Riversdell

This morning brought us another ram lamb from Venus (WDT24), another of our yearling does. This time, fortunately, mom is being quite attentive.

It was a busy weekend. On Sunday morning March 23^rd we discovered a brand new lamb with the flock. Once again, it was being ignored by it’s dam, Lucky (WDT21). Lucky is a first-timer and it has been almost two months since there were any newborns with the flock so we guess that she simply did not know what to do with it. Later in the day we were able to catch the dam and milk some colostrum out of her for the wee one (named Bandit due to his facial markings.) in this picture he is on the right at two days old; that’s Li’l Dill on the left, his three week old half brother.

On Sunday afternoon we set up a temporary crowding pen and separated all the lambs from the flock. The lambs are from 42 to 53 days old and we believe they are ready for weaning. Here they are in the barn with our oldest bottle lambs, waiting for their hay and grain. There are three ewes and four rams. We have agreements to sell the three ewes and Spotswood, the bottle ram, as breeding stock, leaving us with three pasture ram lambs and two bottle ram lambs available for sale.

The snow is finally melted enough that we were able to get the kids and the two bottle lambs into an outside pen to frolic in the sun. The lambs have really grown! The lambs are going to stay in this pen for awhile so we had room in the barn to move our five-day old bottle lamb out of the kitchen. Our plan at the moment is to put the kids out during the day and milk their moms in the evening, then let the kids be with mom overnight to nurse.

Plum had a single female kid this afternoon around 2:30. By the way, Sorghum’s week-olds are one male, one female, giving us a total of five females and two males. That may be the last of kidding for this season, but we have two younger does who may have settled. Guess we’ll just wait and see. Eric disbudded (dehorned) five of the kids today, a most unpleasant farm task. If you are interested in the technique, Fias Co Farm has a good page about it.

… Another bottle lamb. Yesterday at the evening flock inspection we discovered another new little lamb away from the rest of the flock. We tried placing him where the rest of the flock was hanging out, but the mom, Lilly (WDT14), one of the younger ewes we purchased last year, had not bonded with him and was ignoring him. Since it was late, and cold rains were predicted we had no choice but to bring him inside. So, just when we have gotten the first bottle twins down to 3 bottles a day, we are back to six a day with this new one! Knock wood, after his first twelve hours on this earth he seems to be doing fine; we have him in a pet carrier next to the woodstove. In four days we can shift him to four bottles a day and at that point we will move him to the barn. The snow has been melting slowly and the path to the barn is a muddy icy mess and we just cannot see a 3 a.m. bottle trip to barn when the same trip can be made to the kitchen! Keep your fingers crossed.

Prongs had one kid late last night, right after we had managed to remove Pistol Pete from her stall back to the still very snowy pasture. That brings our current kid count to six.

Sorghum keeps a wary eye on one of Glory’s kids as hers get a little nosh. Being a first time mom, Sorghum is more nervous than Glory about keeping her kids apart from Glory’s.

Sorghum kidded about an hour ago. Here is the first one, Sorghum is busy cleaning the second. We’ll go a gender ID in a bit when we bring Sorghum her reward: a pail of warm water with molasses. That’s the good news. The bad news is that we lost one of Nellie’s little ones yesterday. She was lying off by herself and we could not get her to drink any milk.

Nellie had her fist set of twins yesterday around 3 p.m., both females. First Glory, now Nellie. Sorghum will be next, we think, but then again we thought she would be first!