Day 6 Welcome to Iceland Carly , no time to waste

Hello to all. My first official Iceland Blog,

I arrived on a red eye flight to ice land, Grace and Melissa picked me up at Keflavik airport at 5 am. We detoured on our way home and spent some of the early morning in Reykjavik. It was early enough that there were no people, just street cats out to greet us. We grabbed a croissant and walked around the quiet city admiring the street art, monuments and of course some window shopping.




 After grabbing some groceries we headed to the farm. I do not remember any of the ride and slept like a baby. We arrived to a long driveway, several sheep sunning themselves in the driveway, with Icelandic horses on one side and Icelandic sheep on the other. It was an amazing introduction.




















After a quick meal we rested for the evening, until our night shift. I have arrived just as peak lambing has hit, for a first night it was full to say the least. We had upwards of 18 ewes lamb in our 9pm-2am shift. We had several two year old ewes lamb with difficulty passing the horn buds through the cervix. After watching the loop technique and assisting Grace on several births I attempted a successful pull on a very large very stuck ram whose large buds made for a great resistance on the loop. His sister squirted out afterwards and mom was quite relieved for the whole thing to be over. One of the older ewes mannaged to escape our eye, possibly her sack popped before we were able to catch her, but she managed to birth in the group pen. Grace quickly grabbed the lamb and I did my first cross pen wrangle (where you grab the horns and pull with all your might in an area where you cannot let go or the sheep can get away). All the while Melissa disentangled a lamb ball and helped straighten some beautiful twins out. Later in the evening upon investigating some hungry lamb cries I found a very small ram lamb looking lethargic and crying. Upon further inspection mum was found with a very lopsided udder. I was able to milk her and found her to be displaying signs of mastitis (watery, chunky and bloody milk) With two small newborn lambs Grace and I did decide to tube the smaller lamb and add a heat lamp to the jug. He was adopted to a mom with a single later that morning as well as placed him under a lamp.