A Lambing Journal - Day 27

I was pretty drained last night when I finally got home.  I knew I should probably go back out during the night to check on everyone, but I was so tired, I didn't wake up until about 6:30 this morning.  I hoped that moving everyone into a more sheltered location would be sufficient.

I drove into the ranch with some trepidation this morning - I expected that I might have some problems.  To my surprise and delight, everyone was doing fine.  There are still a few lambs that may have problems, but the sheep seemed to handle the wet and cold fairly well.

I had to pull another lamb today.  His mother (a maiden ewe) was pretty clueless, so he ended up coming home. So far, all of our lambing problems have been lambs that have presented correctly (front feet and head first) but that seem to be "locked" at the shoulders.  The terminal ram we used this year is pretty big - maybe too big for our first-time mothers.  Sami and think we'd be better off breeding all of our maiden ewes to the Blueface Leicester rams in the future - their lambs seem to be much easier to deliver.  Some of our mothering problems are probably due to the lambing problems, too.  We'll adjust our system next year.

Here are some photos that the Mountain Moms and Little Folk group sent from their tour last Sunday.