My apologies for not updating this blog in FOREVER! Life at the farm is always up and down, and this winter we've had our share of both. Last fall, I was trying to find a ram to breed my ewe Orange with. I didn't find a ram that I could afford to buy in a timely enough manner, but I was fortunate and purchased 2 gorgeous, huge rams from the Asheville Farm late this winter. One ram is named Emerson, and he's an enormous white ram with a full and soft fleece. The other one is named Thoreau, and he is a black badgerface ram (has light colors above, and dark colors on his belly). Both of these rams are polled (no horns). If we decide to breed our ewes in the fall, we will have plenty of polled rams to choose from - Thoreau, Emerson, and Aries, one of our ram lambs from last summer who sired two gorgeous ewe lambs this year. We certainly went from famine to feast with the genetics of our polled flock! Thoreau and Emerson both are close descendants of the Icelandic ram Flekkur, and they show it.
The sad news this winter was that we lost 2 of our most promising ram lambs. One started to fail to thrive in the fall, but he didn't show any specific symptoms for us to treat. One cold morning, we went out to the barn to find him dead. I was terribly saddened.
What made things worse was that a few weeks later, the ram lambs escaped from their pasture while we were away for the day. One of them ate something (I suspect a bucket of birdseed) which gave him terrible acidosis. Acidosis is a condition in sheep where they eat something that causes the bacteria in the rumen to go crazy. The rumen contents start to foam up, cook too hot, and start to rise up into the sheep's throat. When we found the poor lamb, he was foaming at the mouth and unwilling to move. We took him into my studio to try to force feed him some medication to try to get ahead of the foaming chemical reaction taking place inside his rumen. Unfortunately, he was barely surviving - coughing, sputtering and already hoarse and inhaling rumen contents. He would cough and thrash around and kept getting weaker. Finally, he had a coughing fit, inhaled more foam into his lungs, and died instantly. It was simply horrible to witness, especially when there was not much I could do to help. We had called the farm vet, but there was just not enough time. Even if the vet had come, acidosis has a poor prognosis. Even if the sheep recovers from the foaming, he may contract pneumonia from inhaling the rumenal contents, or his rumen may have been damaged from the severe chemical reaction. Either of these situations would most likely result in a prolonged illness and death.
The good news is that we have had 5 very healthy and hardy lambs this spring already. We are ahead of ourselves this year - The ewes started giving birth March 30th - 15 days before they started last year. These 15 days will give the babies a great head start before the long hot days of the Virginia summers. Lambs grow so quickly that in these two weeks they will have doubled in size from birth. Even better news - we've had four girls and one boy. All of them are white except for one girl who is black and white spotted. Apparently, the sheep deities were listening earlier this spring when I was complaining that I didn't have enough white fleeces to get processed into yarn! We have one ewe that should be lambing soon - she'll have brown moorit babies. I'm hoping she'll have a boy so that we'll have another moorit horned ram.
If anyone wants to see the babies, email me and we can set up a visiting day. There's nothing in the universe much cuter than an Icelandic lamb.
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