One armed paper-hangers!

The Womerlippi Farm has been a hive of activity lately, although the humans were not the active ones, at least not on the farm. Since Tillie dropped her two white lambs last week, Nellie dropped one, her first "starter" lamb, pictured above, which she seems very proud and attentive of. This baby comprises the first lamb born to a ewe that was also born and raised on this farm.

Well done, Nellie!

She's a good mother although like a lot of new ewes, seemed to take forever to let the lamb feed. Every time the little bugger would head for the teat, Nellie would back away as if to say, "Hey! What do you think you're doing?" The other three-yearling mother we've had, Molly, did exactly the same last year.

There's a procedure for dealing with this, manual placement of the lamb on the teat. Twice we held her down and placed the lamb onto the teat manually, just to make sure he wouldn't weaken. Each time he drank very greedily.

But eventually she got the idea, allowed the baby to feed, and the little bugger is now strong enough to join the rest of the flock later today.

That was quite a bit of activity and excitement for everyone in the barn, and things had just settled down again, when I went out this morning to find Molly licking a new black lamb. She hadn't been separated yet, no particular signs being shown, except for a moment yesterday when she wandered off on her own unusually.

That meant that all the other sheep and lambs in the main pen were bleating away an emergency alert at 5 am when I stumbled groggily into the barn to see what was up. So I got the others our of the way by opening the back door, shooing them out, and closing it behind them. Then I picked up the newborn black lamb, bleating lustily, and put it in the second lambing pen (the first still occupied by Nellie), and then proceeded to push and pull Nellie in that direction. She's a big four-year old ewe, at the height of her conditioning, and this was a bit like Shaun the Sheep pushing massive Shirley on the kids' TV program, except that Molly fought back.

It was after I got her separated that I realized that a second white lamb still bleating away by the hay rack was not in fact one of Tillie's twins left behind when mom was shooed out, but a white lamb new-born to Molly.

These three latest, Nellie's one and Molly's two, are the offspring of Snorri, the rental ram from last fall, also pictured.

Snorri, who came in a pick-em-up truck from the Beach family farm west of Farmington, Maine, is a crossbred Corriedale/Romney ram like ours, but shorter, fatter, heavier in the head and face, and with more facial fleece.

He's a very cute and gentle ram which we liked a lot. Were we not bound by a promise to the previous, rather unpractical owners of this flock to keep our current stud until some natural death, that might have been the end for himself, Abraram, who is mean and somewhat dangerous and has rather more daughters around than my geneticist wife is comfortable with. Bringing Snorri in for a season was a good compromise. We have multiple quite well-separated pens, so Snorri was able to be secluded well away from Abe with all Abe's duaghters, and now we reap the benefits of this deal, which cost us about 25 pounds of lamb and ham in trade, but was well worth it since we now have three lambs we would not otherwise have been able to breed.

There might be one or two more depending on how well Snorri got on with our slightly retarded ewe, Lark.

Lark, or Larkie, had white muscle disease as a baby, although not on our farm where we take the proper precautions. As a result, she was a late bloomer and a runt, and only filled out to adult size in her fourth year. Now a very late developing five-year old, she still is the filthiest sheep we know, lacking the intelligence to keep her coat clean or even stay out of the muck. We put her in with Snorri more in order to have a place to put her away from her incestuously minded father than to actually breed her. Again,we are bound by this promise not to cull her, nor any of the flock we started with three years ago, although we really should have done so.

But increasingly I think I see a bulge in her side.

I hope she is bright enough to be a decent mother. I guess we may find out.

Ewetube!

Aimee made a video of Tillie giving birth to her first lamb the other night, and put it on Youtube for students to see the process. It's particularly good for seeing the instinct ewes have to lick the lamb, despite the pain and exhaustion they're obviously feeling.

What a good mother. What a great ewe!

Midnight special

Our official Head Ewe, Tillie started acting very grumpy after afternoon feed yesterday. She put her head down in an odd corner of fence away from the flock, and charged me several times when I came to see what was up.

Mean old girl! But I expect she blames us for the pregnancy. Her upteenth. She's probably ten years old. We don't know for sure, since we never got full details from the people we got her from. But this will be her last, though, because you could tell today that she's done with the breeding game.

I'll tell you what happened next, and you will see why.

So we sorted her into the lambing pen. It's easy enough to catch a charging sheep if you're not in a confined space or on slippy ground. They sort of play into your hands, literally, since if you field and catch a sheep's head and hold it tight and turn it or lift it so they can't see where they're going, then you have them and can move them around well enough. It's a bit like a rugby pass, I always think. Aimee, who's now back from Nicaragua where she had very big adventures in the campos and in the jungle, was on hand to do gates, which makes life easier for me. Once caught, Tillie was easily bundled into the lambing pen despite being a very grumpy old ewe.

(Normally she's very sweet and loves to be petted and spoiled.)

There she stood for quite a while, bleating occasionally for her missing family (all the way up at the other end of the barn, at least fifteen feet away!), until I went out to do a check at 10.30 pm (right after we went through Aimee's hundreds of pictures from Nicaragua for the first time).

The water had broken and part of the water bag was sticking out, but nothing else as yet. I got Aimee and we watched for forty minutes as Tillie struggled quite a bit to get a very large, very yellow lamb out. Tillie then proceeded to lick it to death the way ewes do, which I expect helps stimulate the baby. Tillie doesn't like to see a newborn lying down on the job, and literally kicks and hoofs it up with her feet, until it stands up for itself, which is brutal to watch, but never seems to hurt the lamb. None of our other ewes do this kicking and hoofing thing, only Tillie.

That seemed to be it, so we waited until the lamb was on its feet and drying off well enough, then retired to wait for the placenta. Tillie was still charging us anytime we made moves to get into the pen, and she's a big ewe, very hard-headed, so we didn't try to feel for another lamb. We guessed there wasn't one, and all that charging and ramming in the lamb pen can be very dangerous for the baby.

I went to bed for an hour or so; Aimee stayed up working on her pictures and stuff.

At about 1pm, Aimee yelled up the stairs, and I struggled awake. Another lamb coming. But this one was stuck. I struggled to get my overalls on, but by the time I'd got out to the barn, Aimee had pulled the second lamb out. Aimee said it had had one foot back, which is not too bad of a position, but with an older ewe like Till, it was enough to turn a routine birth into a marathon.

Tillie, by this time was prostrate with fatigue.

But, since she was down and calm, more or less, we could now get in the pen and work with her safely. This was why Aimee, normally much more circumspect than me about ramming sheep, had been able to get her hand in Tillie's vagina. Aimee, it must be admitted, also has tiny slender hands. My big hands are not great for this job.

Now it was my turn to help. I stripped a big wax plug out of her teat, causing a pained "baa" as the milk spurted out for the first time under high pressure. then I jammed the nipple in the first lambs mouth and stripped some milk right in. He got the idea and started to feed. The second lamb was put up by Tillie's head, and she started the licking process from a prone position, which was sort of sad, but it did allow one lamb to get licked while the other taught itself to feed. At one point the first lamb made Aimee laugh by trying to find a nipple on my woolly sweater, banging me with it's head as if I had an udder. After a while we helped poor old Till back up, and then watched and waited a little longer before going in again.

We set the alarm for an hour later, 2.15, and both went to bed. But Aimee's far-too-complicated computer alarm clock had the "weekend override" on, which meant we slept way too long. At 4am Aimee kicked me awake and sent me out to check, following along groggily in my wake.

We stumbled into the barn where we found all more or less well. Tillie had expelled the placenta, the lambs were drying off. Back to bed, where we slept until 7.30, very late for us.

But when I finally woke and went out again, the lambs were feeding.

All's well that ends well, I guess.

But this is definitely Tillie's last time as a mom. This particular birthing hurt her pretty badly.

No way... !!!!

If you haven't seen this extreme sheep-herding video yet, you must. These guys are just brilliant. Absolutely hilarious, I feel just a teeny bit sorry for the sheep, though, being buggered about all over the hill.

Recycling a sheep

Today was one of those unexpected days.

I had decided to use up one of my holidays getting a jump start on a job I need to do with students after the break: putting up a small wind turbine to replace on that is broken on the college's so-called "Eco-Cottage," a small solar- and wind-powered dorm we set up nearly five years ago.

Generally, switching out a wind turbine, or anything like that, is a good opportunity for a lesson. In this case, I set up bench tests for the old, broken turbine head, and for the new one. Students can do the tests, see for themselves how the electricity is produced, and then we can go assemble the new turbine to the tower. Getting ready for this was a nice puttering job for a claggy sort of a day.

But when I dropped in on the college's Sustainability Coordinator Aaron Witham to ask for a hand dropping the old tower, which takes three or four people to drop, he had news. One of the college ewes was looking very badly, and would I go look.

So I did, and realized that whatever she had, she needed to be put down right away. She wouldn't get up, was having breathing difficulties, and had crawled under the hay rack to, well, die, I guess. She was in a very bad way, and to call a vet would just prolong the agony. In our neighborhood it's actually sometimes quite hard to get a livestock vet to come by at all. No James Herriots anymore, I'm afraid. There's been so little money in mid-Maine farming for so long, the vets are all small animal vets, not livestock vets. This ewe is 13 years old, bad-tempered, and prone to hoof rot. Any serious sheepman would have culled her long ago. Obviously, the college flock is more for lessons than for meat or fleece production, but that just means we have even more of a responsibility of care. When a domestic animal is sick, you have to take care of it, one way or another. It's your business. The animal is dependent on you. You're the one in charge. You have to take responsibility. So we had to figure out what to do.

And so, at 13 years old, her time was up, I thought. Better to die quickly and painlessly than slowly withering away in pain and fright, hiding under the hay rack.

The putting down wasn't so much the problem. All the livestock people around here have rifles in our homes for this purpose, as well as for predators and feral dogs. I was not worried about whether or not I could give her a quick, humane death. Disposing of the carcass is the main difficulty. The general plan with a sick animal that can't enter the human food chain because of some unidentified disease (plus being old and tough) is to compost the carcass, which is encouraged by the state agricultural authorities. You simply bury the carcass in a well-aerated, well-mixed compost heap. Less popular with the authorities, but still permitted, is burial. It isn't encouraged because of potential effects on ground water, but a little common sense in picking the spot alleviates most of these worries.

Finally, you can always butcher the animal for dog food. I don't know if you've noticed, but the digestive system of the common dog is generally capable of coping with anything from horse manure, through completely rotten meat, to, well, stolen slippers and items of underwear. Not to be too light about it, but even an old sick animal can generally be fed to dogs.

That was what we settled on.

I didn't want the carcass around my farm because I have new lambs and it might attract predators, the college Facilities boss didn't want to compost or bury her on campus, nor could we put her down there either, discharging firearms being against campus rules.

So we drove around to one of the Amish farmers I know, and asked. "Did anyone in the (Amish) community have a lot of dogs and need any dog meat." Amish often breed dogs for sale, and we quickly found an Amish Springer Spaniel breeder with three dogs who would all be happy to help eat an old ewe.

And then we gently put her in the back of the pick-up truck, drove her to my farm, where we did the deed as quickly and humanely as it can be done. It's never easy to do, and it always takes longer than you think, but with an accurate shot through the spinal cord and the base of the skull, there can be no pain because there's no neural connection anymore.

(I don't know for sure if this is true, but it sounds right, is how I was taught to do it, and is what the books say to do.)

Then we butchered what was left. This was all a new experience for Aaron, but he was willing to learn. As you can see from the picture, he was more than a little surprised and bemused by the whole experience. Being Unity College Sustainability Coordinator, a job he's soon to give up to go to graduate school, has been an interesting set of experiences for him. Today was certainly no exception.

Finally, we delivered her to the Amishman. Aaron was pleased, and curious, to meet so many Amish in one day.

All pretty gruesome, and pretty hard on an old sick ewe. I felt sorry for her, but I think it was for the best in the end. She was barely sensible of what was happening to her, didn't even get up in the pick-up truck ride over, which is unknown. Any sheep taken from the herd and put in the back of strange vehicle will usually struggle.

There's more death to come. I found a cold, frozen newborn lamb out in our own paddock. It was frozen into a layer of snow that fell several weeks ago and was finally thawing in the general drippy thaw we've been having. I guess one of our ewes must have gone into labor early, while we were riding out one of the nor'easters I wrote about earlier, most likely the 24-incher that fell last of all.

I was surprised and upset by this, and looked to blame the bobcat whose carcass I found earlier not fifteen feet from where I later found the lamb. But I have to say, it was more than likely the blizzard. When a ewe drops a lamb into a snowbank on a cold wet night, the lamb can't dry off, and is liable to die. We've seen it before. The remedy is to get the animals into the barn, to separate the ewes in lambing pens as soon as you see the signs, and to monitor closely. This one must have been born in the night, before we started doing night checks. If it was born during that last blizzard, to the ewe I think it was born to, the one currently looking suspiciously svelte, then it was three to four weeks premature.

I guess it could also have been a triplet to Maggie's twins born two weeks ago. There was a small snowstorm soon after. But it was pretty well buried and actually frozen into some ice. I had to chip it out with a pick-axe. It hasn't been long enough.

We will have to figure it out, because we're supposed to have three pregnant ewes left, and this means we may only have two. Unless it is Maggie's triplet, in which case three still.

So that's a lot of death to deal with for one day. Sad.

But there's always death in the life of a farm. And life, encouragingly, goes on. We'll have even more new lambs running around soon enough, to be followed by new green growing things.

My friend who is just getting ready to defend her PhD dissertation, and worried about two teenagers (having ordinary teenager problems) was happy when I told her about the old WW II government signs now back in vogue in the UK, "Keep calm and carry on."

She found the slogan comforting.

Well. What else is there to do?

Exercising the beast within...

I've been enjoying my spring break holiday, although I miss Aimee, and want her back safely, especially as we heard of a student's mountaineering accident on a different spring break trip with a different organization. The student is in hospital, but her instructor was killed. Knowing something about mountaineering accidents, it now worries me even more that my wife is backpacking in the Nicaraguan jungle, but at least there's no rockfall and avalanche in the jungle.

But I get pretty tried of 10 and 12 hour days during term time, so the break has been great, despite the lack of wifey. Mostly it's the dearth of exercise when you work in an office or classroom. I've been known to get up to some fairly strenuous high jinks to get the student's attention, like illustrating the 1st and 2nd Laws of Thermodynamics by climbing on the table and jumping off! (When the fat professor jumps of the table and lands on the floor, where does the energy go to then?)

But table jumping aside, even the grottiest day around the farm, with lots of stomping around in muddy boots in the rain or snow to get chores done, is better than the best day at work. And the several large hikes I've had have made me feel better than I have felt in years, physically speaking. I wish I could keep up the routine.

The downside of all this is that of several big jobs that needed to be done before Monday, two remain undone, one not even started yet.

I remain defiant. Screw them! I work too bloody hard. And I have dogs to walk and lambs to watch!

Still, yesterday I worked all day, and no hike, and today I have to travel to scope out more anemometry sites for possible community-owned wind turbines. That leaves four days to hike before the end of spring break and the onslaught: Thursday, Friday (Aimee comes back late that night), Saturday and Sunday.

In case you're feeling sorry for me, don't. Remember, we don't teach all summer, although I do community service and research work, especially wind assessment, and Aimee does her crab research.

And in the fall, I get to spend two afternoons a week getting paid to hike, and several other long sessions getting paid to be in the outdoors teaching barn-building and carpentry. Not to mention the wind assessment seminar with all the outdoor work and field trips.

It's a fairly varied and interesting job I have, with a lot of outdoor work, this one I complain about so much.

It's just the mid-winter period where exercise is so elusive and valuable. From early December to spring break, and even on to the end of term in May, I essentially have to fight with my schedule, my bosses, my students, and sometimes even my wife, to make room for exercise. And I always lose. It gets a little easier after spring break because the snow melts and so I can walk for a half hour in the campus woods, but not much better, because you still have to make time for that walk.

I find it hard to believe that I permit this, considering how much better I feel about myself when I get time to exercise. This is all my own fault, of course. If I hadn't spent all that time as a youth climbing mountains with the RAF, I could be a happy fat slob and never know the difference.

Our college president, also an exercise nut, has a better time of it, I think, probably because his preferred forms of exercise, basketball and cycling, can be fit into a work schedule. Mine, farm work and long walks, require a half day at least.

Anyway, the upshot of all this whining and rambling is, I guess I have to choose between finishing up my spring break jobs, or taking some more hikes, and then I have to go back to those 12 hour days.

I think I've settled on unmitigated defiance. Screw the work. I'm taking a hike tomorrow!

Say hi to Patrick and Paddy

Here is one of Jewel's twin ram lambs. I distinctly remember Aimee saying I could pick names for them in her absence. It is St. Patrick's Day tomorrow, and I just got a card from my buddy Pat, an "Irishman of note."

So in Pat's honour we will call these guys Patrick and Paddy. I know that's redundant, but I'm thinking ahead, see: Twin lambs, nursing the same ewe, the same age?

We'll never tell them apart! It's best for all concerned if they have interchangeable names.

Off course, none of these executive decisions I'm so boldly making might survive the wifey's return. But we'll see.

In other news, I decided it was Mary's turn for a nice long walk in the snow. Mary is a Redbone Coonhound (say that with a nice fakey southern accent for the full effect -- lots of extra vowels and syllables!) and likes to run free in the woods, which is not good, and she is a fidget in vehicles, trying always to stand on the dash and flap her long ears out of the window and drool on the car behind.

As a consequence, she is not often allowed to go for walks that require the preliminary of a ride in the pick-em-up truck, so she never gets to go to Mount Harris, unless Aimee comes along. But she is allowed in the woods behind the house, where she generally runs right for home as soon as she figures out that we've reached the turn-around point in the walk.

Here she is risking her neck on the ice. And a nice shot of an old snag overhanging the beaver pond.