What Makes a Good Mom?

 

We’re coming up on the most enjoyable - and the most intense and important - part of our sheep year (at least for me). Sometime in the next four weeks, the first lambs of 2022 will arrive. If past experience is any indication, we’ll have a few more trickle in during the last two weeks of February - and then a flurry of lambs in early March. Lambing, for me, is like six weeks of Christmas - or maybe six weeks of final exams! I love it - and I’m glad when it’s over.

For any sheep outfit (regardless of size), lambing season requires more labor than any other part of the sheep calendar. For us, lambing season means I’ll spend my mornings and late afternoons going through the flock, marking lambs, assessing the lamb-ewe bond, and sorting out problems. And the list of problems can be lengthy:

• Is that lamb nursing?
• Can that ewe count to two?
• Is that ewe stealing another ewe’s lamb?
• Where’s that twin?
• Who does that lamb belong to?
• Do I need to help that ewe deliver her lamb?
• Are those front feet or back feet?
• Do we have enough feed in this paddock to make it till Saturday?
• Does that pair need a little extra help?
• Is there weather coming in?

The list goes on! On good days, lambing chores take about an hour at each end of my day. On bad days, they can take most of the day!

In my experience, though, solid maternal instincts in our ewes resolve nearly all of these questions. We’ve given a fair amount of thought about what makes a good mother in our system - and we’ve tried to develop an objective way to measure these qualities.

Even though we’re very small scale (we’ll lamb out a maximum of 90 ewes this year), we manage our flock like a more extensive operation might - we lamb on pasture, and we accept the fact that we can’t be with the drop bunch (the lambing ewes) 24/7. And we have no hired help - lambing is entirely up to us! The ewes need to manage on their own, as much as possible. For us, a good mom needs to:

• Deliver her lambs without assistance,
• Know which lambs are hers, and
• Produce enough milk from our grass to keep her lamb(s) warm, vigorous, and growing.

There are more details to this, obviously - a good ewe will seek a sheltered, isolated area to deliver her lambs. She’ll call to her lambs when it’s time to nurse. She’ll keep track of them at all times. She’ll stomp at the dogs - or even at me - when she thinks her lambs are threatened (the ewe pictured above has actually run me over to get to her lambs). But objective measurements of the three traits I’ve listed above - which we’ve recorded for more than 10 years - have helped us keep the solid mothers. More importantly, our system has helped us select our replacement ewe lambs - and sell the bad mothers!

Here’s how it works:

We mark our lambs within 24-36 hours of birth (marking, for us, includes ear tags, castration and docking, dipping the umbilical cord in iodine, recording birthweight, and paint marking the lamb with it’s mother’s ear tag number). We also score each ewe (and her lambs) as follows:

• Lambing Ease (the ewe gets 1 point if she delivers without assistance; 0 points if we need to provide a bit of assistance; and -1 point if we need to provide major help - if it’s breech, for example).
• Maternal Ability (1 if the ewe is up in my face while I’m marking her lambs; 0 if she can’t figure out where her lamb is; -1 if she doesn’t know she has a lamb).
• Lamb Vigor (1 if the lamb is warm, active, and has a full belly; 0 if the lamb is slightly lethargic or can’t figure out how to nurse; -1 if the lamb is dead).

We add the scores together - a ewe needs to have a combined score of 2 or better to get to stay. And we’ll only keep ewe lambs from ewes with a score of 2 or better - these behaviors seem to be at least partly heritable!

The system works! Even without penning ewes and lambs, we have very few mis-mothering or lamb abandonment problems. All of our ewes who are 3+ years old can count to 2 (at least). I’ve learned that I can usually trust our ewes to do the right thing! Studies in the UK and elsewhere confirm that this system can cut labor at lambing significantly - I’ll need to look up the exact numbers, but one study I read suggested that one shepherd could care for

nearly twice as many lambing ewes on operations employing this kind of system.

Obviously, there’s a danger in using any single-trait selection system. What if the genetics involved in maternal ability also mean the lambs don’t produce high quality meat or wool? Maternal ability isn’t the only thing we consider when we make our culling decisions - we look at pounds of lambs weaned, foot health, other behavioral traits, and a number of other factors. But focusing on what makes a good mom has helped make lambing season my favorite time of year!