From time to time, we hear it said that working newborn lambs is a whole lot of fuss and bother and not worth the effort. For us, it is just the opposite — one of the sweetest, most relaxing, and confidence-building times with our sheep.

A couple of days ago I took my trusty new pocket video camera with me while Steve worked one of our brand-new lambs, a little ewe we haven’t even named yet. I hope you will enjoy this tranquil scene of a contented shepherd, contented ewe, and mostly-contented lamb all together in their jug.

For now …

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 …

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 …

When we have a listless lamb, one who is not up and nursing robustly pretty quickly after birth, we may need to call a vet, but before we do, we take advantage of the best, most cost-effective diagnostic tool we’ve got – the plastic digital  thermometer from some place like Target or Walgreen’s waiting there in the Lamb Kit.  The thermometer often can confirm what is wrong even though the lamb and ewe cannot.  In the rare circumstance where we have had lambs in trouble, the first thing we do is take its temperature.  Odds are the lamb is cold and that almost certainly means he is not nursing at all or not nursing enough to get the bonfire in his tummy going.  If we can get him eating, he should come around.  And if not, we know the first thing the vet is going to ask is, “what is the lamb’s temperature?”  So that is where we start, and here is an example of an inexpensive thermometer, this one available from Target. 

In our experience, lambs with temperatures between 102.0 and 104.0 Fahrenheit are almost certainly okay; they are eating; they are turning milk into fuel to keep them warm and healthy.  Last year we had almost 40 lambs and with two exceptions, their temperatures when we first assessed them were just fine.  The two lambs in distress each had temperatures lower than 102 the first time we checked them. In both cases, it was urgent that we get the lambs up and nursing and pronto.  Cold lambs do not live very long, period.  Remember the blue gloves?  We put them on and took the lamb back to the ewe’s udder and did our darnedest to persuade the little guy to eat.

We had mixed success.  One of the lambs seemed lethargic after the first four hours and his temperature was 101.8 degrees, not alarmingly cold, but low enough to check on him frequently.  Although we did not actually see him nurse, when we came back to check on him a couple of hours later we could tell by feeling his belly that he had gotten a little milk.  This was confirmed by taking his temperature, which had risen to 102.6 degrees.  He only weighed 3 pounds 15 ounces at that time, so we were relieved to see such a wee one fighting hard to make it, and he did.  By 11 hours, his temperature had risen another .2 of a degree and from then on he was fine.  

The lamb we lost, by contrast, had a temperature of only 100.8 the first time we assessed her shortly after birth, critically low.  Although we immediately gave her NutraDrench, tube-fed colostrum-laden milk stripped from the ewe, and put the lamb under a heat lamp, she did not rally, never could get up and nurse on her own, and never showed any signs of being able to survive.  Her temperature fell to 100.4, then 99.6, and she died.  It was our first face-to-face experience with the concept of “failure to thrive” and a blunt reminder that even with the renowned hardiness of Soay sheep, not every lambing has a happy ending.     

A note about thermometers.  They do not feel any better in the lamb’s little bum than they do in yours, so give the lamb a break and apply just a smidgen of KY to the tip of the thermometer.  You could use Vaseline as well, but KY works better if you make and use one of Steve’s Pretty Good Goo Syringes.  Read on.

After the first time Steve wasted the better part of a tube of KY trying to squeeze it out onto the tip of the thermometer, he rigged us a nifty applicator by fitting a 6cc syringe with a 16 guage needle, breaking off the tip of the needle, smoothing the rough edges of the now-blunt end with emery paper, and filling the syringe with KY.  With the needle guard back on, we can keep our Goo Syringe around forever.  It also comes in handy when we are applying eartags to lambs and adults.  

For now …   

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 …

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 …

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 …