Update on Lambs

The last lamb of spring.

Now that lambing is done (for the spring, anyway), I've been taking a break from daily blogging.  I thought, perhaps, that an update on the lambs was in order - now that the last lamb is over a week old.  The last lamb, unfortunately, has had a run of bad luck.  The day after he arrived, his mother suffered a uterine prolapse.  Sami's efforts to keep her uterus in place with purse-string stitches has been successful.  Today, however, the lamb had a swollen hock - signs of a joint infection.  He may have navel ill (an infection that entered from his umbilical cord), or he may have suffered some kind of trauma to his leg.  I treated him with antibiotics, and we'll keep an eye on him over the next 3-4 days.

The rest of the lambs are doing well!  As part of our ongoing battle against footrot, we put all the ewes and lambs through the footbath last week.  We had noticed 8-10 lambs limping a bit (not unusual with all of the wet weather we've had).  The footbath seemed to help tremendously - I found only a single gimpy lamb today when I walked through the sheep.  We'll probably repeat the footbath next week.

With the wet March we had, the grass growth has been amazing.  Paddocks that were sized for one day's worth of grazing two weeks ago are now lasting 3-4 days - in other words, there is 3 to 4 times as much grass today than there was at the beginning of April.  We may get a bit of moisture tomorrow, which would help keep the grass green and growing for another week or two.