General Discussion & Chat: Coffee and...part 9 :-D, 1 by MaryE

MaryE wrote:
Hello, anybody home? I'm just stopping in quickly before I head outside to tend the greenhouse quickly, then get down to the barn on my way to town just to see what is new. Last night there were no new lambs on my check, so I did a quick check of those in the barn and came home. I get a chuckle out of the barn notes. We keep a barn chart that has information on the ewe, the ear tag color and number, face color, hour of delivery, and notes such as " good attentive mom", "wouldn't follow" (the cart with her lamb in it), and the one that cracked me up last night was "homicidal" for an apparently overprotective mother. Some get nicknamed after cartoon or movie characters, or because of their attitude. After a couple of days in the barn with people around them most of them settle down, but there are exceptions. Yesterday I thought one of the yearlings was going to jump out through the window in her pen, it was open and even if it hadn't been she could see daylight and would have opened it if we hadn't backed off and let her settle down.
This lamb is "tiny" who is a surviving twin whose twin was twice his size. You can see the window in the background, similiar to the one I referred to in the above paragraph. His mother has so much milk we are taking some of it every day to feed the less fortunate ones when we need it. Milk and especially colostrum is harvested any time we can get some because often we need to tube feed a weak or chilled lamb. The excess can be frozen. Milking a sheep usually requires two people, one to hold the ewe against a wall or fence, the other on knees with a jar doing the milking. It can get to be a close contact sport at times!

This message was edited Mar 8, 2005 10:06 AM