Day 4: Between a Ewe and a Hard Place

A white wagtail, known as 'mariuerla' in Iceland and "Ahhhhh! So cute!" by me.

We began the day with a lovely serenade from this little guy on the front porch. At the barn, I found the yearling resting comfortably under the heat lamp while Xena and Oolong cuddled together for warmth in the corner.

Not the face of a sheep who is sorry for her actions.

Xena and Oolong have it covered, though.

Grace and I found ourselves dealing with an interesting situation later. Grace spotted a ewe in labor (so nothing out of the ordinary yet). Normally when a ewe is found to be in labor, we shut all the aisle doors except for any leading to the jug we have prepared for her, and then move her out of the group pen. The ewe then follows the corridors and any blockades we have set up to direct her, and ends up in the jug (in theory). This minimizes the time the ewe is handled, which is easier on everyone involved. Anyway, Grace had caught the ewe and was moving her out of the pen, when Myla, the farm's Border Collie, decided she wanted to "help."

Pictured: Agent of chaos, and her kong toy.

Next thing we knew, this is what the aisle leading to the jug looked like:

I tried to encourage the poor, corridor-wide, heavily pregnant ewes to go back as gently as I could, initiating a backwards shuffle-waddle from the line of ewes. Most of them turned around when they reached the corner.

Most.

We were heartbreakingly close to the group pen when the ewe in front decided she could shuffle-waddle backwards no more. She stopped and could be neither dislodged nor moved around. We tried calling Myla to fix the mess she made and she strangely had no interest in fixing it despite being very eager to help us earlier. It took Helgi wading in and basically picking up the lead ewe and turning her around to unclog the corridor.

Later, I found myself assisting a yearling with a fairly large lamb. I got him out, and felt for the position of the next, which was fine. It seemed much smaller, so I figured I'd let the yearling work on that one on her own. The next thing I knew, the tiniest lamb I'd ever seen squirted out with one push, spraying me with amniotic fluid. The yearling expressed her thanks for my help by licking the fluid off my face and hair while I was tending to the babies.

I named her 'Pip' because 'Pipsqueak' was too big a name.

Pip's a feisty little ewe, but she had to be bottlefed initially because she was too short to reach the udder! We weighed her later and she was a mere 2.5 lbs (1.1kg).

Grace managed to help a pretty mouflon ewe (Stetja, although I'm not sure I spelled it right) deliver two massive babies (around 12 lbs/5.4kg each!), a ram and a ewe. All of them took it in stride. When we came back for our next shift, however, we found the ewe lamb weak and lethargic. We treated her for watery mouth, but she passed away two hours later, a horrible lesson for me on how quickly this disease can kill a lamb. As she had been vigorous at birth, nursed, and received a preventative antibiotic like all the other lambs, the best explanation Helgi could come up with was she was so big, the colostrum she got wasn't sufficient for her body size. Even though hours had passed since her labor, Stetja was still willing to adopt a lamb from another ewe who was having trouble caring for it, because she's a champ.

We didn't have much time to dwell on the unfortunate situation because it was a crazy night of lambing. We think Helgi jinxed us earlier by telling me how to deliver lambs from weird positions, because lambs in weird positions is exactly what we ended up with. I dealt with my first case of tangled lambs (Grace says it's like trying to untie a knot you can't see, and also everything is sticky). I still don't have a mental image of how the lambs were positioned, but I picked one of the heads I could feel, found the front feet, and went from there, and that worked. Grace meanwhile was trying to move a ewe in labor and ended up with the contents of a waterbag in her boot! She didn't let that stop her, and didn't complain about it for the rest of the shift, either. It did move 'sock day' higher up on our laundry priorities, though.