Flicker’s Lair Blog

We got quite a surprise when we went out to the barn this morning!

We weren’t/aren’t expecting lambs till toward the end of April. There had been some fence breaking so this isn’t entirely unexpected!

Isn’t she beautiful!

She has been introduced to all the crowd. Sweet Pea wasn’t worried about her meeting the chickens and ducks. But when one of the geese came into the barn she got very protective and kept chasing the goose away! The poor goose just wanted to lay an egg in her corner of the barn, where suddenly there was a rather antagonistic sheep!

Sorry to those who might have been expecting this update somewhat sooner in the day. We were really worried that the lamb wasn’t eating so ended up spending half the day watching the lamb and mum. I am not sure if we were so over-anxious because we are novices or because the mum is Sweet Pea, whose lamb was still-born last year. But with some reassurance from our shepherding mentor – Tammy at Kalwa Taure Shetlands – and quite a bit of reading, we realised that yes we were just being over-anxious and mum and baby are doing fine!

To quote my favourite sheep book: “I confess that I find keeping track of whether or not a lamb is nursing to be the most maddening part of lambing. Baby lambs don’t drink much milk, and sometimes it seems as if they bounce off the teat without ever really attaching. Plus, a newborn lamb spends almost its entire first day sleeping, which I have tended to misinterpret as dying if I’m convinced they haven’t suckled effectively.” ~ Living with Sheep by Chuck Wooster

Tags: lambs, shetland sheep

This entry was posted on Friday, March 27th, 2009 at 9:31 pm and is filed under Homesteading, Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.