The Soay Sheep Chronicles

If your first Soay sheep are about to arrive, you may be a little apprehensive about whether you have the right “stuff” and the right setup for your new flock.  There are a number of detailed “how to” accounts online and in books, but here is a rock bottom list that will get you started.  Details in subsequent posts. 

1.  Food.  Grass and forage in the summer if you are lucky enough to have grass all summer, either naturally or because you irrigate.  When the grass gives out, switch to good quality grass hay.  Sheep do not need anything as rich as alfalfa hay and you should not feed it to your rams anyway.

2.  Water.  A stock tank will do just fine.  Where we live, they come in tall and short – get the short one.  If you only have one or two animals, you can make do with a big plastic bucket secured so it will not tip over.  Sheep need access to water 24/7/365, which means if you live where water freezes in winter, you need to make provision for that sooner or later.

3.  Mineral.  Get sheep-appropriate granulated (not a block) mineral from your farm store.  Cow mineral contains too much copper and is toxic to sheep. Put a pan of the sheep mineral where the animals can get at it 24/7.  Keep it out of the rain, preferably in a container up off the ground so it will not get kicked over or pooped in.

4.  Treats are an easy way to persuade your sheep to follow you. Use just a little in a bucket (so you can shake it and make a sound the sheep recognize), but do not give it to the sheep on a regular basis or they will follow you all the time and become a nuisance.  Any sort of treat will do:  ewe/lamb mix, beet pulp (soaked overnight), COB (corn, oats, barley mix).  See what is on order at your local farm store.  Caution:  never give more than a few particles of a grain-based treat such as COB to the rams.  The only times Soay need supplement beyond grass or hay are when you are flushing them or they are gestating or lactating ewes, and all that comes later.

5.  Fencing to keep your new flock from running away.  You need mesh with fairly small holes, e.g., 2 x 4 no-climb or similar, or else a solid wood barricade fence.  Sheep can get their heads stuck in ordinary field fence trying to reach for grass on the other side (remember, “the grass is always greener … “), and lambs can crawl right through.  If you are buying both genders in order to breed later in the fall, you need two separate areas, and a view block if they adjoin.  You do not want your new ram(s) bashing down your new fence(s) to get at your new ewe(s).

6.  Shelter.  In the summer, any structure or area with a roof  that is big enough to let the sheep to get in out of the sun.  A tarp over a section of the fenced area will do in a pinch.  In the winter, depending on your climate, the sheep will need an area they can retreat to in heavy rain or snow, and in severe winter areas, the shelter will need sides to cut down on wind.  If you have a barn, all the better.  The sheep do not need heat, just protection from rain/snow and wind.

7.  Predator control.  Unless you are sure there are no coyotes or mountain lions in your area, protect your sheep at night by (1) bringing them into a barn or other enclosed shelter that coyotes can’t get into; (2) procuring an experienced livestock guardian dog or llama that can live with the sheep outside 24/7; or (3) electrify your fences with a hot wire on top and on the bottom (coyotes will dig under).

8.  Medical.  Locate a veterinarian who will treat sheep and if you can, get to know him or her before a medical issue comes up.  Buy a rectal thermometer and keep it where you can find it, since it is your number one ally in diagnosing whatever may ail your sheep.  If you do not already own a large airline dog crate (hard plastic, slatted sides for ventilation, we’ve all seen them), go out and get one so you can take a sheep to the vet if necessary.

9.  Book learning.  If you do not already own either Storey on Sheep or Ron Parker’s The Sheep Book, go online to your favorite book purveyor and get yourself one of them to read in your spare time (see below).
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10.  A comfortable chair.  How else will you be able to sit and fritter away hours watching your irresistibly adorable Soay?

That’s enough 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 …

Will Rogers once said, “The best doctor in the world is the veterinarian. He can’t ask his patients what is the matter–he’s got to just know.”  Will Rogers was right, but his vet almost certainly relied on a good thermometer as a substitute for a patient interview.  

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 …