Lambing Season

What is your view of lambing season?

This:

Or this (video of lambing simulator and what can go wrong).

When we bought sheep 15 years ago, my lambing knowledge came from oral stories and books.

The oral stories mostly consisted of freezing nights in barns assisting ewes with births; one friend told of weak newborn lambs falling into water buckets and drowning.

The books weren't much more optimistic. They illustrated the many wrong ways a lamb could try and enter this world, and all the ways lambs and sheep can die.

"It's amazing any lambs live," my husband said.

Needless to say, I was pretty apprehensive about that first lambing season.

But during the first lambing season, we didn't experience that. The ewes often gave birth in the night, and we walked into the barn to find a ewe with her newborn lambs. It was a few years before we actually witnessed a birth or had to assist a ewe.

Over the years, we've had a few bad births. I've pulled a few lambs. We've had stillborn lambs and one or two deformed lambs. This may happen about 5 percent of the time. What usually happens, though, is that the ewe gives birth to twins or triplets, cleans them off and encourages them to nurse.

But, I'm all for learning more about sheep and lambing season. So last week, we watched the Ohio State University's lambing webinar. Again, we learned of what can go wrong, and how we can assist a ewe. (The video of the lambing simulator is well done).

I now have a re-stocked lambing first aid kit and have just the right amount of optimism and apprehension to start lambing season.

When Breakfast becomes the Bed

After raking hay from the barn floor, I place it in a tub. It'll be breakfast for Lily, the pony who believes no blade of grass should be wasted.

The barn cats, though, have another idea.

Trick and Roxie snoozing in the tub.

The tub makes a perfectly warm nest when overnight temperatures drop below freezing.

So, I let sleeping cats lie and feed Lily other hay.

Barn cats find many spots to snooze. They settle on top of the hay stack where they can overlook the horse and sheep stalls. Sometimes, they nestle in a crevice between the bales. But their favorite spot is the tub filled with hay. 

As days turn to weeks, their spots in the tub begin to resemble nests. They become deeper and deeper, and now their bodies are level with the hay.

 I no longer consider turning their bed into Lily's breakfast.

In the dead of winter, when days are short, and when pandemic and rioting fill the daily news, I take great comfort in seeing the barn cats curled up and warm in their nests, like two yolks in an egg shell.

I tell the cats they can nest there until mid-March. That's when I'll need that tub to be both bed and breakfast.

The Fragility of a Single Egg

When you have five hens, and it is winter, and cloudy days stack up one on top of the other until they reach 10 in a row, eggs are a rarity.

On some days, I find no eggs. On others, I find one, never two or three or four.

Protecting that single egg seems so much harder than a clutch of eggs.

In the summertime, when eggs are plentiful, I place them in a coffee can that also serves as my vessel for carrying scratch grain, horse feed and sheep minerals.

But a single egg gets lost in a coffee can. It's easily overlooked and, if lucky, left on the counter in the barn or a fence post. If unlucky, it's knocked over or covered in grain.

A single egg fits neatly in a winter coat pocket, where it's forgotten until hit with firewood or a flake of hay.

When I find a single egg, I cup it in my palm and carry it to the barn where I look for a safe spot to place it while I finish evening chores.

I don't place it on the counter in the barn where a slightly bored and always hungry cat would bat it around, until it fell to the ground and became cat food.

Instead, I nestle it in a bird's nest that I found in the yard and kept because it was lined with pony hair, and I found it charming.

A chicken egg looks ridiculous in the tiny nest.

But I always notice it as I'm turning out the barn lights in the evening. I carry it into the house and place it in the egg carton.

I have six single eggs now--enough for an omelet.