sleepless nights!

Well, I'm still here but haven't had much time to post as lambing has got into full swing. Six of the ewes having triplets have lambed and so far four of them are coping fine with their lambs. We aim to leave them as long as possible but if a lamb slips back we take it off (pet lamb!!). Toffee lambed a few hours before Pearl who was having a single so I tried a wet adoption where you put the adoptee lamb with the newborn and the birth fluids and rub them well together and hope the ewe is convinced she had two lambs. It is sort of working but she is not 100% sure so until he is really strong to keep up with her and the other lamb, they will stay in an individual pen.
Ten of the ewes and their lambs went out for about a week but because of the awful rain that group has come back into one of the sheds for a day or two, as we prefer the lambs not to slip back because of cold, wet weather and also because their is still not much grass so the less it is trampled in the better.
Most of the ewes have plenty of milk but one or two have suffered with the long cold winter and are taking a couple of days to come into milk - in the wild these lambs would die as they need colostrum within an hour or two or they become hypothermic. We have got through two tubs of artificial colostrum already.
Our busiest weekend approaches with over thirty ewes to lamb between now and next Tuesday.

A trauma for Eve (and Me!)

I got up this morning to discover Eve, who had been fast asleep at 3am checks, trying to lamb but the lamb had not presented his legs and so was stuck with just his head out. Quick work by me and Kev got her tipped slightly upside down to make a bit more room and I managed to get one of his legs forward and deliver him - and despite his ordeal, he was fine. After half an hour, she gave birth with just a little help to his twin. All are doing fine, and after the first day, Eve, Gizmo and their lambs moved into a bigger shed together. They can all go out as soon as there is some grass for them - maybe it will start to grow this week as the weather is a bit warmer and some rain is forecast for Thursday.
All the other pregnant ewes have had their vaccinations (which helps to give the lambs extra immunity to several diseases via the colostrum, the first milk) and there are now 32 ewes in the main shed. Unfortunately one of the shetlands who was having triplets in about a month shed her lambs so she has had to go on antibiotics and be isolated from the others for a short while and I have my fingers crossed that it was just an isolated incident due to improper development rahter than the start of an abortion storm. Our flock is vaccinated against toxoplasmosis - one cause of abortion passed via hay, straw etc contaminated by young kittens/cats. However, we have not yet vaccinated against enzootic abortion, but also who knows what bacteria etc the sheep were exposed to during the floods which is when they were in the early stages of pregnancy.

All has gone quiet again.

Gizmo and her babies are doing really well - she has recovered from the mastitis and I took them to the cow pasture yesterday for a couple of hours but there cant be any grass as she frogmarched them round the field a couple of times at full speed (well, Gizmo's full speed, but it was quite fast!). It was cold in the wind, though so I brought them back in after a couple of hours. Nobody else looks like lambing yet, but on last night's 3am check I found the girls had been 'playing' with the water supply and pulled a joint apart so there was quite a lot of water gushing into the lambing shed so I had to turn off the stop tap until a more sociable hour when Kev could fix it. We brought five more sheep into the shed today, ones having single lambs, although one looks quite enormous so we'll have to watch her in case the scanner got it wrong as she hasn't had much feed and so would maybe struggle if she did have twins.
Mother's Day brought a lunch voucher for Lyzzick Hall including a bottle of bubbly from Matt, and a set of Rachel's beautiful hand-made jewelry, so they are both in the good books at the moment - long may it last.

Little cuties

More pics of gizmo and babies

What a day!

Well, Gizmo gave us our very own 'lambing live' on Tuesday night. We went down to check her just before 8pm and she was just popping the water bag out so we gave her half an hour to get on with it. Rachel was over the moon - in eight years of lambing sheep no lambs have ever arrived on her birthday, so this was a first. However when we went back to check it was apparent that things were not going to be straightforward, as she was only trying a little bit and then sort of giving up. An examination quickly revealed that the first lamb was lying sideways on to the womb entrance and although I could feel the front legs of the next lamb I couldn't find the head or tail of the lamb whose back and ribs I could feel and I couldn't move him out of the way. We immediately decided to whizz her down to our vet as this was beyond my expertise and with three live lambs I wasn't for taking any risks. Anyway, all's well that ends well and the vet expertly turned him round and got him out closely followed by a brother and a sister. Gizmo is a wonderful Mum and got them dried and well fed really quickly.

The next morning, however, I noticed a cold area on her udder - the dreaded mastitis - so as well as the antibiotics that the vet had given her for the difficult lambing, I gave her a different one that helps fight mastitis. She is also still getting a daily dose of her high energy 'medicine' which she loves, lots of her favourite mix (Jim Peet's 321) and some soaked sugar beet shreds.

Just to complete the hectic twenty four hours, one of the young ewes was discovered with a slight prolapse which had to be cleaned and popped back inside and then she was strapped into a harness which she will wear for the next month until she lambs. This will hopefully stop her straining and so stop it happening again. She is now Mathilda's new companion so that I can keep a close eye on her.

The horses, or more specifically Buster, also got in on the act - he came in last night with possibly the most swollen head I have ever seen - you could not see his eyes at all, he was slightly trembling and his breathing was elevated - a classical allergic reaction, but heaven knows what to, the vet suggesting an insect bite as the most likely cause. He was given a steroid injection intravenously by James from our vets. He was very sweaty through night but was much better by this morning.

Hello to Jamie and Holly

The guests in the holiday house in February half term included Jamie and Holly, who absolutely loved the horses and very kindly sent us a lovely hand-drawn picture of Sonny and Fizz once they had returned home - thank you both very much, Fizz loved it and added it to his fan mail collection - make sure you keep up-to-date with his activities by following his blog too.

It's a waiting game

I have spent the last week on tenterhooks as Gizmo approaches the end of her pregnancy. She is absolutely huge at the moment and last week we separated her and her Mum Mathilda (for company) out from the others in the shed and put her in a little pen of her own so that she did not get knocked about too much in these last few days. I have also started giving her a small measure of twin lamb formula which helps maintain her energy levels at this late stage. She is supposedly due on Friday but does tend to lamb early so watch this space!