The Soay Sheep Chronicles

It was a dark and stormy morning last Thursday.  I was in town and Steve was running the lambing operation solo.  Delighted to find Fulmar with a big (5 lbs, 4 oz) ewe lamb in the area reserved for pregnant ewes, he jugged them and then went about the normal routine of quieting the din in the Maternity Ward proper with several flakes of fresh hay and a little beet pulp for the nursing mothers.

And then all the wheels came off.  There, amidst the nursing moms and their big three-week old lambs, was a little bitty brown thing with no distinctive markings and no ear tag – a newborn lamb.  But whose? And where was the mother?  Someone was where she did not belong.  Either the mother had panicked, jumped out of the adjacent lambing area, and lambed instead with the 3 dozen mothers and 4 dozen lambs in the comparatively chaotic main part of the Maternity Ward and lost her lamb there.  Or, the lamb had been born in the lambing area but then crawled out.  But which ewe and where was she?  Was Steve really going to have to lift up 3 dozen tails to see which ewe besides Fulmar had lambed overnight? 

Step one:  count noses in the pregnant ewe area.  Sure enough – one short.  The most likely candidate to have had a really little lamb was Gweek, and Steve did not see her.  Thinking he would find her by carrying the little lamb around the Maternity Ward sort of like a sniffing dog at the airport looking for drugs in luggage, Steve was hoping the lamb’s mother would smell her “work” and follow along to a jug.  Lo and behold, that is exactly what happened.  When Steve picked up the lamb, all the ewes but one scurried away, and only the presumptive Gweek paid any attention to the little lamb in Steve’s blue-gloved hands.  She sniffed and gurgled at the baby and dutifully toddled along right into a jug, where she (the ewe) and the little lamb proceeded to nuzzle and slurp approvingly at each other, sounds that always reassure a shepherd that all is well.  Steve’s sigh of relief probably could have been heard far beyond the friendly confines of the Maternity Ward.  Only the ritualistic checking of the ewe’s ear tag remained (remember this is a lab scientist who used to keep meticulous records of several hundred of his tagged lab mice).  I can only imagine the sound of Steve’s jaw dropping open when he discovered that the little lamb’s “mother” was not Gweek at all, but rather Tolcarne, who already had a three-week old lamb!  And not just any lamb, but one with such distinctive markings that no mother with even minimal visual acuity could mistake her for someone else.  (Never mind the universally accepted common wisdom that any ewe worth her salt can recognize her lamb 100% of the time by smell alone).  Look at Tolcarne’s lamb Buttermere.  Does she look like a little bitty nondescript brown sheep?

 What … on … earth … was … going … on?

See what I mean about wheels coming off?  Mind you, I was still in town at this point, calmly going about my non-sheep business, while all this was taking place.

Back to the pregnant ewe pen went Steve to find Gweek, who he persisted in believing was the lamb’s mother.  With no small amount of relief, Steve realized he had miscounted by one and all the pregnant ewes were in fact accounted for, including Gweek.  And that, faithful readers, left only one explanation: Fulmar had twinned, and the little one had wandered off.  A sense of deja vu crept crept into Steve’s consciousness.  The same thing happened to us last year with another little bitty lamb, Otley, who crawled out of the same kind of opening — the slot between the bars of a Shaul panel – only to be found lost and wandering around the Maternity Ward bellowing like a miniature hippo.  You would think we would learn, eh?   Would you be surprised to learn that as of this moment, there are no more slots for tiny lambs to crawl through?  Maybe.

But I digress.  Fortunately, this year’s little bitty lamb was warm and clearly had managed to get a meal off Fulmar or Tolcarne or somebody, so Steve caught the little one, took her temperature just to be sure, and put her in with Fulmar and the other twin while he pondered how he could possibly figure out whether the little one had gotten any colostrum from Fulmar during the night.  Fulmar, however, was not about to buy into the proposed new arrangement.  She wanted nothing to do with this unfamiliar creature and she proceeded to bash the poor unsuspecting little lamb against the plywood sides of the jug.  Ack!  We never want to lose a lamb, but especially not at a point where we are behind in the lamb gender lottery.

Armed with the knowledge that a ewe’s milk is always the first choice for a lamb and so is living with sheep rather than with people, Steve considered whether to try to graft the little one (since named Patterdale, which beats referring to her as “hey ewe”) onto Tolcarne on a permanent basis.  Even though Tolcarne seemed willing enough, it nonetheless seemed too risky, especially given the disparity in age between Tolcarne’s own lamb and the proposed adoptee, and also the fact that Steve had no idea whether Patterdale had gotten any colostrum.  And so, for the first time in our tenure as shepherds, we had ourselves a bottle baby. 

From then on, the process has taken on a certain regularity using well-established guidelines for dealing with bummer lambs.  Most importantly, we needed to get colostrum into Patterdale immediately.  She was approaching the 12-hour-old point after which her system would no longer absorb the critical antibodies that will protect her for several weeks until her own immune system kicks in.  Fortunately for her, in the rare cases we have lost a lamb, Steve has been diligent about milking out the ewe beginning right away and continuing for about a week, in order to have an ample supply of frozen milk for just such occasions.   In this case, Steve was able to strip some milk from Fulmar and boost Patterdale with another ewe’s frozen first milk as well.  Once Patterdale had her furnace running, Steve quickly dipped her navel, tagged her (at last!), and off to our house she went. 

Patterdale is pleased to report that her home-away-from-home, a wire dog crate lined with clean straw and a little fresh hay, and seated on the cement floor near our breakfast nook, was quite satisfactory for the first few days.

The crate continues to be her bedroom, but she spends her days in a “run” composed of a leftover set of wire puppy panels and lined with an old college dormitory bedspread in a lovely shade of ovine brown plaid.

Relying on our references of choice, Storey and Parker, we set up a feeding regime to meet the twin goals of getting Patterdale growing, but also avoiding scours by overfeeding.  She only weighed 2 pounds 4 ounces at birth (even smaller than the sainted Miss Otley), so the temptation to stuff her with ewes’ milk (never cows’ milk!) was strong.

Here’s a really short course in bottle feeding an animal the size of a very small Soay lamb, adaptable to your circumstances:  Day one, 2-4 ounces of colostrum if you have it, plus 1-2 ounces more of milk — no more.  Best to administer one ounce (that’s two tablespoons) at a time.  Days 2-6, between 6 and 12 ounces of milk total, depending on the lamb’s enthusiasm for eating.  Second week, 12 ounces or so per day.  If the lamb is getting milk but still hollers, it is probably thirsty.  Feed plain water in the bottle or heavily dilute some milk.  If the lamb starts to scour (diarrhea), cut back on milk but dilute it so the lamb will not dehydrate.  The warnings about scours in Storey and Parker are surprisingly strong.  One of them says bluntly that you can kill a bottle-fed lamb by overfeeding it, so err on the side of underfeeding it.

We have not yet faced the issue of when and how to re-unite Patterdale with her twin, mother, cousins and aunts in the Maternity Ward.  Not surprisingly, we have grown quite attached to our little house companion and Steve delights in sitting in her playpen on a chair scavenged from my kindergarten classroom back in rural Iowa that lets him get closer to her without having to sit his middle-aged carcass on a cement floor.  Molly, our border collie, sits remarkably quietly on the other side of the cage, enjoying the sight of a rescued lamb frolicking around the huge sandals belonging to the gentle giant.

Just a minute, you may ask, haven’t you left out a critical part of this report?  What was going on with Tolcarne?  What on earth possessed her to adopt the little lost soul?  Almost never does a lamb successfully poach off a ewe who is not her mother.  Remember Otley, the lamb who wandered off last year?  Only readers with truly impressive memories will recall that Tolcarne is in fact Otley’s mother, so for Tolcarne, perhaps there was a sense of “been there, done that” this time.  Perhaps Tolcarne remembered her plight last year and was simply returning the favor. On the other hand, shepherds far more experienced than we are long have cautioned that, however altruistic sheep may appear, they are not rocket scientists.  Attributing both long-term memory and a social conscience to Tolcarne seems a bit of a stretch.  We simply will never know why she, of all the ewes, took Patterdale under her care.  I guess that’s the beauty of shepherding – never a dull moment.

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 …

For generations before the internet replaced paper, boys happily frittered away countless hours on baseball cards, memorizing statistics and honing their negotiation skills.  At the same time, if they were lucky, they were introduced by their grandfathers, as Steve was, to the insanely arcane world of scorecards, meticulously recording the details of a game with their stubby little pencils and even stubbier little fingers.  No wonder Steve came up with the idea of lambing cards.
 
Like their baseball predecessors, lambing cards are both a luxury and a necessity.  You do not need them to produce healthy, marketable Soay.  But once you try them, you cannot get along without them.  And they are a lot easier to master than scorecards.  

The lambing card is nothing more than a 3 x 5 card with pre-printed information about each dam/sire breeding pair and blank spaces for the shepherd to capture the vital statistics for the ewe’s one or two lambs right after it/they arrive. 
 
You may ask, why bother with cards, why not simply annotate a list of your Soay as lambing proceeds?   We once used a spreadsheet on a clipboard and it was okay, but the clipboard had a nasty habit of falling off ledges into the muck and it was a total mess by midway through lambing.  Plus, finding our way across an 11-inch line of small type to be sure we record data for the correct ewe is exasperating, even if we remember to bring our reading glasses.  With cards, once we know which ewe lambed, we grab her card, stick it in the Lamb Kit, and we’re set to go. Besides, it is fun to shuffle through the deck in the evenings as we chatter about lambs born and yet unborn.
 
Every picture still tells a story even if Rod Stewart does not, so before I get any further wound up about lambing cards, let me show you what one looks like.  Here is our card for Cleopatra and her first lamb, Turmeric, in 2006:

A few notes on a few items.  The first box, Seq 2006-  tracks the order in which the ewes give birth.  Cleopatra was our 26th ewe to lamb in 2006.

OR119-028 is Cleo’s ear tag number.  We always double check the ewe’s tag once we get her in the jug with her lamb(s).     

BoSe in the upper right hand corner reminds us to give the ewe her shot of selenium and vitamin E supplement, 1.5cc for big ewes, 1.0cc for gimmers.

Date/time of course records when the lamb arrived.  We use the adjacent blank box to record the date and time we first work the lamb.  That way, we can decide whether there’s enough of a time lag to warrant adjusting the lamb’s birth weight for a later-acquired belly-full of milk. 

Tag.  If you look closely at a lamb’s ears (sheep, not botanical), you know how small they are, too delicate to support a full-sized eartag.  To avoid lamb mixups, we install little plastic temporary eartags on our newborns. 

Notes – our catchall.  Looking over the 2006 cards, it seems we cared most about fleece and whether a lamb was light or dark phase.  Typical are Steve’s comments about Turmeric, roughly translated as ”Brown [fleece], but dark/black at base. Dark eyelids.” 

Twins.  Luckily, Steve designed our card to accommodate the possibility of multiple births.  Last year we needed this option for eight pairs of twins, whew! 

Have I persuaded you of the benefits of lambing cards?  If so, the key is to make them before lambing starts.  Their utility lies in having them ready to grab and go.   You can design them on the computer (Mailmerge on Microsoft Word works just fine), by hand, or on your trusty old Selectric typewriter.  One size does not fit all.  Your custom-designed card will mirror your operation and will include the information important to you. 

Oh yes, if you happen to own a Roger Clemens rookie card you’d like to trade for a tan Soay ewe with great horns, give us a call — collect.

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 …