Tuesday, April 2, 2013

double the fun

A surprise in the barn at 6 am this morning:



Jasmine this time! Two ewes and one ram. The best part was that she did it all by herself, no assistance required.

Unfortunately the ram lamb is having some kind of trouble with his leg. Jasmine had triplets last year and one of them had a similar problem, as if the ligaments hadn't tightened up yet. It was completely healed within a week of his birth and I am hopeful that this little one has the same outcome. In the meantime I am keeping a close eye on him and supplementing a bit to make sure he can compete with his larger, stronger sisters while we decide if the leg should be splinted.

Speaking of supplementing, the two younger lambs from Saturday night are struggling a bit as well and I started to offer them a bottle this morning. I can't tell if Holly isn't making enough milk yet or if they are having trouble getting it out. This video from today illuminated one of the problems:



Their darn larger brother is spending all his time knocking his smaller siblings off! Check out that karate chop  move, amazing for an animal lacking arms, that neatly pops his brother off the nipple, leaving him wondering just what the heck happened, anyway.



Bottle feeding means more trips to the barn, but the annoyance is more than outweighed by the scenes of utter (udder?) contentment often found in the little nursery.

2 comments:

  1. Yay! And a video to boot! Enjoying the lamb updates. Is your ram black? Have you always had so many black lambs?

    ReplyDelete