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WANNABE STUFF
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APPRENTICE STUFF
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MASTER STUFF
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And for our former harrowing adventures, there's always the archives
Sunday, March 21, 2004
In which we finish the story
Sorry to leave you all hanging like that, but I needed a little time to tidy up my life after (yes, AFTER!) we finished lambing. We finished the Tuesday of my last 2:15 AM entry, with both of our remaining two ewes rallying cooperatively. Sally checked on the ewes at 5:00 that morning and stayed for an hour; by the end, she noticed that one of the two was starting to paw the ground and gaze wistfully off into the distance. I came up around 8:00, and the two of us hung out with the sheep and waited for something to happen. As luck would have it (NOT!), this was the day of a freak spring snowstorm: we got a few inches, and everything was a howling winter wonderland throughout that very cold, very long day. The first ewe had her lamb by about 10:00: she had a single little ewe lamb, very pretty, whom we later named Cordelia. The ewe took a little time to allow the lamb to nurse from her, which was an enormous worry to us at the time. But we barely got the two of them into the jug when the final ewe (one of our favorites--she has a speckled face and a lot of personality) went into labor. She had her first lamb (a little ram) in fairly short order. The second one took a little longer coming out, but nothing that seemed at all outside of the realm of the acceptable. But, much to our shock and horror, the ewe lamb that finally was born was dead. Very large, very normal looking, but very, very dead. Sally worked hard on her, slinging her, doing some quasi- mouth-to-mouth and CPR, but nothing worked. It was extremely sad, because we had both been looking forward to this particular ewe's lambs, because it *was* a ewe, and because it was a little more interestingly marked than any of our others. But the only bright spot was the fact that this death is helping me to stop obsessing quite so much about our first dead lamb: this time we were right there, we were in a sheltered barn, and nothing about the delivery indicated an emergency. The lamb must have breathed in amniotic fluid at the wrong time, and there just doesn't seem to have been anything we could have done to prevent that. If I keep being involved in sheep breeding, I can see that I'm going to have to become much more philosophical about life and death--and, given the fact that death is inevitable for all of us, that's probably a good attitude to foster. And there's a peculiar symmetry to it all: we started with the death of one of two twins, and that's how we finished, and we had some unseasonable snow with which both to begin and end lambing.
So, mopping up the story, Cordelia's mother accepted her by early evening, after we left them alone in their jug to bond. We named the little ram from the last ewe Frex (Frex is a character in WICKED, a novel and a musical that both Sally and I recently read and saw. I'll give a free LittleHats T-shirt to the first person who writes in with the connection between WICKED and the sheepdog community. Good luck to all contestants!) Now we can finally relax and enjoy our lambs; all of them are out of their jugs now, and they're about as cute as cute can be, frolicking and playing with each other. I'm about to leave for an Alasdair Macrae shedding clinic, and I know that I'm *really* going to miss the lambs. *Sigh*. But the clinic should be fun, and hopefully I'll learn a lot. I'll let you know in my next entry--think good thoughts about me!
Tuesday, March 16, 2004
In which we make up for months of not updating the blog
Just a quick note to say that, as of 2:15 AM, we have no new lambs. I'm sure we'll have our busy day tomorrow, since it's supposed to be miserable and snowy. We're not very lucky people (and considering that we privately think of our little leased field as Lucky Ewe Farm, the irony is magnificent!). Anyway, g'night folks! (One of the other joys of lambing is the way it makes one savor simple pleasures, like sleeping. And I'm totally ready to start savoring!)
Monday, March 15, 2004
In which we manage not to faint
I did it! That is, ewe number 11, our little watched pot who kept me up all Saturday night and left me feeling very foolish, did it! She finally had her lamb (a single little ram) around midnight last night. I (have you noticed that this blog is really all about *me* and not about Phyl or the sheep at all?) had a really miserable day yesterday: I was just plain exhausted, depressed, anxiety-riddled, and basically not good company for people and sheep alike. Since we knew that the ewes were so close to delivering, we decided to check on them every three hours: my shifts were going to be at 11:00 and then again at 2:00 AM. When I drove in for my 11:00 check, I was so busy wondering how on earth I was going to get through a 2:00 check without, you know, DYING, that at first I didn't hear the unholy racket that one of the ewes was making in the barn. This was it! Yikes! I went into the barn and saw number 14 groaning with misery, and I ascertained that no lamb seemed yet to be in the process of being born. Then, of course, I called Sally, who came as quickly as was humanly possible. (We live about fifteen minutes apart, twelve if you speed. With a ewe bleating out in pain, that can seem like a *long* time!)
Anyway, in due course (and not nearly quickly enough to suit me!), Sally arrived, and Sally really was a savior, a savior with a well-stocked lambing kit. I mostly sat in the corner and trembled, trying not to listen to the poor ewe moan. Sally was completely focused on the task at hand and didn't notice what I was doing or not doing, and that suited me fine: I really wasn't at my heroic best, and it was a pretty good time to be suddenly invisible. In the end, Sally had to help pull the lamb out, and she asked me to hold down the ewe while she did that. I *really* held on to the poor ewe, throwing myself on her and willing her not to move. (Hey, this was my only job: I didn't want to mess it up!) But Sally got the lamb out, and after that everything was more or less ok: the new mother was a little confused and kept backing away from her lamb at first, but in the end she cleaned him and let him eat. (I was really slack-jawed with amazement that someone could pull a lamb out of a ewe, even though I know rationally that it happens all the time. But I also know that *I'd* never be able to do that. It's all I can do to stand back and watch with partially-covered eyes. It's beyond wonderful to have a sheep partner who can actually do stuff!) I put the ewe and her lamb in the jug, and I also did the lamb's umbilical cord. So I'm slowly gaining a tiny speck of a shepherding skill set! :-)
So that's where we are right now: six lambs (two sets of twins and two singles), four ewes and two rams. We have two ewes who have yet to lamb, and it's possible that one of them will be tonight. I'm getting a tiny bit more relaxed about the whole thing (famous last words, I know!). So stay tuned, and I'll catch everyone up on our madcap adventures tomorrow.
Sunday, March 14, 2004
In which we jump the gun and feel really stupid
Last night wasn't my finest hour as a shepherd (and you have to realize that, since my "finest hour" probably consisted of holding a cup of iodine under an umbilical cord while someone else held the lamb, that bar is set pretty low!). I got to the sheep around 8:00 for their penultimate check, and I found one of them showing signs of what appeared to me to be the beginnings of labor: she arched, stretched, pawed the ground a bit, and made peculiar smacking motions with her lips. I observed for about 45 minutes, and then I decided to call Sally. Sally (who was having a very nice, cosy dinner with her family the night before the end of her college sophomore daughter's spring break) of course immediately came over to join me in the bitterly cold barn. We hung out until 1:00, seeing an occasional-maybe-possibly sign of labor but nothing that progressed into anything serious. Sally went home at 1:00 to go to sleep, and I (I live on the farm where we lease our sheep field) decided to check on them every hour, since I was SO CERTAIN that something was going to happen. Needless to say, I was totally wrong: nothing whatsoever happened, and when poor Sally came back at 5:00 to check on things again, everything was dead quiet. All I accomplished last night was getting chilled to the bone and really, really exhausted; even worse, I made *Sally* get cold and tired too. (I'm really moving in the wrong direction here: my goal is to make things *easier,* not *harder*!) So I don't think anyone's going to be hiring me as Shepherd-in-Charge anytime soon. (I was told my a sheepdog friend that sheep *do* sometimes exhibit genuine signs of labor and then stop abruptly. I'm clinging to that; I hope what I saw actually *was* something, and not just the product of my overeager imagination. But I'll never know.)
I checked the sheep around 8:30 and again at noon, and everyone looks as if lambing were the furthest thing from their collective minds. *Sigh*. We'll see what the rest of the day brings, since two of the three were officially due yesterday.
That's enough of my wailing and gnashing of teeth: even blogs must get bored with that. For anyone interested, here's a little Quicktime Video Clip of one of our lambs. And, for those of you who care about pictures, here are some!
Saturday, March 13, 2004
In which we begin blogging again
It's been awhile, but I feel as if I've been in hibernation all winter. What is there to say, really, during a bitterly cold January and an unusually snowy February? I rarely worked Phyl, and I'm afraid all that lack of work is going to show when the trial season officially kicks off in April with Sherry Smith's Longshot trial. But I'm not thinking about that this evening, even though right now the weather is terrific and there's no physical reason for my not working Phyl. But there is a reason: we're lambing for the first time, and I'm finding that lambing is taking up every speck of physical and emotional energy that I have, and then some!
Sally and I bred six (yes, only six, all this angst over six little ewes!) of our Katahdins in October. We're exactly halfway through lambing right now: three ewes have lambed, and they have five lambs among them (four ewes and a ram). I had planned to use this blog to keep a daily journal of the lambing experience, but I didn't feel in prime blogging mode when things began to heat up. I promise, however, that I'll update the blog faithfully from now until the end.
Here's the backstory for anyone who's interested. Since I believe all stories really start with emotional impetus and psychology, that's where I'll begin this one. The first thing that you need to know is that Sally (a normal person and a terrific and knowledgable shepherd) has been almost giddy with excitement about the lambs, the kind of excitement that energizes you just being in the vicinity of it. I, on the other hand, am neither a normal person nor a shepherd at all: I'm nearly phobic about anything to do with birth, and anything to do with death, and birth and death are so closely related in my mind that it's hard for me to extricate them. This attitude, I am given to understand, does not readily a stock farmer make (or readily make a person with whom one wants to associate, for that matter). But I've been trying to keep it together, with partial success (that is, I haven't been locked up in a rubber room yet, but I'm not exactly behaving like an ordinary sheepman, either). My jobs are thankfully, embarrassingly few (I check the sheep at 9:00 pm and then again at 12:00, and all I have to do is call Sally (the competent member of the team) if anything looks unusual, and after that I'm free to wring my hands and try not to throw up. And so far, at least, I haven't.
For those of you who don't think "backstory" means "bizarre psychological rundown," here's what's been happening in terms of facts. On Monday night, I did my very first evening check around 10:30. The first thing I saw was only five sheep, not six sheep; the second thing I saw was the missing ewe off in the field alone; and the third thing I saw was a little lamb cavorting beside her. It really was a magical moment: a quiet night, a glistening white being who hadn't existed two hours before, and her mother dancing beside in perfect harmony. But unfortunately, it really *was* only a moment: after a few seconds, I saw a little pile of white off in the distance in the field. I hoped very much that it was a mound of snow, but I was pretty sure that it was what it turned out to be: a dead lamb. I found that I could barely look at it; I just went to my car, dialed my cell phone with very shaky hands, and called Sally. She came very quickly and confirmed that it was, indeed, a dead ewe lamb. We got the mother and remaining ewe lamb (whom we later named Elphaba) into one of our very nice-looking jugs, and settled them in for the night.
The next morning, Sally checked and found that another ewe had just had twins, a ram and a ewe (now known as Cholmondeley--pronounced "Chumley"--and Chelsea). Everything went well with those: she called me after they were already settled into their jug, and it was good to have a good experience to erase the terrible feeling of seeing that dead lamb in a heap in the field. We had a couple of days of down time, and then Thursday morning Sally arrived to find one of the ewes actually in labor: she called me as soon as she could safely get away, but I just missed seeing the two little ewe lambs (now Felicity and Samantha) being born. However, I got to watch the ewe clean them off, and Sally let me put the iodine on their umbilical cords--I felt a little more useful and a little less bumbling, and it was extraordinarily pleasant, sitting there on a beautiful morning watching two lambs get their start in life, without having anything terrible happening to mess it up.
So that's where we are now, waiting for the last three ewes (two of whom are officially due today) to give birth. I'm trying hard not to dwell on (or at least not to confess outloud in too much irritating and agonizing detail) my hideous feelings of terror and inadequacy as a shepherd, and I'm trying hard do concentrate on all the good things about lambing. And there *are* good things. Here's what I really like about all this:
And, since I like to be fair, here's a list of the bad things:
Looking that over, I'm pleased to see that the list of "good things" seems a lot more impressive than the list of "bad things." And I have the feeling that I'm over the angst hump: if the remaining ewes have good experiences, I'm going to come out of this experience feeling pretty good about lambing. So stay tuned: I plan to update the blog with every barn check, so those of you with lots and lots of time on your hands will be able to follow the whole thrilling tale!
