Lost Little Lovely

Something pushed part of the fence down and took our smallest ewe lamb Lovely with it.  There have been some teenaged black bears and whatnot running around.  It’s hard to say what happened.  We looked for any traces of her, but there was no sign on our land or the neighbors bordering us.

 

The rest of the girls are fine and boys were in a separate paddock.  I’ll have to record her as a probable predation loss.

We’ve had a lot of health issues, and scaled our flock down.  We have about a dozen total between girls and guys, plus a healthy wether in Zuko 4.  The land can support them even if we don’t get around to eating the rams this year.

Preliminary plans are to shear in a couple of months.  Should be interesting.

Wingus choked to death on electronet

I was able to bail him out a couple days ago, but today he snuck by and we just didn’t catch him in time.  He was tangled where there is a lot of bramble and it’s not easy to see if a sheep is actually tangled or not without stomping out there in the mud and thorns.

No more electronet for us.  This is the first (and hopefully only) death from it, but we’ve had so many close calls with our other sheep that we’re just going to have to put up something else that is higher-hassle to move around for our temporary fencing.

I know it’s our first year (from when we got our initial sheep), and my husband keeps saying that part of starting out even on a small scale is losing animals due to inexperience, but we were really hoping to eat Wingus, he was really massive.  And the punchline is that we don’t know enough about dead animals to know if the meat is salvageable, so he’s going straight in the ground as fertilizer.

I’m just feeling very overwhelmed right now.  My own child is gaining like crazy, if his current gains persist, I’d have a 90lb one year old.  So it’s hard to wait for the old energy levels to get back up.  But it’s good to have a healthy, comically large newborn.

Anyway, we have a lot to learn, and in the meantime our bellies will have to be filled with humble pie as we gain that wisdom from experience.