Working a baby Soay sheep – the Lambing Kit in action

Now comes the fun part, working with our lambs instead of endlessly talking about them!

I already used up the “every picture tells a story” line, so let’s just say one of our cooperative new lambs and my trusty digital camera will show you how we work our newborns.   Remember the Lambing Kit?  As soon as our first lamb arrived, the L.K. swung into action.

These pictures star Amado, a twin American ram born last week.  Ready?  Here we go.

Setting the stage:  Steve sits down on the folding camp stool in a small enclosure, picks up Amado, and waits a couple of minutes while mama ewe Willow gets accustomed to sharing her lamb.  The goal is to do everything calmly.  As soon as Steve upends Amado, we learn he is a ram.  I run the portable database (i.e., the lamb card), entering what number it is in the seqeunce, date and estimated time of birth, date of working, gender, etc.

A little KY or vaseline on the thermometer and voilá – in it goes.  Do you think the look on Amado’s face suggests he knows what’s coming?  Yuk.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, you need not take a healthy lamb’s temperature.  We do it because we are numbers nuts and also to confirm what the lower end of our “healthy” range is so we will have an indicator of when we have a lamb in trouble.  Amado’s temperature was 102.5 F; he clearly had gorged himself  before we worked him about 9 hours after he was born.

Next Steve puts in the baby eartag, two little bitty pieces of green plastic stamped with a number and applied with a task-specific tool that looks like a paper punch.  We get these tags from a supplier in the U.K. and they are really useful.

The baby ear tags allow us to identify our lambs immediately, preventing any possibility of mixup.  If you are the keeper of the Open Flockbook Project, as Steve is, it simply will not do to mix up lambs. The little white strap around Steve’s fingers is neither a lamb tether nor a designer collar; it holds the arms of the applicator together in the Lamb Kit to prevent iodine spills and general chaos.

By informal convention, Soay rams have adult Scrapie eartags in their right ears, so Amado’s baby tag goes in his left ear and will stay there even after we install his adult tag (right) when he gets his first tetanus shot at 8 to 10 weeks.  More on ear tags and the federal Scrapie programs in a later post.

I forgot to take a picture of Amado getting his BoSe and vitamin shots, but that’s the next step in the process.

Then into the sling goes the lamb for weighing. The scale above the sling is a Rapala fish scale, 50-pound capacity, and the sling below it probably came from Jeffers. I plan to talk about lamb and adult weights in a later post, so for now let’s just say it is a completely optional step in the process. If you are new to Soay sheep, let me put Amado’s weight in perspective. He weighed 4 pounds 11 ounces at the age of 9 hours. That’s a half gallon of milk and change.  When people brag about their easily-handled Soay, they mean it. These sheep are small.

The only part that sometimes upsets the lamb is The Dipping Of The Cord. Remember the “ahem” caution I gave you in the iodine post earlier?  As you can see, with ram lambs your aim has to be good:

Steve’s middle finger points to the umbilical cord, his ring finger points to the little guy’s tiny pink penis.

We take one final precaution before we turn the lamb(s) and ewe loose to do a ceremonial turn around the Maternity Ward.  Also not a mandatory procedure, but certainly sound husbandry, we give a shot of BoSe to the new mama for good measure, just in case she became selenium deficient with her in utero lamb filching it from her. 

Pressing the ewe to your chest as Steve is doing in this picture eliminates the need to plop the ewe on her rear, the conventional way of working a sheep, when her vulva and her udder are still very tender and vulnerable.

Here is Amado reuniting with Willow in a fun bunch of fresh straw we had put out for Venus (remember Venus, she of the broken leg?).

And to complete the storybook, here are thw twins headed up to the feeder where mom is refueling before refueling the twins. See why we use eartags to identify our lambs?  Can you tell Amado and Arivaca apart?  We can’t unless we pick them up and check their numbers.

For now …

Tags: baby lamb ear tags, iodine lamb navel, lamb kit, lamb scale, lamb temperature, lamb weight, selenium deficiency