The Soay Sheep Chronicles

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 …