It’s been steadily busy here on the farm as lambing in the Merino and commercial flocks hits the final week. Next week should see the start of the Drysdales and English Leicesters! This year there have been lots of twins – probably a result of the flush of green feed the ewes had in January prior to joining.
Every year there are some challenges. This year has seen a lot less difficult births (a good thing!) but there have been a number of ewes that have failed in their ability to raise twins. Some, thankfully, just needed a helping hand to get them back on track to being a good mum. This was the case with Petunia, one of the Merino ewes. After she lambed she effectively abandoned her newborns and it was the maternal behaviour of one of the alpaca that alerted me to this.
Petunia and her twins ended up in the hay shed having some “quality bonding time” and she then remembered that she did indeed want to be a mother. Unfortunately, she didn’t have a lot of milk the first few days so Iris and Fuchsia had a few bottles to help them along. They are now all back out in the paddock. 🙂
About a week ago we found a young ewe with a vaginal prolapse. These are usually quite troublesome to deal with and despite initial success in having things “go back the way they should be” that success didn’t continue and a couple of days later we were consulting with the vet upon which we realised we’d effectively run out of options. 😥 Nature is a cruel mistress sometimes but we do our best to protect our animals from the worst. The decision was made to put the ewe down but we also decided to try and extract any lambs immediately afterwards. To our surprise, and relief, this procedure was successful and so although the ewe couldn’t be saved her little twins were.
Despite their slightly unorthodox arrival, little Tom & Jerry are going from strength to strength. 🙂