Photos: Babies with mama Iris, the natural baby-doll Southdown smile at it's finest (as modeled by Jake/Jacob), and twins curling up for a nap in the feed pan (won't fit for too much longer)
Time to shift into high gear, at least as far as animal care-taking is a concern. The weather is warm, the snow cover is melting, the animal waste that has been generated throughout this zero-degree winter is no longer frozen solid....
The piles of manure are thawing. Temporary pens that were frozen in place can be moved, straw bedding can be shoveled away, animal housing can be reconfigured, the smell is getting stronger. With the quick-thaw that started a couple of days ago, the farm is smelling quite ripe.
And did I mention....piles of manure are thawing. That's the task-at-hand for the whole week/spring/warm season.
For today, though....
I need to move the sheep around inside the barn, now that the first set of baby lambs has arrived and are thriving.
Brock the ram is still posing a potential threat when I go in to feed him, so....he needs to be contained where he can't ambush me. He lets me scratch under his chin, but still thinks that he needs to paw the ground or bob his head when he's feeling spunky, and I do NOT want to end up on the ground because I was knocked down by a sheep!
I've been working on a larger area for the sheep, and that's what the end-result of today's work should be, and should look something like this:
Brock the ram, contained in a 10x10 area adjacent to the other sheep. If you've been in our barn, this is a dirt pit in the far corner. It's been fenced off and a make-shift gate added, so that it can be used as a stall. I can feed and water Brock from the outside of this pen, but it should no longer be necessary for me to actually enter that area, swinging a stainless steel bucket full of water to douse him with.
Iris and babies will then be introduced to last year's lamb, "May", in the larger sheep area at the south end of the barn.
Mama-to-be April will be moved out of the very small temporary lambing pen. I will move her in with the other two ewes and the twin babies, but not until Brock is contained. I don't want to risk having him head-butt her pregnant side, and potentially cause damage to her growing baby/babies. And it will be interesting to see if April remembers her baby May from last year. They've been separated since last fall, when we put Brock in with the mature females (May was still not old enough to be bred at that point)
Taffy the English Shepherd will come out to the barn and keep me company, and be guided through moving the sheep here and there as I work. Last fall, she was so exuberant with the sheep that it seemed she was attacking the back of their legs as she moved them. We are working on "slow", calm, "easy", and "watch" as she gets more comfortable with a friendly way of working with the animals. Of course, if Brock comes at me, Taffy is more than welcome to grab his nose with her teeth and hang on until he backs up. But I don't expect it to come to that.
A nice perk to getting all of this done: The new pigs from Tennessee arrived last week, during a snow storm, on the day after Iris' lambs were born, and are in quarantine for the next couple of weeks. They are 6 month old American Guinea Hogs, destined to be breeding mama's in about a year.
I need to get them out of the temporary pen so that I can scrape out the muck from when the ducks were housed there. By moving Iris and the twins, it gives me that nice 10x10 space for the piglets, full of wasted sheep hay (which the pigs will eat), packed bedding (which the pigs will gleefully root around in and fluff up for easier removal), and wasted grain which was lost by the munching sheep (which will encourage the piggies to root even MORE and loosen even MORE sheep bedding). A win-win situation.
And future plans hinge on getting that old sheep pen/new pig pen cleaned by those pigs:
When that 10x10 pen is cleaned out and it's time the new pigs to be introduced to the older pigs, the timing will coincide nicely with when the pregnant Bea needs to be moved into a clean area for giving birth (Bea is the American guinea hog, the piglet that we bought a year ago in January 2014)
Make that a win-win-WIN situation when the current new piggies have made it easy to get that pen ready for Bea.) :)
It's confusing sometimes, but I have to think of it in terms of one big, on-going rotation, to keep things as organized as possible but to also use one species to help in the farm work, whether it's having pigs root through old cow or sheep bedding so that I can shovel it out later, or having chickens and ducks follow the cow through the pasture to eat seed and fly eggs and spread the cow patties around for better fertilizer. If I can just keep my mind focused on the end result, it makes sense.
Update:
Mama Iris and twins are doing great. Spunky, curious, nibbling on mama's hay, sleeping together in the feed bowl. They won't fit for too much longer. And they are "reserved" for a family in Wisconsin (which means I've received a deposit towards the purchase in May), who want to potentially use them in 4-h and keep them together on a small starter farm. Hooray! I couldn't ask for a better set-up for them.
Mama-to-be sheep April is still pregnant. I'm guessing that she was just past her "cycle" when I put Brock in with April and Iris last fall. So she missed getting pregnant that first time around (when Iris was bred), and possibly got pregnant the next time. Or the act in October just didn't produce a viable pregnancy. Or she wasn't cycling exactly the same as Iris and got bred when she was receptive.... At any rate, she seems to be pregnant, and is definitely showing the physical changes that happen in the weeks before giving birth. It's a waiting game at this point, but I'm keeping a close eye on her. If she has a black ewe-lamb (female), I plan to keep it.
The other pregnant mamas....
Bessie the cow is within 3 weeks of her due date. She is also showing physical signs of getting close, with her udder getting large again, and other unmentionable lady-parts changing as her cow-hormones prepare her cow-body for the imminent birth. (Coyotes in the fields around us are a worry this spring, and we've been hearing them much more often this year than last year. Not much I can do except to trust that the presence of our 3 dogs is leaving enough canine "scent" to keep the coyotes wary, and that our 4' high perimeter fence will keep them out. Bessie and her calf are in potential danger if coyotes breach the perimeter fencing).
Mama-to-be Bea should give birth to piglets in May, and my private joke is that this will be a "newbie" litter (meaning it will be the first litter of piglets born on our farm) and also a "New-Bea" litter (Newton the boar and Beatrice the sow). Yeah, not so funny, but I have to chuckle when I think of the irony.
Time to get to work. There's a lot to get done this week.
Laura
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