The Soay Sheep Chronicles

Here we are in the dead of winter, minding our own business, whittling away at the projects that we put off all spring and summer and fall, and our pregnant ewes have gone totally ditzy. About 6-8 weeks out from lambing, they should be settling in to a nice matronly, placid late gestation, like ovine Mona Lisas.  Not our ladies.  Along about mid-afternoon, they start acting like ninnies, jumping and stotting, racing from one end of their pasture to another for no apparent reason, head-butting, shimmying like crazy, and generally acting like complete doofuses (is that a word? or maybe doofi?).

The gimmers – yearling ewes who we have not yet bred – don’t do this.  They are off in their own pasture minding their own business and enjoying the gradually warming rays of sunshine. You would think they’d be the nutsy ones since they are basically teenagers.  But no, it’s our supposedly “mature” ewes out there making fools of themselves.  We cannot figure it out.  Maybe they are starting to feel their lamb fetuses moving?  Or somehow the lengthening days trigger a goofy response?  Whatever it is, we see it each year.  Back when we were doing AI for the first time and fretting up a storm about coddling our “special” AI ewes during pregnancy, they did the same thing, and a couple of them were carrying hormonally-induced triplets.  Scary stuff, especially when they bash each other from the side.  Fortunately, none of the ewes got up enough of a head of steam to harm their in utero lambs and none of them hurt themselves or their sisters.

I don’t even know how to look for whatever lore exists on this issue.  Imagine the Google search:  “crazy pregnant ewes” or “ditzy sheep”?  Hasn’t worked so far.  If anyone reading this post has a clue what is going on, I’d be grateful for your insights.  Otherwise, we’ll just wait it out, knowing the lambs will be here before long.

For now …

Over the last few days we have been talking with a potential customer about the feasibility of shipping several lambs by air to her next summer.  In the course of those conversations she wanted to know how much our lambs weigh when they are sufficiently past weaning to be ready to ship by land or air.  The airlines have pretty strict rules about how small “pets” must be in order to ship two animals per crate so as to keep the cost at a tolerable level.

As luck would have it, we were able to quickly give her average weights for 33 lambs weaned at 12 weeks who we happened to weigh after they had been acclimated to grass-only meals for about a month and were physically ready to leave our farm.  Here’s a quick summary of the weight data, which we hope will be useful to other breeders and potential buyers who also are considering air freight or just plain wondering at what rate Soay lambs grow.

These 33 British Soay lambs were born between April 3 and April 12, 2011, and all were weighed on August 5, 2011, when they were within a few days either way of 4 months old.  The data includes lots of twins, whose weights not surprisingly tend to be somewhat lower than single lambs, although not universally so.  The data also includes Peanut, our ram born at 1 pound 15 ounces.  If we had excluded him from the data, the average ram weight would go up about a pound.

The 13 ewe lambs ranged from 22 to 34 pounds, with a mean weight of 26.5 pounds, median weight 26 pounds.

The 14 ram lambs ranged from 20 to 40 pounds, with a mean weight of 32.4 pounds and a median weight of 33.5 pounds (the Peanut effect)

The 6 wether lambs ranged from 22 to 34 pounds, with both mean and median weights of 28 pounds.

For now …