The lambs seldom nurse and have become much more independent; some days spending more time with other lambs than with their mamas. All of the lambs are now over 60 days old. Those precious moments between mama and lamb are over until next spring. It’s weaning day. Each lamb is weighed and given advice ~ “Be brave.” “Be strong.” “Don’t let the bigger lambs pick on you.”
“Don’t worry,” we tell the mamas, “we’ll take good care of your little ones. We love them too.”
As always, barncat Davita is right in the middle of all the action, doing her best to help with the record keeping. One by one we work our way through the lambs and ewes. The ewes out the side door and in to a moving lane, going to the pasture by the knoll. The lambs will go out through the corral and on to the graveyard field. There are two paddocks and four fences in between them. Even so the next couple days are full of separation anxiety and they can be quite determined to get back together.
It is a bittersweet day, but new friendships will be formed, old alliances will be re-kindled. In a few days… all will, once again, be quiet in the pasture.
Don’t forget to comment on Thursday’s post… you could be the lucky recipient of a skein of our farm-grown, hand-dyed, millspun yarn!
Forgive us for continuing to share the same fence-line, but this view never gets old… it is forever-changing… with the farm schedule… with the seasons
Joining Life According to Jan and Jer for Friday’s Fences
Nettie and her beautiful half-border-leicester ram lamb… loved the wonderfully blue sky and that big puffy white cloud.
Joining The View From Right Here
This beautiful, pastoral scene… ewes and lambs peacefully grazing… is really quite different from the activity on the farm just a few hours earlier. Let’s rewind…
We rounded up all the ewes and lambs bright and very early yesterday morning (that was a zoo, there should have been a movie made) and brought them back to the barn for a health check-up. We herded them through a moving lane we put up on the outside of the perimeter fencing the night before. It took three of us (Thanks, Mom!), two on the inside and one on the outside. Once, again, the shepherds’ crooks were invaluable. We did FAMACHA checks on the ewes; most were twos, but we had a few we needed to worm. The lambs received their first CD-T shots, FAMACHA checks and tail checks.
We have had a problem with fly-strike this year at the tail docking area… the very thing we are trying to prevent by docking their tails. We’ve never had this problem before. (It’s probably a result of the unusually mild winter; the flies are bad already this year. Has anyone ever tried Fly Parasites?)
Everyone behaved very well in the barn and were very relaxed and quiet. That was wonderful because it made everything go pretty smoothly. After the shepherdess/s did some re-hydrating, we all headed back out the barn door, but to a new pasture. The ewes and lambs are now in the knoll pasture. It was very noisy for several hours as it took quite awhile for the mamas and little ones to find each other again. But everything has quieted down and they seem quite happy, once again.
(If you’re new to our blog, you may be wondering about the farming detail in some of our posts. We began our blog as a farm journal, somewhere we can go to quickly find… when did we do that? what did we do? We keep very detailed paper records also, but we can access this from basically anywhere… even in the field on our phones 🙂
Rosey Posey’s and Petunia’s little ewe lambs share a quiet moment amidst the chaos that is feeding time.
Joining The View From Right Here for Weekly Top Shot.