The sheep have taken up more of my staycation than I anticipated. I spent a whole day on Friday messing around with them. Due to all of the babies and only having one Jug left open It was determined I should tag and band babies. I usually just turn the babies loose and in a month try and match and catch random babies. It tends to be inaccurate and fairly labor intensive. Annmarie has been trying to get me to tag and band from the jugs for ages. The real problem is banding the lambs at that age is not easy. I have tagged and banded over 330 male lambs so I am pretty confident in getting it right now no matter the age. Plus it has the added benefit of actually being able to track each ewe accurately. Meathead helped me tag band and give selenium supplement to everyone in the jugs except the newborn twins under the stairs. We then put fresh straw in all of the used jugs and moved panels around to make the momma/baby area bigger and created a chute for the pregnant mommas to get into the barn. As the momma/baby group gets bigger we just keep giving them more of the front of the barn and the preggers get the smaller back half. It took us few years to figure this out! Nothing is ever easy when you start, there are a lot of hard lessons to getting a good routine down. The feeders get moved around also to correspond to the number of mouths needing fed.
- Date of update- Feb 3, 2023
- # of Lambs born – 15
- # of ewes who have delivered babies – 8
- # of ewes still pregnant – lots
- # of single lamb births – 2
- # of twin lamb births – 5
- # of triplet lamb births – 1
- # tagged male (weathers-neutered) lambs-6
- # tagged female lambs-4
- # of bummer lambs – 1
- # of lambs who died in first two weeks – 1
- Total # of lambs on farm -13
- % birthing rate- 188%
- % production rate -163%
- % survival rate at birth – 100%
- % survival rate at 2 weeks (bummers count as death as they need help and leave the farm) – 87%
Stewart Creek Somethings 