The Sun was out today!

Today was a beautiful day in Borgarfjordur.  It has rained nearly every day for a month , hailed, and been quite windy so a beautiful day, one where only a sweatshirt is needed and not a jacket is a big deal! The birds have begun to chirp and the grass if finally becoming lush and green. Melissa and I continue to power wash our shifts away.

Here is a picture of Melissa in our everyday garb.Face shield is not optional, unless you want to pick sheep poop out of your teeth...












 Here is a clean pen! Awe yeah













I continue to rub mint cream on our lopsided mastitis ewe. Here is a picture of her udder. The right side is actually the normal side. The larger side is still sensitive to the touch and needs to have the pressure relieved/milked out. She is on a cocktail of antibiotics and seems to be improving as today she tried to kick me less haha.




Here are some photos from inside the barn. This first on I call. Motherhood. Our leader lambs. Eating hay and looking at me as if to say, we are adults now.



Below are two beautiful pregnant ewes still to give birth.






Here are some more pictures of lambs and mums around the home fields. The landscape looks so fake in pictures. No matter how long I stand outside, I do not get used to this view.





    I love this picture. haha

  The- Its time to stop ramming my udder move




A yearling and her lamb enjoying the warm gravel



I spent the afternoon with the horses. A new foal has arrived( the black one). When I go visit the horses I approach the pregnant mares first, and offer them some second cut timothy. Once they have inspected and approved of my presence I move closer to the mares with foals. This seems to be a good initiation into the herd. Today the foals slept and I felt lucky that the mums allowed them  to continue to sleep while I snapped pictures.

Iceland gets so much rain that the fields must have drainage ditches set into them. Here is a cool picture of a bridge to allow the ewes and lambs to cross from field to field.

  A beautiful day here at Hestur. I feel so blessed to be here. 

Day 24: A Yellow Thing I Don't Recognize

This morning felt... different. It took me a few seconds to process, but it was because there were actual sunbeams coming in through the windows! When I stepped outside, it felt pleasant and refreshing, instead of like being buffeted by hurricane force winds/rain/hail. I wasn't quite sure what to make of it all. I could even see the actual sun and not just light filtered through clouds.

The sheep have stopped banging on the doors. Things are good. The silence and sun almost feel weird at this point.

This one ewe really seems to like the gravel pile. Every time I walk by she looks at me like: "This is MY gravel pile, go away!"

While the weather held, I helped Snaedis and Helgi prepare some more group pens to put outside. Once all the lambs had gotten dewormer and the ewes had been checked for mastitis, they were moved outside in groups of around 8 ewes at a time, plus lambs. I actually hardly noticed this going on, because at that point I was finally pressure washing! When pressure washing, we have to wear a raincoat + rainpants+ boots+ face shield because there is a lot of spray that comes back and hits us. And that spray contains a lot of poop. I still really enjoy getting the pens clean, though! It would be better to not also get sprayed with liquid poop, but hey, you can't have everything. The face shield doesn't keep it all out, so I keep telling myself it's probably good for the immune system.

My trusty weapon. The solid piece of poop/cement in front is the trophy I kept after a hard day's work.

While prepping everyone to go outside, a ram lamb and his mother and sister were held inside temporarily. This ram lamb acted just like a regular lamb, except he kept holding his head at a weird angle, looked a little confused, and could not seem to straighten up. He received an extra dose of vitamins once symptoms began appearing, which did not help, so it is likely he received brain/nerve damage from a ewe slamming into him. Normally, ewes push other lambs away if they get too close, since milk is costly for them to produce, and they do not want to waste it on a lamb that's not theirs. Lambs typically get the hint pretty quickly and stick to their own mom. Occasionally however, a ewe is mean and violent, or just strikes an unfortunate spot and injures the lamb. We monitor group pens right after introduction, but sadly we cannot see and stop everything (some ewes are sneaky). The ram lamb was initially able to nurse, but his balance declined alarmingly quickly and the decision was made to euthanize him since there was no indication he would improve instead of continuing to grow worse.

Something more cheerful: a lamb nibbling its mother's horns, hoping for milk.

I don't remember planting that.

A ewe and her little mini-me.

I also witnessed something I've never seen before... a ewe chasing her emerging placenta like a dog might chase its tail! Why she decided to do that, I'm not sure, but I hope I'm not a jerk for having laughed at it.

The barn now consists of a lot of empty pens to be cleaned, two pens of pregnant ewes still holding on to those lambs, and a handful of group pens and younger lambs still in jugs with their mothers. It is very quiet now, except for whenever they hear the grain bin open. The leader lambs are still inside with us, as their mother has some slight health problems that are still being treated, but the lambs are climbing and exploring EVERYTHING so the sooner they get outside the better, even though we will miss them. The leader lamb's adoptive mother continues to handle her little leader sheep with admirable aplomb and still seems totally up to the task of raising them. She is such a champ.

Lil' Bean hugging her siblings with her cast. They really are quite close.

A proud mother.

Gull (in a rare moment of rest) and siblings.

Our little leader lambs! (Also in a rare moment of rest)

Dyri the cat and lambs outside.

Curious lambs through the laundry room window.

The steps rams still like the steps and keep bringing friends over.

A researcher stopped by and this ewe examined his car very closely. When I walked by, I got examined closely instead.

Day 23 ( I like power washing poop)

Melissa and I now work opposite schedules, rotating around the clock. No matter if it is light out, hailing, windy ect. I can sleep whenever!

Lambing has certainly slowed down and our jobs now are more of a balance of taking care of special needs moms and lambs, cleaning, and watching for ewes yet to give birth. We have made decent progress power washing and scraping the larger group pens. It is actually awesome...SO nice to see the poop washed away!  I have been picking away at the middle barn where the jugs are larger and filled with packed heavy hay which comes out in carpet like pieces. I have been singing to the sheep while I pitchfork away my 2am- 6 am shift, the ewes look at me like im crazy but the lambs like it.

I arrived for my pm shift and found a mum who had recently graduated from the mastitis group again inflamed and with a lopsided udder. She was more than unhappy to have me hand strip the water out of her left side to relieve the pressure, poor girl. Its hard to communicate that you are only trying to help when you are causing pain.. I made sure to apply mint cream around the udder afterward to sooth the inflamed tissue. Her ram lamb is the best. He always tries to comfort his mum when she is in a panic. She has been segregated again we are hoping she mends quickly before her ram lamb jumps out of the jug.


Melissa had a difficult birth where a ram came backwards. He is slow to nurse and overall is a little quiet. I spent some time helping him attach and nurse. Frustrating to put the teat in his mouth and have him scream and spit it out, but after about half an hour we made some progress.

Little Bean( the small lamb) is doing great!! She loves her moms low hanging teats and has gained double what she used to weigh in less than a week. The splint I have been adding  I removed and her leg looks much better. A day with out the splint and I will re-evaluate if she needs one again. Regardless her and her siblings will remain on the home fields where they can be monitored.

Several moms still have to many lambs that need at least one of them adopted out. But the rest of the pregnant ewes are holding on. Until then we are monitoring their stomaches by feeling to see if they have a full belly, if not they are topped off with some milk replacer. This is a tricky balance because you don't want to turn them off of the teat, so giving them just enough is a hard amount to come up with.

I have not taken many pictures within the barn, but here are some pictures from the drive to  Reykjavik( when we dropped Grace off) Grace come back..

 Here are Graces eyebrows and the terrifying tunnel under a river. It goes so deep into the ground your ears pop. NOT MY THING.



And also some pictures of the landscape and some lambs in the home field.










Another day about to begin. It is 11 pm. Time for a nap before my 2-6am shift begins.

Day 22: They Want In

"Knock knock"

Yes, day 22. I'm not sure where 21 went, blogwise, but this post is for day 22, according to the Great Notebook of Chicken Scratch I write in every night/very early morning. Even I occasionally cannot understand what I wrote afterwards, but I am always careful to get the date and number of days here correct (and legible). It is the only way to combat the weird time distortions Iceland and/or the sheep apparently emit. Actually, my bet is on the sheep. They are something else.

It has been mentioned in previous blog posts, but the weather here continues to be a little unpleasant, to say the least. I didn't know any better, and assumed Iceland is always like this in the spring, but have been informed that no, it is a distinctly unpleasant year. On two separate occasions, Helgi has forlornly shown me pictures of the fields from this time last year, when the sun was shining and the grass was thick and green. Those hot springs Carly mentioned in her last post? We were hailed on briefly while we were soaking there (actually, can't complain about that one, the hailstones were small and it was kind of weirdly refreshing). Anyway, the weather is bad, and long story short, the sheep want in. I thought they were okay with using the house as a rain/windbreak, but yesterday, the kicking/knocking began. Usually there are a couple of ewes and their lambs who stay by the door, but very suddenly there were more. And it sounded like they were trying to bust in. Also, I think the little ram lambs on the steps pictured in my last post live there now.

Seen here with their little buddy that they invited over.

"Just open the door."

Amassing the horde.

I've been using the guest shower in the basement, where the windows are just below eye level for the ewes. When I got out of the shower last night, I noticed a ewe was staring at me through the window. We locked eyes, and she baaed. It was frankly a little unnerving, and I have no idea how long she had been watching me and I don't know, judging my shampooing technique or something.

Hopefully the weather improves soon.

Anyway! I wanted to talk about the strange little creature I call Gull, after the bird, because that is a bit what she sounds like.

Gull ended up in the orphan box in the most recent scramble to adopt out lambs from unwell mothers. The plan was to place the newborns from the next ewe that gave birth with two ewes who happened to have recently given birth and lost a lamb. It was a good plan, until neither ewe decided to cooperate (normally, most ewes soon to give birth and those that have recently given birth cannot pass up a newborn). We found a mother for Gull's brother, but she was out of luck. Even her own biological mother was too distracted by her new adopted babies to want her!

Not sure why; she is very cute.

I have never seen a lamb like Gull before. She is insatiable. She screams any time she is not sleeping or eating. As a day old lamb, she decided at one point that I had not fed her enough, so she jumped out of the orphan box and went looking for a snack. We have since placed Gull with a loving mother but she still lets out a majestic seagull cry whenever she sees me. In Icelandic, gull means gold, so it's a doubly appropriate, since she has reddish/gold pheomelanin marks on her head, legs, and tail.

What is that...?

Oh.

Size comparison of Gull and Lil' Bean (if you were wondering, Gull is rather large for a newborn).

Other than Gull's cries, it was a fairly quiet day. I went to milk a ewe for some extra colostrum and was very surprised to find milk the color of strawberry puree in the bottle. Normally, blood-tinged milk occurs in ewes with mastitis, particularly when they have had a teat unclogged with a hollow needle (sounds brutal, but sometimes it is the only way to unclog a teat). This ewe, however, had no firmness, redness, or swelling, and I had not felt any blood clots or other oddness when milking her. We will simply have to watch her to make sure her lambs are getting enough to eat and her udder does not get worse.

The assist.

This is her grain face.

The pressure washer was finally here and I was eager to begin cleaning (yes, really), until Helgi went to test it and found that it was broken! I'm told that when Snaedis, Grace, and Carly went to go pick it up, it was quite heavy and they almost dropped it at one point. Carly yelled "No! This is Melissa's dream!" and they managed to pull through, which makes the failure of the pressure washer all the more sad. Oh well, the poop on the floor gets to stick around another day. It is a dry, cement-like mixture that contains some shed wool, and is nigh impossible to remove without damaging the boards underneath. I almost wonder if it could be used as a building material.

Night shift was uneventful for me, just one old pro of a mom who squirted the babies out with ease. Shutting the feeders at night has helped keep the lambs at a reasonable delivery size, although it is a tough balance between making sure the ewes are getting the proper nutrition, and making sure the lambs are neither too large nor too small. Carly's shift was more eventful. She redid Lil' Bean's/Nano's split (still used to karate chop adoptive siblings) and then had to deal with a yearling whose unruly babies tried to exit at the same time.

Pregnant ewes wishing they could get at the hay.

Kruna's lambs and friends.

Triplet puddle.

Lil' Bean and her adoptive siblings.

This one knows I have the power to giver her hay but don't. Explaining it is for their own good does nothing.