A trio to start the lambing season

Mary and her three triplet lambs. 

Lambing season 2013 has started at Brambleberry.
 Mary, one of our original ewes, had a set of triplets on Feb. 13.
We had intended to wait longer this year before having lambs due, but like other years an amorous and determined ram decided last fall that fences were no obstacle for him getting his job done.
He apparently did it well in the one day that he escaped because we've also had twins and a single birth in the past four days, with several more looking ready to birth as well.
Saturday morning our Valentine weekend guests were lucky enough to witness a live birth.
So far all of the lambs have been boys, which is OK, since these are all crossbred lambs and not animals that we would keep for breeding stock. We would prefer  that our purebred sheep will have ewes.
The weather has been cold, with overnight lows close to zero, but the lambs so far are doing fine. We hand-strip some mother's milk and tube-feed our lambs just to make sure they get some colostrum which is essential to their survival.
Of course it also means that we're not getting much sleep, but that's part and parcel with lambing season.

Sheep breeding season at the inn

(Colonel Fitzwilliam, left, and Mr. Darcy, right)

September 20th began the same as every other day. I sat in the first window seat of the library, drinking my morning tea as I watched the sheep. I saw one of the Scotty girls riding Fanny or Emma – I couldn’t tell who from that distance. I thought it a bit strange but never gave it another thought – until I went to water the sheep later that morning.
To my alarm I saw that Mr. Darcy was cavorting around the barnyard with the girls. He had broken through the fence where he, Mr. Bingley and our new Suffolk ram Colonel Fitzwilliam were pastured. I realized it was Mr. Darcy, not one of the Scotty girls, that was on top of the sheep I saw earlier that morning.
I was extremely displeased because he had bred one of the Suffolk girls who were intended to be a part of the Colonel’s harem. I had been looking forward to getting some nice Suffolk lambs this coming year from the Colonel and what should have been his girls.
Mr. Darcy is a purebred registered Scottish Blackface ram and he has his own flock of that same breed to mate with. He has no business interfering with the Suffolk girls. I managed to get most of the ewes into the barn and chased Darcy into the pasture where I locked him out.
I found Chris’s father and Josh, our son-in-law, who were able to help fix the fence and get Mr. Darcy back where he belonged. Through the fence he continued to sniff anyone who would approach. Some of the ewes were definitely in heat and he was very determined to get to them. I feared some of the girls would be so obliging as to smash their behinds right up against the fence to help facilitate the illegitimate breeding.
The rams were all moved to the next paddock back to put some distance between them and the ewes.
Many sheep farmers would be breeding sheep at this time – we did last year. But this year we were deliberately delaying, hoping for our lambing season to begin mid-March, after the birth of our first grandchild who is thought to be due around March 3.
I don’t want to be busy playing midwife to sheep giving birth when the baby is arriving. Due to the unfortunate coupling I witnessed, I know at least one lamb is due on February 15.
We managed to keep the ewes safely separated from the rams for three and one-half more weeks. We separated the two flocks, placing the Suffolks in the lower pasture and the Scotties in the upper pasture. Then the appropriate ram was led to each pasture. The Colonel was fitted with a marking harness with a red grease paint type crayon. Whenever he breeds a ewe her backside is marked with the crayon, which eventually washes off. Each day we look for a new red butt, making note of it. The lambs are due five months later.
Last year, our old black ram bred Kitty less than one minute after being led into the girls’ pasture. A new crayon really colors the ewe well. Kitty’s whole backside was covered by the red marker. I had to laugh the next morning when I was preparing breakfast and an anxious guest told me over the café doors that he had just come back from a walk on our creek side trail – and he was afraid one of our sheep had been attacked! He thought her whole backside looked as if it were covered in blood!
I smiled as I confirmed to him that, yes, Kitty has been aggressively attacked yesterday – but not by a coyote. It was the ram. (I think he was a little embarrassed when I explained it all.)
Colonel Fitzwilliam was fitted with the harness and Mr. Darcy’s chest was manually chalked up with the crayon because we didn’t have a pin to hold the crayon for the other harness. Unfortunately he is too wild to catch every other day to mark him.
A sheep’s estrus cycle is around every 14 to 17 days. Three weeks in and our two best Suffolks – Kitty and her daughter Fanny – have not been marked, so I’m left with the awful suspicion that Mr. Darcy has impregnated both of them and the offspring of our two prize ewes will be crossbred mutts.
The colonel is only seven or eight months old so it is his first season working as a stud ram. We only have eight Suffolks he has to service. He has a gentle disposition with the ewes, nickering as he sweet talks them into complying with the call of nature. His father was of a gentle disposition which is a big part of why I bought him, hoping he would inherit his amiable demeanor.
Mr. Darcy, on the other hand, is much different. Unlike his namesake, he is no gentleman. When finally released into the Scottie girls’ pasture, he paced up and down the fence dividing the two pastures, pawing and snorting like a Brahma bull. He panted heavily like a rabid dog with his mouth open, his tongue hanging out. His idea of courtship with Marianne was to bash her violently into submission and have his way with her.
The guests are intrigued and fascinated with the goings-on in the barnyard and delight in counting red butts. The first five ewes (after the Valentine lambs) are due around March 9 or 10. Twin lambs are usually up to five days earlier.
Last weekend our daughter Jessica and her husband Josh visited. They brought a DVD copy of their baby’s sonogram, which was neat to be able to watch! (They’re so much clearer than when we were expecting Jessica.) And, oh yeah, it’s likely now that the baby could arrive around March 7 – just in time for lambing season!

The weather has been perfect for making hay.
If you have animals to keep year-round, you need to feed them in the winter. Hence the need for hay.
Chris and his Dad put up more than 800 bales so far, which is about 3/4ths of what we estimate we will need to feed the sheep when the pastures are dormant.
Hot weather that drives most people inside to air conditioning is perfect weather for drying hay. There always seems to be a direct correlation between the hottest days of the summer and the amount of hay that needs to be baled.
Sometimes when people complain about the heat, I (Chris) ask them if they've ever worked in a hay mow when it's 95 degrees outside. I usually get a strange glance and people quickly shift the topic of conversation.
Mow, which rhymes with cow, is the place in the barn where the hay is stored. When you're getting close to the top of a metal roof with very little air movement, 95 degrees outside seems refreshing.
In the old days - for me, that's early 1970s - baling hay used to require one person driving the tractor and one or two people riding on the hay wagon to stack the bales as they came out of the baler. We used iron hooks to grab the bales and stack them. Sherry also grew up on a farm and had to stack bales or pick up them in the fields before putting them in the barn.
I still have a scar on the top of my head from the day when the load shifted and my brother's bale hook found my skull instead of a bale. There is speculation the injury went far deeper, which explains why I became a journalist.
We became a more modern farm in the mid-1970s when we got a kick-baler, which fired the bales into the wagon. Most farmers today use big round balers, requiring heavy equipment to move around the bales.
On a good day we'd put up about 1,200 to 1,500 bales of hay. My cousins sometimes helped out.
In the old days between loads my brother, cousins and I would head to the milk house and consume copious amounts of water, sticking our heads under the faucet to cool off. We'd sprawl out on our makeshift furniture - bags of feed - and contemplate how many more loads we'd have to do that day and argue about whose turn it was to wash up the milking equipment or who had to stick around to help milk the cows while others went swimming in the creek.
Baling also is a chance to cleanse my pores and stack hay bales rather than pushing around paperwork. It also gives me a sense of satisfaction that although summer has officially not yet started, we're already on track to feed our animals this winter.