Lambing Season
Lambing season is the most exciting time of the year for a shepherd! Mark your calendar for 21 weeks (about 5 months) from the first date you introduced your rams to your ewes; you can expect lambs any time from this date forward.
What supplies do you need on hand for lambing season? You can follow the instructions in the sheep books and buy a multitude of items, but with Soay sheep the chances are high that you will never need them. Even from the beginning I didn't buy everything on the list, and never used most of it. We interfered too much in the beginning, in our novice and over eager efforts to be "helpful." We have since learned to stand back and watch and keep our hands to ourselves! The ewe will give birth, and if you are watching, it may seem like a long and anxious time, but it's a normal course of events. The ewe will clean up her lamb, softly grunting and "talking" to it all the time. You may wonder why she doesn't let it nurse immediately, but her most important task at this time is to get that lamb cleaned up and dry. As long as the lamb suckles within a few hours of being born, it's fine.
The lamb will often stand up within just minutes of being born, and will begin looking for that udder. It may not find it immediately, and you may feel frustrated at its clumsy efforts, but restrain yourself; it will find it without any help from you. The ewe will then hunch her back up, allowing easier access to the udder. The first milk to come from the ewe in the first days is called colustrum. This is an all important first food, giving many nutrients as well as antibodies from the ewe to protect the lamb from disease.
The afterbirth may come out within a few hours. The ewe may eat it, and she may not. Don't be disgusted; it's Mother Nature at work... the placenta is full of nutrients, and by eating it, she also cleans up any evidence of the birth, making it harder for
predators to find her new lamb. But just as often the ewe will not eat it, and that's
fine, too. On rare occasions you may have a ewe that doesn't drop her placenta for
days. DO NOT PULL ON IT! If it's so long that it's dragging the ground, you may catch the ewe and trim (don't pull!) the part that touches the ground, but don't trim more than an inch or two above her hooves. It is thought that the weight of the hanging placenta will help it pass. If you are tempted to pull it out, remind yourself that you will cause more damage to the ewe than if you left it alone. Pulling on the placenta will very likely cause internal infection from a broken piece left behind in the uterus, and you may end her lambing career right there; she may never lamb again after that. So, no matter how disgusting and smelly it might be, leave it alone. The longest I have seen a placenta hang there was 4 days on a Shetland ewe, and 2 days on a Soay ewe, and it always always always dropped out on its own.
So what equipment do you really need? Binoculars and a camera with lots of zoom! And plenty of self restraint! You can buy the stuff listed in the books, and it may come in handy. But we believe that if a ewe requires assistance in birthing, she's not worth keeping for breeding stock. Soay sheep are hardy, and if breeders begin assisting them in birth, and keeping lambs from those ewes as breeding stock, it weakens the breed and soon we will have sheep that have just as many problems with lambing as the commercial white sheep. Soay sheep have survived for millennia without assistance from man. Let's not change that!
What do I do at lambing? I watch, never tiring of the miracle of birth. I take pictures if I have my camera with me. Once the lamb is standing and is mostly dry, I will catch it to determine whether it's a ram lamb or a ewe lamb, then I release it back to its mother. I no longer trim the umbilical cord, and I no longer dip it in iodine. Who is doing this for the Soay sheep on Soay and Hirta? Nobody! So, neither do I. It's not neglect; it's a desire to keep our stock at least as hardy as the wild flocks on Soay and Hirta.
I make sure I catch the lamb within a few hours of being born, otherwise they are often too fast to catch! Then I enter the information on my lambing chart, including the date of birth, the length of gestation (if I witnessed the mating of that ewe), the sex of the lamb, whether the lamb is a single or a twin, it's color, any unusual markings, and it's new name.
Between 2 months of age and weaning time, we put an ear tag in the ear of each of our lambs. This does not hurt them; the tag goes through a fleshy part of the ear, rather like your own ear lobe.
Ram lambs need to be removed from
the ewe flock no later than 3 months of
age, or they can begin breeding. If you
are keeping your sheep in a Wild Flock
manner, then this is a non issue for you
and you don't need to do this. For
people who prefer to keep track of
lineage, 3 months of age is mandatory
for removing ram lambs.
Be sure to register your Soay lambs
before the end of the year. If you do
not register your Soay sheep, you are
not helping to preserve the breed.
Their genetic information becomes lost.
Help promote and save this breed by
registering your lambs each year.
Someone wrote a question on a message board this year, and the following was my response on April 10, 2006:
"Do I assist in the birth of lambs?"
Wow, I hope not!
It's really easy to get sucked into that "gotta help 'em out" mentality, mostly because of our human need to "help." But Mother Nature really does know what she's doing, and if you have done your part as the shepherd regarding feed and care, then it's very unlikely that your help will ever be needed.
These sheep have been giving birth for thousands of years without us. Do you really want to create yet another helpless breed of sheep that can't lamb without human intervention?
We "helped" with one of our first lambs (we couldn't resist that human urge) and a few hundred lambs later, we know to sit on our hands when that urge rears its ugly head.
Ewes that actually do require assistance (and their resulting lambs) do receive help from us, but they are mentally marked for culling (cull = meat) later in the year. Our goal is to preserve the hardy traits of this breed, rather than make them dependent on us.
Ronda, Greener Pastures Farm
And following are a couple articles I have written over the years about lambing:
The Magic of Lambing Season
by Ronda Jemtegaard of Greener Pastures Farm
Several years ago I was awakened by the sound of a ewe in distress. It was lambing season and the calling I heard had the distinct sound of a ewe that had lost her lamb! I threw on my coat and boots, grabbed a flashlight and went outside. It was 3 o'clock on a clear February night and I was easily able to follow the sights and sounds to the scene in one of our pastures, where I found my son's black Soay ewe had given birth. Another ewe, whose time was imminent, apparently felt that the newborn lamb should be her own, and was making a loud and determined attempt to take it. I shooed her away, and inspected the lamb, which had been cleaned up and was not quite dry. I determined the gender of the new lamb with the aid of my flashlight, then stood nearby until the bawling ewe left. It was apparent that the new mother was in labor again with the second of twins, but she didn't like my flashlight, so I turned it off. I could have gone back to bed; there were no problems and I was not needed. But I couldn't bear to leave this incredible scene! I was only about 6 feet away, and the time passed quickly while I enjoyed the peaceful clear night, the moon, the absolute quiet that daytime never affords, and the occasional soft grunts of a ewe in labor. After some time I heard the slippery sounds of a lamb being born, and then listened to the ewe quietly talking to her new lamb while she cleaned it up. All I could see was a black silhouette of the ewe and her lambs. Even so, it was magical to listen to this miracle of life and be right there as it happened. Once I sensed that the ewe had cleaned her youngest lamb up sufficiently, I turned on my flashlight just long enough to determine the gender of the new one, then walked back indoors, secure in the knowledge that both lambs were being well cared for. A mere hour had passed by since I had dashed outside, but it was one of the most magical hours of my life!
Monet
by Ronda Jemtegaard of Greener Pastures Farm
New shepherds (and shepherdesses) make mistakes; it's a fact. Hopefully we learn from them, and go on to mentor other new shepherds and shepherdesses. In that spirit, I am sharing this story:
In one of my earlier years of owning sheep we had an especially cold and windy day; the kind that knocks your breath right out of you. I noticed that one of my youngest ewes had given birth to her first lamb out in the middle of the pasture. I had hoped that she would lamb inside the barn as many, but not all, of my ewes do during our worst weather. (Please note that we have not ever lost a lamb to cold weather, so why I was concerning myself about this can only be attributed to that "worried mother" syndrome.) I rushed out to the pasture, trying not to get blown over myself, and picked up the literally "blown-dry" newborn lamb. There is a method for luring a new mother into a barn or lambing pen, in which the lamb is held close to the ground, and the shepherd backs slowly toward the barn or wherever you are trying to lure the ewe, and the ewe will follow her baby to wherever you want her to go. Because ewes know that lambs don't fly, they are likely to "lose" the lamb if you just pick it up and walk upright with the lamb in your arms, and the ewe will then run back to the place where the lamb was last on the ground. If this happens, go back to that place and start over, by bending over, holding the lamb close to the ground, and backing toward your destination.
I tried this method again and again, but no matter how many times I tried, the new mother would follow only as far as the barn door, and then run off. I finally decided to remain in the barn, and let the lamb call for its mother, hoping that would do the trick. The mother would come only so far, calling for her new daughter, and then back off. After a good ten minutes of this, listening to the barn creak frighteningly in the fierce wind, I came to the conclusion that since I was more than a little concerned about remaining inside this creaky barn (what if it was blown down?) that the ewe must surely know what she was doing. "Okay, you win." I said to the new mother, though I doubt that she heard me over the gusts, and I brought her tiny daughter back to her. I watched them for a time; they continued to bond in the usual manner, and I ducked my head down and headed as best I could back to my own creaky house. I named the lamb Monet (it was the year I used artists names) and the buyer was told the story of this hardy little American Soay lamb born on such a harsh spring day! Years later, Monet is his favorite ewe. The moral to this story is that Soay ewes know best, even first time mothers.
