Impromptu pre-dawn cattle drive

Rough night:

10:15 pm - check sheep. One is due to lamb and likely to have issues. Then read to youngest child and fall asleep in her bed.

1:00 am - move to my bed

3:00 am - check sheep. In the rain.

5:00 am - neighbor calls. Sheriff thinks my cattle are out on Renner Rd. Wake up the whole family. Drive to farm behind ours. Yep, that's our cattle.

5:15 am - Drive cattle into the dark, fog and rain where they immediately become invisible except for their glowing eyes when they turn to look at us and the fortuitously white backside of one of them.

5:30 am - My expectation that the cattle know the way home seems false as they appear to be wandering in circles in the giant mud flat that used to be our neighbors' corn field. I'm so grateful that my kids have experience herding cattle and are comfortable spreading out in the dark and containing the milling cattle off the road. Rain picks up and we can barely see anything. We speculate that we may have to wait with them until daylight in order to find the crossing through the strip of woods to our back gate, which we presume they broke down and exited through.

5:40 am - I manage to get up next to the woods without scaring the cattle off and recognize from the profile of the plants against the sky that we are not in the right part of the mud flat. We head them back toward the west and the lead cows find the crossing! With a great crunching of branches they pass through. Almost done!

5:45 am - Gah! The four little heifers I bought in the fall decide that the greenery is too big a barrier and reverse into the mud flats, galloping around us. Fortunately, they have one of our calves with them and the mother is bellowing for it, so they know where the herd is. They want the protection of the herd so go back to the woods after a bit. With some pressure from us in a semicircle around them, they brave the branches. Phew! They are funneled onto our property now by the neighbors fences.

5:50 am - Could they all be back in the pasture? No! Some of them didn't want to cross the gate that had been knocked to the ground during their escape and had veered off into a neighboring field. I jerry-rig a barrier to keep them from heading back out into the mud flat, Owen and Davin go back to get the car and take it home, and Hope and I make a big circle around the cattle to get behind them and funnel them back into the pasture.

6:00 am - Success! All cattle accounted for. Sky is getting lighter and rain and fog has lessened, so we are pretty sure we can see them all. I've scavenged twine and wire from around the area to reinforce the gate until I can get up there in full daylight with some better supplies. We walk home across the farm with Hope excitedly telling me how fun that was and how she would have been mad if we hadn't included her. I see a real future farmer inside there. Davin has the opposite reaction. He's a Never Farmer .

6:15 am - check again. No labor yet.

This pic is for humor. I did not stop for a photo up during our pre-dawn cattle drive. Also, that is not a cow.  ;O)

 So, last night Hope (11) and I slept up in the barn to keep an eye on Dimples, our ewe who is due to lamb any time now. We watch her extra closely because she has a medical problem where her insides poke out of her rear orifices late in pregnancy. Sometimes they reach the size of a cantaloupe. It's rather horrifying. We aren't going to breed her again as a result, but for now we have to get through to the birth. It's intermittent, mostly when she's been laying down. She starts straining and groaning, presumably because her body tells her it's a lamb sticking out. This is not good for her so she has to wear a special harness with a device that keeps her insides where they belong.

 The problem with this is that when she really does go into labor, if we aren't there to remove it, she and her lambs will likely die. We don't want this, obviously, so we have to check on her often. We removed the prolapse harness yesterday evening because it looked like she might lamb. In the night I got up every time I heard birthing type sounds. It's amazing how many grunty-groany noises a barn full of pregnant sheep can make just laying down resting. At 2 am the racket really kicked up to definite labor levels. I got out of my warm sleeping bag, put on my outer layer of clothes and checked on Dimples again.

 No lambs, just another giant bout of prolapse. I tied her up and grabbed a bucket of water to splash onto her protruding innards while rubbing them with my hand to remove the worst of the manure and bedding she had been lying in. Using both hands, because that much of her vagina had emerged, I attempted to push it back inside. The increased pressure caused her to feel the need to bear down, so she strained mightily to push it right back out. As a result, an additional handful of her colon squeezed out. Gah! I attempted numerous times to return it all to its rightful place, but without success. After a bit I took a break. On my return she had settled a little and I was able to funnel her vagina back inside using both hands and hold it with one while putting her colon back inside with the other. Then I attempted to hold them both in with one hand while I placed the plastic retainer inside her.

 Unfortunately, it will pop right back out if not fully strapped in. Somehow I managed to hold it in with one hand and a knee, while holding her against the wall with the other knee while applying the harness with the other hand and possibly my teeth. I'm not sure. Anyway, I got the contraption on her and buckled tight and turned her loose. Unfortunately I didn't notice until afterward that my injured shoulder which I'm in the middle of "resting" no longer felt very rested. Apparently lambing time is just not a good time for giving up the use of my dominant arm for weeks on end.

 Heading back to my sleeping bag I noticed that my hands were very sticky and odoriferous. Washing them in plain cold water, which is the only kind I have in my barn, I realized that as a farmer, I frequently practice not touching my face. Useful skill in a pandemic. Since my daughter wouldn't appreciate waking up in the dark barn alone, going to the house was not a great option, especially since I knew I might have to wake up in another couple of hours to do it all again if Dimples managed to scrape the harness off. She didn't so I got to sleep until the rooster started in at 4 am and maybe even a little more between "songs."

 I woke up to my daughter, who slept like a baby through all of it, telling me how fun this was and how she can't wait to do it again tonight and maybe every night. I did very much enjoy the part I spent with her. I like midwifing the sheep too, but I could do without the gynecology / proctology sessions.

 I found Starburst’s son Dandy laid out sick and unable to get up during my morning barn chores. I dosed him right away with the herbs, the homeopathics, and the antibiotic. After consulting with Hope, whose lamb he is, we called the vet and set up an appointment. Turns out she could give him fluids, vitamins, more antibiotics and fever reducer, but can’t really do much for what she believes is a viral pneumonia. When I walked into the office with the lamb I told her I thought he had Covid. Kidding of course, and maybe not funny, but a weird parallel given that we’ve never had any such thing in our sheep before. We’ve got him back in the barn with his mom and sister, grateful for the warmth in the weather now, with frequent doses of medicine. This is where I’m so happy to have herbs and homeopathics, which can indeed treat viruses, since they are mostly supporting the immune system anyway. Just have to see if it will be enough with this particular bug. We also decided to go ahead and dose all the other lambs twice a day. We can hear some of them starting to get a bit gurgly and a few have been punky, but they’ve kind of rotated through that. I’m dipping the dosing syringe in disinfectant between animals to try to cut down on the viral load any of them are picking up. I’m also syringing milk into any that look like they might be too weak to nurse.

July 1st 2020

Update: Many of the lambs showed signs of the bug that caused this illness. We will vaccinate the ewes for it and hopefully that will prevent a re-occurance next spring. Live and learn. It's always something new on the farm. With the help of the natural medicines we were able to save all who were ill except the one who got soaked in the cold rain and one whose mother developed mastitis that stopped milk in one of her teats. We tube fed the little girl but she had gone hungry too long before we discovered the issue and that combined with the pnuemonia was too much for her. Dandy made a full recovery.

May 9 th 2020

 Luna, a little brown lamb with a white roundish spot on her head (hence the name Moon in Spanish), was looking a bit peakish and so we had been dosing her with the same remedy that had helped Freckles. She seemed to be doing better but then an afternoon rain came by and we didn’t go up to make sure all the lambs were inside until a couple of hours later, at which point I discovered Luna soaking wet and shivering. All the other ewes had taken their lambs inside the barn. We’ll never know if Luna’s mom just didn’t see the need or if the dominant ewes had clogged up the entryway and not allowed her in. In any case, I brought them inside, dried Luna off, and gave her another dose of the medicine. By evening chores she looked much worse, so we went ahead and gave her a shot of the antibiotics that we had purchased for Freckles, since he hadn’t needed them after all. The low was forecast for around freezing, so we brought Luna inside the house and also gave her some formula since she looked too weak to nurse. I got up a couple of times in the night to feed her and give her medicine but she didn’t improve and she died during the next day. Hope and I had a little funeral. Losing our critters, whether by accident or harvest, is always hard. It’s even worse when they are tiny babies and we are fighting to save them. The big question is if Luna was just unlucky or if something bad was going around.

 Life doesn’t stop just because there is death and my lovely first time mother, Blanquita, had darling twin girls that morning when I got to the barn. She was a first-time mother, pure white, and had no trouble with the birth or the nursing, which was a relief under the circumstances. One of her babies is white like her and the other looks like cookies and cream ice cream – Yay for fabulous colors!

May 11 th 2020

 My second prized ewe, and the second to last of our flock to pop is called Estrella and is black with white on her head, legs and tail. She is one of our older females and, as usual, looked like someone had strapped a basketball to each side of a regular ewe, under the skin. She looks like this every year before lambing. It’s enough to make us suspect she’s going to have octuplets, but in previous years has always delivered boy – girl twins. She was several days past her due date so I was checking the barn often in hopes of catching her in labor. How can we possibly know a sheep’s due date, you might be asking? We sit in a tree with a good view of the pasture and a pair of high powered binoculars and a thermos of whisky and wait for them to get frisky. Got nothing else to do on a farm. Lol! Actually, before we turn the ram in with the ewes for breeding, we strap a harness on him that has a brightly colored chunk of soft waxy stuff strapped to the chest. When he breeds a ewe, it leaves a mark on her rump. Every morning we take note of any who have marks and write down the date. After a month of no new marks, we take the latest date each one was bred and plug it into online calculators that tell us the due date. Gotta love technology. Hope checked the ewes at one point and came running back to tell me that Estrella had a little hoof poking out. We went up and waited with her while she labored. Even though it sometimes takes hours, for me it is like time stops. I can just wait peacefully as long as it takes in almost an altered state, which is not exactly my usual MO. Maybe the laboring energy of the ewe is rubbing off on me. I was sitting in the hay feeder and the ewe would lay down and strain and strain and get up and walk around for a while before doing it again. At one point she came up and laid down right next to me as close as she could get. I wonder now if she was asking for help.

 After longer than it should have taken, there were still just two little hoof tips and the end of a nose peaking out. The legs should be further ahead of the nose than that. Instead of tying Estrella up or getting someone to come hold her, I just moved slowly up behind her and wrapped my fingers around the little protruding hooves. Estrella didn’t love this, so she started to walk away, which had the effect of applying a little traction to the legs. With a pop, the feet released from the bent up position they had been in, which had apparently been holding up the birth because the baby practically fell out of her then. She got busy cleaning up her baby and I left her alone for a little bit. Pretty soon she was back to straining and this time she got just a nose tip and one little hoof. Without the second hoof, I was reluctant to pull. Small Hand Kelsi to the rescue again! It turned out one leg was forward and one was back. I thought she might have to try to push the lamb back in and get the leg, but she was able to support the baby and twist it a little and help her out the way she was. One boy and one girl. Both black and white like their mother but with more white. The boy has a white face with black eye patches and ears and the girl has a black face with a white stripe that goes all the way down to her nose and then crosses her mouth onto her chin. Both extra adorable!

May 5th 2020 

 In the morning we noticed that “Dandy” the little black lamb was trying frantically to nurse on us and not able to move around very well. At first we thought he might have an injured leg, which can happen when you have to help them during birth. It turned out that he was just having trouble figuring out how to nurse. We got him latched on and he suckled well. Later that day we had to repeat the process. Maybe he had some oxygen deprivation in the womb. Seems a little slow on the uptake. Cute though, and now getting stronger. His sister “Daffy” has been vigorous from the beginning. Dandelion and Daffodil. These lambs hardly touch the ground before Hope is trying to figure out what to name them. It drives her absolutely crazy that Kelsi and I will sometimes wait days until a name comes to us.

May 6th 2020

 Last night I went to check on the sheep at 3 am. We had put a brown ewe of Hope’s named Doodle into a lambing stall yesterday evening when she had left the herd and begun hanging out alone. At bedtime and midnight there were neither lambs nor visible labor. On my way up the hill behind my house, with the moon low in the sky, I heard an unbelievable ruckus in the barn and envisioned a lamb stuck in a water bucket or impaled on something sharp. I was greatly relieved to find that no such disaster had occurred and instead, Doodle had two beautiful little girls, wet and freshly birthed. One was all reddish brown, just like her mother and the other had large splotches of white on a backdrop of red, much like a Guernsey cow. The mother was in a tizzy about something, baaing frantically at her newer lamb, who was right there with her, while it baa-d back. Apparently the screaming of each was upsetting the other and they were just winding each other up. Seeing everyone safe, I went back to bed.

 This morning we saw that both of the new little ones were a bit cold and shaky on their feet. They really should have been a little stronger by now so I checked the mom’s udder. I couldn’t get even a drop of milk out of either side. Uh oh. I gave her a homeopathic remedy for anxiety, because that can keep their milk from letting down and we mixed up some powdered colostrum to get the lambs started on. We couldn’t get them to latch on to bottles so we resorted to syringing the formula into their mouths. Starving lambs often act as if they are being murdered when we try to feed them. We have to pin them down in our laps and force the tip into their mouths and dispense about a quarter teaspoon at a time. If they truly are in need of sustenance, they look thrilled at this spontaneous arrival of nourishment but then fight like the dickens each and every time we try to deliver another installment. Not the sharpest knives. They sometimes learn to appreciate the food, and sometimes not.

 Two days ago Hope and I were sitting in the barn after morning chores, mightily enjoying the scampering lambs when one of the pregnant ewes’ water broke. By the time I got her into a lambing stall (not something she was a fan of, apparently), another ewe began straining and passed a bag of fluid as well. The second ewe was Nieve, who is the founding member of our flock and my special pet. I raised her on a bottle after buying her from a breeder who had some orphans. She’s been suffering from a medical problem called a prolapse and had been wearing a special harness to keep everything in place. Several times I had believed her to be laboring when really it was just a relapse of the prolapse ;0). Her condition mandated sleeping in the barn or multiple nightly checks, neither of which is conducive to a full night’s rest, so I was especially thrilled to have our watch coming to an end. We sat in the barn with the ewes as they laid and stood, strained and rested, and lost more fluids. Sitting with a birthing animal is a beautiful and mysterious experience. Sometimes the babies come quickly and sometimes they don’t and going to the house for even a few minutes usually means missing the birth. I positively adore being present for the births. A whole new being is entering the world and it fills me with joy.

 We sat with Nieve and Starburst, a second time mom who is black with a little white and belongs to Hope. We like colors in our flock, a nice variety of white, brown and black, preferably with spots or patches of contrasting colors. Starburst was the first of our black ewes to go into labor, and we had not yet had any black lambs this year, so we were eager to see what she produced. After two hours of waiting, the ewes had not progressed much. I had to run an errand so Kelsi stayed with the ewes – one of the many good reasons to have a co-farmer. :0) While I was away, Kelsi live-texted me updates as she decided Nieve was struggling too hard and unproductively and gave her a hand by reaching in and applying a little traction to the front hooves of the lamb. Shortly afterward, Nieve birthed a pure white male lamb that matches her color. Before I returned she also birthed a second that was stillborn. This is the first stillborn lamb we’ve had, though there have been a number of calves over the years. It’s always sad. He was small and thin compared to the living one, leading me to suspect some ongoing difficulty in the womb.

 When I returned from my errand, Starburst was actively pushing and lambing seemed imminent. However, another hour passed with no visible progress. I attempted to feel for the lamb to see if the positioning was right, but my hands are pretty large and she was small inside. Kelsi Small-hands to the rescue! The poor lamb was not positioned well. Instead of two front hooves and then a head, it was front hooves only and then, much further back than it should have been, a head and two more hooves. Poor mama! No wonder this little one was stuck. After many attempts, Kelsi managed to get the lamb into the correct position and the legs coming out into the world. Pretty soon a little black male lamb with some white on his head was born. As mom was cleaning him off, I went to do other chores and when I returned I found he had a little sister, white with brown spots on her shoulder and neck. It wasn’t even dark yet, and everyone seemed to be all set. Finally, I was able to get a good night’s sleep.