Lambing Season—Not For the Faint of Heart

Mar 04, 2020

Laura Longtail's boy/girl twins, born a week ago.

In a week's time, we had three sets of boy/girl twins, lovely!

Brad was out working on the birthing center this Saturday when he heard the low gurgly call of a new mama sheep. Silently, sisters Olive (black faced ewe) and Layla, had been giving birth practically under Brad's nose! I was in the house so he phoned and yelled, "Babies popping out all over the place out here!" and hung up. LOL! By the time my friend Cheryl, Michael, and I ran outside there was one last one being born. Wow. That was unusual!

But Olive's little boy didn't seem quite right. Sometimes your intuition says so—it's not because of something in particular, something just feels off. He was up, he was drinking, all was well, except for...who knows what. He didn't survive the night.

This is Olive's third year having babies. Her first year she had teeny tiny babies, a black and white girl and a white boy. We did everything we could, Brad even did mouth to mouth while I was working on the black and white baby, but the white boy didn't make it.

Last year we were in Chicago for Brad's mom's funeral. Olive went into labor. The emergency ranch sitter was upset to find one of our livestock guardian dogs taking her two white lambs away. Holy smokes. We didn't know what to think of that. How frightening! Neither lamb survived but both were licked completely clean with no damage done to them. Were they dead at birth? We were told they were both teeny tiny as well. Maybe they wouldn't have survived if they were born alive. There was no knowing. We've always kept our livestock guardian dogs away from the births, not knowing what they would do, but knowing how yummy blood and goo is to dogs! But this was an emergency and the sitter couldn't get the dogs separated.

Since Olive had had two strange lambing stories, we decided to try one more time with her and had the same story as her first year. Sigh.

Raising animals is not for the faint of heart that's for sure.

In happier news, the five lambs are doing well, growing and thriving!