The Soay Sheep Chronicles

Having now dithered for a full two weeks trying to figure out a way to introduce our lambs, I have given up on the notion of an orderly, grown-up recitation of the lambs as they arrive, complete with mini-pedigree and a clever phrase about each one.  My downfall was watching the little woolies cavorting about in the Maternity Ward.

Duh – how about sharing some of that fun instead of yammering about lineage?  You would prefer that?  So would I, at least until Steve finds out and makes me go back to serious heritage questions. 

For three years straight the lambs have shown us by example precisely when the lambs are ready for their first taste of freedom from tagging along after mama every waking moment.  Imitating the big girls, they jump into the portable hay wagon (a.k.a. garden cart) and play with the hay, pretending to eat with all the earnestness they can muster.  Sometimes the game ends when too many of them move to one end of the cart, upending it with a great flurry of mock-horrified lambs.  Here’s the squad crowding in, all of them only 3 or 4 days old.

Meanwhile, one would think that a day-old lamb would be content with her mother’s milk, but not our Borrowby.  Does she call to mind the old adage, ”the grass is always greener”?  I shudder to think what she’ll do when she gets old enough to go after real grass.   

I sense a theme developing.  Here is Bowie checking out the buffet line in our Shaul feeders.

Mind you, the lambs do not really eat solid food for some days yet, but by golly they are going to have their chewing and sniffing skills honed when the time comes.

Our first lambing year I was surprised to see the lambs engaging in what looked for all the world to be teething.  Hadn’t even thought about it, but no harm done.  Even if I had stocked up on those hard rubber gadgets human babies use when the Ryecrisp runs out, they would have gone to waste.  As Catalina demonstrates, the lambs much prefer the edges of the portable hay wagon.

Not all the lamb activities are food-oriented, although it seems that way most of the time.  Here is little Bisbee looking up at Llucy, pretty clearly thinking to herself, “you are an awfully big sheep.  Will I be that tall when I grow up?”

Someone asked us the other day if there is a measurable difference in the sizes of Soay.  Catalina again assists with a demonstration.  She is the biggest lamb we have ever had, weighing in at a hefty seven and a half pounds right after birth.  Contrast that with Arivaca, the smaller lamb in this picture, who weighed only five and a half pounds after his first feeding.  Even Arivaca is large compared to our average lamb weight, which is comfortably under five pounds.  And besides that, Arivaca is four days older than Catalina.  With the steep growth curve these lambs experience in their first three or four weeks, the difference in size is even more pronounced.   

There is always a game of King-of-the-Mountain going on in the Maternity Ward. Who knows which of the little ruffians are in this picture, but they are mighty grateful to Steve for arranging a “safe” place for them to test their climbing skills.  Of course, part of the game is to fall off and scramble back up for more.

In the midst of all this folderol, long-suffering Llucy was trying her darnedest to help get Sandpiper’s second twin, Cascabel, back to his mama.   Sandpiper had done a spectacular job of getting the two lambs out and cleaned off, but then Cascabel simply wandered away.  In this picture, Sandpiper is quite a ways off to the right with her first lamb, Calabasas.

Appearances to the contrary, we do try for a modicum of scruffy gentility here at Saltmarsh Ranch, including in the Maternity Ward.  Nothing captures this goal better than watching Amado and Arivaca out for an afternoon promenade with their mom, Willow. 

Are you persuaded that decorum reigns on a Soay farm?  Don’t be.  Tranquility, like fame, is fleeting.  Within minutes of a peaceful walk, all of the lambs are likely to congregate and take off like Kentucky Derby contestants.  As Steve put it when he saw the next picture, you cannot remain grouchy in a lamb pen.  Involuntary belly laughs are the order of the day.  Here is the first lap at Saltmarsh Downs.

Not surprisingly, as fast as the little juvenile delinquents organize a game, they collapse for brief naps.  I’ll close this post with an endearing little lamb asleep under the hay feeder.

May your lambing be this much fun and then some.

For now …

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 “lambing” it is, date and estimated time of birth, date of working, gender, etc.

A little KY or vaseline on the thermometer

and voilá – in goes the thermometer.  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.  They 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 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, 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 posting 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 Amado and his twin brother Arivaca headed up to the feeder so mom can get refueled 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 …