Sold some sheep. They are missed by the flock.

More Monday.  It’s been a busy time with the flock these days.

Breeding began Feb 6 with Badgerface

We bolused the eligible ewes and put them in with Shaft, who completed the mission nearly instantly with Badgerface but who has been struggling to figure out the logistics with the other six breeding ewes.  I think he’ll be done by this weekend, but we’ll keep them all in another week at least.  This blog has been the best way to track breeding dates, so there we are.

Live lamb pictures!

Grey did have a living lamb, also black moorit, walking around and hanging out as lambs do.  Best guess is that this lamb is also about 8-9lbs.  Grey is being a little nervy, so I am going out now every half hour to monitor.  The perils of pasture lambing.

This is probably a ram, couldn’t get close enough to see.

Goldie and her lambs came by to greet the new arrival.

EDITED 5pm: The survivor is a little 9lb ewe.  We call her Ripley.  She is nursing great and mom’s chilled out and is relaxed and grazing.

A month of lambing awaits us

If our two smaller ewes Goldie and Badgerface have singles rather than later conception dates, we could see lambs this weekend, and it looks like our two big heavy ewes Grey and Black N Tan are due up mid-month.  One of the joys of having a sheep breed with a bit shorter gestation than the books/extension sites mention is that lambing always happens sooner than you were quite expecting.  Icelandics lamb in a typical range of 140-144 days, with 137 being term and 154 being late-term.

I was operating on the assumption that the two small ewes missed two 17 day cycles and would thus lamb close to the end of April or early May, but it is increasingly looking like they didn’t miss that many cycles and did get covered before mid-December.  So we’ll be starting the lambing watch this weekend, but low-key, with the big push after April 15.  So hopefully we’re done at the end of April.

 

 

Sheep roundup

The pregnant ewes are finally all together with their daughter lambs, and all the rams are together, which will make management easier.  The breeding pen was not really set up for hay feeding, but now we have two groups with access to the hay feeders, so that will go easier.

It’s been a really mild winter, grass is already coming up.  We should have fairly rich pasture this year with the extra time.  Still had to order more hay though, and we also have to fix a barn leak so we can safely use the remaining hay.  That’ll be fun.

We’ll try to get some hoof trims and worm checks in this month, while the ewes are not too heavily pregnant and then just focus on minerals and adequate hay until lambing season.

Homesteading Diary, Thursday, January 8

Husband and I: Coming off a very sick holiday season, but doing better and may be up and about this weekend.

Sheep:  Pregnant ewes are pregnant, looking ok, we just have to find a Saturday to move them back in with the ewe lambs, hopefully it can be this one.  Scottie is bold as brass, which will make sending him to freezer camp easier, but that’s probably still a couple weeks away.  All the sheep are miserable about the rain.  We have to order a ton or so more hay and a bunch more straw this week.

Kids: It’s a rainy enough winter that even they don’t want to be outside constantly.  But they do want to run around and finding places for them to do that has been a bit of a challenge.

That’s all for now, next week should be more normal and busy.

Slaughter success and breeding victory

Skinning Bart. He was very bony.

 

With the help of some relatives, one of the ram lambs, Bart, was finally slaughtered, skinned and broken down over the holiday weekend.  It didn’t take very long and we now have some Icelandic lamb in the freezer.  We should have Scottie and Dingus taken care of in the next week or so.

As for breeding, all the adult ewes are finally in with Shaft and hopefully everyone gets pregnant.  Due to the ewes’ cycling not being synchronized, they’ll be in there until January, or when they show conclusive signs of pregnancy, whichever comes first.  So we are going to have May lambs, which means April spring shearing.

Bart was a light yield, about 15lbs of finished cuts including the organs we kept.  That is a hanging weight somewhere past 20lbs, but not much past.  He weighed more before the weather got colder, but he was in fact weaker than Scottie and Dingus and lost some weight the last month.  Dingus has inherited excellent parasite resistance, as he was stunted but has a well formed, meaty frame.  He is smaller physically than Bart’s rangier, lankier frame, but will give more meat.  So that’s good.

My husband feels pretty good about his ability to slaughter sheep going forward.  Bart was stunned unconscious and then had his throat slit.  It all went very quickly.  The cold weather has helped a lot.

Now that Thanksgiving festivities are over (we celebrated with friends and family and it went pretty well and was delicious), I have to get back to the fiber prep.  Speaking of weight gain, we have a baby that went from 16 to 17lbs over the course of Thanksgiving week.  And still waiting to hit three months old.  I guess he’s taking lessons from the lambs.

The lambs’ first maintenance weekend

This past weekend we did maintenance for all the sheep, with some much-needed assistance from a local acquaintance. It was the first time for the lambs. They all got their very first vaccines and hoof trims and dose of wormer.  From the look of things, we will need to do some soil testing, as the lambs grazed in a pretty different area to the ewes and the FAMACHA checks were quite different in both groups.  We also found out Bucky has better parasite resistance than Shaft, though Shaft has clearly better fleece.  Something to keep in mind for the future.

We had a couple cases of lamb hoof scald from the lambs grazing in the running seasonal stream.  Scald is a precursor to hoof rot, but is not necessarily a sign that there is rot in the field.  We foot bathed and are doing very clean straw, even out in the muddy entrance.  We weren’t skipping straw before, we’re just doing the recommended extremely dry bedding level for scald/rot in the flock.

Anyway, since there was no limping (the scald was mild enough that it could have been missed in a larger hoof trim group), we didn’t bust out the antibiotics.  We’re really trying to keep use down to a minimum where that makes sense.

There was a plan to do more fencing, but hitting a water line derailed that and the time was instead spent fixing that problem.

The lambs had some odd growths from walking and skipping on uneven terrain, nothing bad, very likely just the normal course of things when there aren’t enough scraping rocks around.  We are working on putting some out in the field to help reduce having to trim by hand.

Nobody looked nutrient deficient, so that was nice.

No new lambs

The two ram lambs are growing about 1lb per day per lamb, based on the weighings we were able to manage.  They are increasing in vigor and size visibly.  They’re also darkening up, with a lot more brown than when they were newborn.  They are not likely to have much white, that is both recessive and not heavily selected for in the American Icelandic genetic pool.  As far as I’ve seen, shepherds of Icelandics in America cater to wool buyers who want a range of colors and not just white dye-friendly wool.  White wool isn’t rejected, it’s just not necessarily as sought after by people who want this fleece.  Also, many Icelandic-raising shepherds like working with wool themselves and also have a personal preference for the color variety of brown, black and spotted that is typical for the breed.

I think the other ewes must have been covered later than my recollections.  I looked back at my posts around that time and it looks like the first week of November might be when they were bred and not the very tail end of October.  The grey ewe was settled very quickly, which is surprising given that she remains our most skittish and feral ewe herself.  But I thought the gap between her and the others was just two or three or maybe four days.  If it was a week or so, then we could be waiting until the first few days of April for all the lambs to finish making their appearances.

We’re going to see if we can put together a permanent ram pen rather than a temporary one.  Even though Icelandics are not prone to out of season conception, their season goes through April, and they return to fertility during that time.  So it will be easiest going forward to keep the rams completely separate from the girls, especially since it will mean less work separating ewelambs from breeding ewes.  It’s too bad, it would be easier if they could stay in all summer with the ewes and the new lambs.  But our rams do better without the distraction of the ladies, surprisingly.  No dominance fighting, sharing food occasionally, and generally calmer.

 

Rams just won’t stop until they reach the top of the neighbor’s hillside

I am finally starting to feel rested after racing uphill to chase the silly stupid rams.  They have decided the electronet isn’t serious enough and just jump over it or barrel through, as the whim takes them.  So in less than an hour they tore across three different property lines and quite a bit of bramble in pursuit of whatever it is little rams are after when they go roaming.

I spent a good twenty minutes running around in the weeds and blackberries trying to find them and then I get back to the barn to see if some alfalfa will lure them and there they are right next to the barn looking at me like they’d been there the whole time.

So electronet and smart fencing will have to be for ewes only (they never wander, so it can be temporary or permanent for them), and we’ll have to rely on cattle panels for the rams.  Cattle panels are a little too high for them to jump easily, and they seem to actually respect them in general, so they don’t test them in the first place.

I thought I’d be saving my uphill runs for the third trimester, not the start of the second one.