Well, I have learnt my lesson and shall write this in Wordpad and copy it to BLOG, saving things as I go, so no more annoying losses.
Lambwise things have been busy. I am typing this with a little one on my lap. They are not pets and do not have names, so little Angel here knows her place. Angel (or she may become Flower), is a little Suffolk / Texile cross gimmer (girl) and is an orphan that we got yesterday. One of our sheep, Cleatus, gave birth to a still born on Monday, so we wondered if we could get her to adopt another. Cleatus was very distressed and kept looking for her lamb, walking round in circles and calling for it. However she snapped out of it as soon as she saw the little one and decided that she didn’t want a lamb after all. I won’t be too gruesome, but we had wrapped the dead one in a towel and rubbed this on the new one, and then rubbed the new one on the dead lamb to take its smell, however Cleatus didn’t fall for it. We should have skinned the dead one and make a jacket for the new one, however neither of us was ready for that, and decided that if she didn’t adopt it then we’d hand rear it. Hand rearing one won’t be too bad. We shut them in the cellar together but removed the little one last night as Cleatus kept butting her. They may have bonded but we were too worried that the lamb would have got injured, and it did seem highly unlikely at that stage.
And we have had another lamb this morning. This was another boy – so so far we have had three boys from our sheep, two of which are alive. The one this morning is quite small but very stocky. The one on Saturday was more dainty. Horrace seems to be doing his thing for man-sheep kind. New lamb is now in the cellar with his mum to dry off and to give them some bonding time. So far we have been able to get them in the cellar one by one, as lambs have been coming out well spaced. The only trouble is trying to get the ducks in as they resent sharing their overnight accomodation with sheep.
We watched the first lamb being born on Saturday, and were disappointed to note that they do not come out in a fluffy cute state, rather coming out looking rather slimey and gruesome. However it was a small miracle watching it happen.
So we have Freckles and BlackKnees who we are not sure about and then 4 other sheep, one of whom is Loofy who was the one that was poorly a while back, and we wonder if she lost her lamb then as she is not looking very fat. There is one who is looking particulary large and I can’t remember if she was the one who had twins last year. We’ll keep an eye on her.
I am incubating some duck eggs at the moment. We weren’t going to this year, however we could still be here in several months time so as we got so much pleasure from the ducks last year then we thought we’d get the incubator out again. They went in on Saturday so they’ll be hatching in four weeks.
We had a broody hen, but she gave up after a couple of weeks. I wonder why they do that.