jugging with blue gloves on.  I probably do not have to tell you what 1966 “hit” tune by Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels will be  piped into the Maternity Ward to accompany the dance. 

For now …

Anticipation, excitement, and a certain tension are in the air – a sure sign it is almost time for lambing to begin. When we start getting edgy about all we have left to do before the first lamb appears, one of us inevitably asks how we are doing on supplies and equipment. On a rainy late winter day it helps to go through the calming exercise of laying out what we have, taking inventory, and restocking from catalogs or a quick trip to town.  It’s an important event in the Soay Year Calendar.

The really critical lambing “stuff” goes in the Lamb Kit itself, so I will start there – the subset of supplies we actually bring with us as we head out to greet each new arrival.

A brief aside: When Soay breeders brag about how easily their ewes give birth, they are not exaggerating. The ewes just do it, no muss, no fuss. As soon as the lamb is on the ground, the ewe cleans it off, gets it on its feet and encourages it to start nursing. Once the lamb has a full tummy and is producing its own heat, the immediate crises of birth are past.

But because we live in an area extremely deficient in selenium, an essential element, our vet recommends giving both the ewe and her lamb a selenium injection as well as a shot of vitamins. And, because Steve’s focus is pedigrees and tracking genetic characteristics, ear tags also are essential identification tools. The ewe cannot address these issues, so we help out. We have a standard routine we follow with each lamb, usually about 2 or 3 hours after birth or the first thing in the morning after an overnight birth.

And that brings me back to the Lamb Kit itself. Here is what it contains:

• Nitrile gloves
• Iodine for the umbilical cord
• Thermometer
• Portable scale
• Clean rags or towels
• Syringes pre-loaded with selenium and vitamin supplements
• Baby ear tags & applicator
• Lambing cards & pencil
• Flashlight

All of this fits neatly in a rectangular plastic container with a handle that looks sort of like the removable top tray of a tool box only much deeper. We got ours from the local farm store and I think it is designed for use with horses. It has a nifty groove on its bottom side so it straddles the wire fence and can’t tip over, always a plus when you are working with slightly gooey, wriggling new lambs.

Here’s a picture of our Lamb Kit, partly loaded, sitting on a fence in front of one of our sheep shelters.  Cat, contrary to appearances, is not part of the kit.

This post has gotten long enough.  Details on what the various items in the Lamb Kit contribute to the mix in the next few posts.

For now …

The realization that lambing starts in five weeks sent Steve out to the barn today to count what’s left of our winter hay supply.  Do we have enough to last until the pastures green up?  When we put in our order last summer for winter hay, we factored in the extra needed for gestation and nursing, but the thought of running out is so scary that Steve ran the “are we sure” count again.  I would like to say we always remember to check about this time each year, but without reminders in the datebook, the final pre-lambing hay supply check might get lost in the shuffle.

We buy enough for November through April, more or less.  The grass is getting pretty crummy by the end of September, but hay is so expensive that we let the Soay scrounge the remaining grass in the fields for as long as we can.  And when we put our breeding groups together in late October, we can’t rotate the sheep any more so we have to turn to hay.  In terms of the end of hay season, some years we have lush fields by mid-March, some years it’s a little later depending on when the ground warms up.  The hay keeps pretty well so we err on the side of having a few bales left over.  Last-minute orders of hay in February can really poke a big hole in your Soay budget. This year, both the Capital Press and our local paper report that for all intents and purposes, there is no hay left to be bought.  Southern Californians suffering through drought apparently bought up all the extra Oregon hay.    

The formula we use is one we heard about in a seminar on pasture management run by Woody Lane, who by the way knows more about grass and how to maximize pastures than anyone we’ve come across.  To calculate the amount of hay you’ll need, start by assuming pounds of hay at 5% of body weight per day per animal.  We use 55 pounds as our ewe weight, 75 pounds as our ram weight, and 40 pounds as the weight of our lambs born the prior spring.  So for a lamb, .05 x 40 = 2 pounds of hay per day.  If you’ve remembered to ask your hay supplier for an average bale weight, you can easily calculate how many bales you need.

From watching our pregnant ewes the last couple of years, we estimate they eat about 1.5 times as much during the last month of gestation and easily twice as much while they are lactating (nursing).  But by the time they are nursing, the rams and the non-pregnant ewes are converting from hay to spring grass in the pastures, so with these offsetting factors, the original 5% calculation is sufficient.  These numbers worked well last year and based on our bale count this afternoon, they’re holding steady this year as well.

More on how we choose our hay later. 

For now …

If you managed to find this site, you must like Soay Sheep. Good. So do I, and so does my husband Steve, the head shepherd here at Saltmarsh Ranch. It is almost lambing time, which means those of us who are hopelessly addicted to these little creatures have much more to talk about than our non-Soay friends will tolerate.

As the chief observer of all things Soay on our farm (that just means I don’t do the heavy lifting like building fences and shelters), I have filled my head with a lot of practical knowledge about the actual care and feeding of Soay. The time has come to share what I have learned with other people so I can reassign these brain cells to new tasks, Soay-related and otherwise.

What’s the topic for today? Just introductions, since the sun is setting and it is time to figure out what’s for supper. But over the next few weeks, I plan to talk about specific ways of dealing with our Soay that have worked for us in hopes they will help you, too.

Time to run. I’ll be back in a day or two to dig in and start the Soay Sheep Chronicles.

Priscilla Weaver