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 …

Some of the indications that a Soay ewe is about to lamb are seen only in an experienced ewe.  If she is going to twin, she usually looks like a propane tank.  Even if carrying only a single lamb, an older ewe will develop saddlebags and a waddle.  The yearling ewes (”gimmers”) who are lambing for the first time exhibit more subtle signs of approaching labor, oftentimes surprising us when a lamb appears.  They never have a big soft bag for several days or even several weeks before the lamb arrives, as do their matronly colleagues.  In our experience, gimmers do not bag up until a few hours (at most) before they drop their lambs, and even then, their bags are hard to spot.    

Leave it to Tolcarne (who happens to be the first British ewe born here) to lead by personal example and remind us shepherds of our limitations in the lamb forecasting department.  It was not a dark and stormy night, quite the opposite.  Friday afternoon was a peaceful time in the Maternity Ward, with nothing but the sound of 50 ewes eating for two and the muted thunder of 120 little hooves doing laps and wind sprints to break the silence.        

Without warning, out of the corner of his eye Steve noticed The Kick, a tell-tale sign of a ewe in labor.  We had not even been certain Tolcarne was pregnant.  She had no poochy belly and no bag, but there she was, lying on her side, vigorously kicking straight out horizontally, not at all the langorous stretching they do all the time, pregnant or not.  I have never been able to capture The Kick on camera, but I promise you, when first you see a ewe executing The Kick, you will recognize it as something new, something different.  It is unlike any of the other gestures in the Soay repertoire.

Most ewes proceeding through labor get up and down a number of times in a restless Birth Dance.  But not so Tolcarne.   In obvious discomfort, she just lay there grunting and whimpering, frightened and in pain.  Steve managed to nudge her into a jug, concerned about her immaturity and inexperience and wanting her in a relatively clean, dry place with no distractions.  And in fact, she did have an uncommonly hard time getting her lamb out, to the point that Steve took the nearly unprecedented step of intervening, gently rolling back the skin of her vulva just enough to ease it over the top of the lamb’s skull.  Unlike the body of the lamb, which can be squeezed out and is quite malleable, its skull and front feet, which come out together, do not give at all.  Anyway, once Steve helped get the lamb’s head moving, the rest of the package plopped right out in a few seconds.

We were startled.  Given how much exertion it took Tolcarne to give birth, we could not believe how small her lamb actually was.  And Tolcarne had so exhausted herself that she lay immobile for a long 5 minutes.  This is most unusual for our ewes, who either birth standing up or immediately get up, licking and gurgling, and get right to work on the lamb.

Fortunately for the lamb, Steve had rubbed her nose just enough while she was coming out to break the membranes, allowing our miniature Soay creature to start bellowing like a miniature Soay bull or, more accurately, a miniature mezzo soprano.  Gilbert and Sullivan, here we come!  At first we worried that we had a preemie on our hands, with the attendant lung problems, in particular the possibility that her lungs, which are collapsed in utero, would not convert to “balloon mode,” as must all babies right at birth.  To our relief, we concluded a preemie with lung problems could not possibly make this much racket.  It was a very encouraging sign and just plain funny in an otherwise somewhat tense situation.

Tolcarne, on the other hand, was not as impressed as we were with her squalling, slimy bundle of joy.  Her life had just taken a dramatic, irreversible, and from the look on her face, not entirely welcome turn:  “This is not the career path I had in mind.” 

Other than dipping the cord in iodine, we elected to leave Tolcarne alone for the post-birth cleaning and first meal.  Steve does not like to “work” lambs with gloves on and it seemed too soon to handle the tiny lamb with bare hands.  By this time Tolcarne had roused herself and was starting to get down to business, so we decided it was safe to leave the two of them alone for their ancient, instinctive rituals.  

Back to the house we went for our own dinner (Note to self:  do a blog posting on the realities of human meal planning during lambing).  Turns out we need not have worried about this little lamb’s resourcefulness.  When we returned to the Maternity Ward to work her it was dark.  All forty-plus lambs, having found their mothers, had with one exception turned in for the night.  You can guess who the holdout was.  Once again she was bellowing, but this time from amidst the general population of bedded-down ewe-lamb pairs.  Somehow she had managed to crawl out of the jug through the bars of a Shaul panel and had marched right out into the fray, where I found her surrounded by – in relative terms – elephants and dinosaurs.  No baby Mozart this lamb; she was in full Wagnerian coloratura, waking everyone up with her high notes.  

Back to the jug she went.  Up went cardboard, plywood, anything we could find to secure the four sides of the jug.  We were not about to lose a precious little British ewe lamb to sleep-walking.

Working her started uneventfully enough — Good temperature (102.4), easy tagging, injections without undue wiggling.  Then came the weigh-in.  Even carrying her back to the jug could not have prepared me for seeing a mere 2 pounds 6 ounces register on the scale, almost a full pound less than the smallest lamb we have ever had, and at least two pounds smaller than average.  Where did all that lung power come from?  How could she possibly have had the strength to start a cross-country trek at the age of two hours? 

Now it is three days later and little Otley (named for a small town in Yorkshire) is to all appearances doing just fine.  She has not managed to get out of her cardboard-lined nursery again and she gets up and feeds regularly.  Little mama’s brand new bag also is functioning just fine, thank you. 

We remain concerned that Otley’s small size may present problems over the next few weeks, but at this point, she is every bit as robust as her larger cousins.

Meanwhile Tolcarne has, to our great relief, concluded that motherhood may compare favorably with a career outside the home after all.  And besides, with Otley’s musical talents, she may yet support her mother in Tolcarne’s dotage.   

For now …  
 

A number of regular and usually supportive readers, including my brother Jim, have expressed skepticism here and elsewhere about the notion of “jugging” and where it fits in the greater scheme of things.  One observer questioned the very existence of jugging, suggesting in polite tones that perhaps I made the whole thing up as a literary foil.

Make up jugging?  I don’t have enough imagination.  But in the interests of family harmony and to dispel any lingering doubts, here is an actual jugging dance featuring Gala and her twin lambs, Darrowby and Thirsk, a few days ago.  After a suitable musical introduction, let’s say 8 bars with a trumpet fanfare and a drum roll, Steve begins the dance by donning his blue gloves, picking up the lamb(s) and inching his way backwards towards Gala’s assigned recovery room — her jug de jour.  

Steve tries to keep the lambs no more than about a foot from Gala’s nose, to be sure the olfactory link is not broken.

Even at this early stage, it is apparent Gala’s lambs are not light phase (tan) as she is, but aren’t they cute?

Almost all our ewes hesitate at the gate into the jug, torn between following their lambs and the fear of being “trapped.” 

The lambs always – no exceptions — win out!

With the gate shut and the sun shining, Gala can go back to the business of cleaning and feeding her little brood in relative tranquility.

Technical note:  The photos have not been subjected to PhotoShop (not that I’m against PhotoShopping, but I couldn’t have improved on this set even with Adobe’s help).

Naming note:  We waited patiently as our RBST/British lambs arrived one by one, saving Darrowby and Thirsk, the literary and literal names of James Heriott’s town, for a particularly nice-looking set of twins.  Now I can write to my new friend Anne, who I have ignored for several weeks, to report on the litany of lambs with melodious names from Yorkshire:  Appleby, Bainbridge, Boltby, Borrowby, Chopdate, Follifoot, and the list goes on, each temporarily housed in a jug and each welcome at Saltmarsh Ranch.

 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 …