Our 2006 Lambs!

NOTE: If you have checked this page previously, remember to click on Reload/Refresh to get the newest version. I am posting the newest entries on the top. So to start the story from the beginning, scroll down the bottom and read the entries from the bottom to the top. If you want to see photos of the parents, you can go to the Finns - Our Flock page and there are links to pages for each sheep.

Monday, April 17, 2006 The ewes and their lambs can go outside in a small pen just off the barn whenever they wish. On nice days, they go out in "the big world" (pasture) to play. The ewes are busy grazing and the lambs race around the pasture at top speed. It is very cute and hilarious.

Annika - Lumi's small ewe lamb

The sheep and lambs all love Sophie, the barn cat.
Sophie is less impressed by them. Although she did once sleep on a sheep on a very cold night.

Panda-monium?

Kahvi, the brown ram-lamb and some of his buddies

Is a lamb stampede called a "lambpede"?

Friday and Saturday, April 7 and 8, 2006 Here are some recent photos of the lambs...

Helmi's lambs - 2 days old

Uma's ram lamb - 2 weeks old

Mara and her lambs - 2 weeks old.
(Forgive the glowing eyes. This was taken in the barn at night.)

Lumi in a pile of lambs - some of which are hers.
She is a bit thin after having her lambs. We are working on plumping her up!

Tracy with Rio (the Great Pyrenees) and Lumi's tiny lamb

Thursday, April 6, 2006 -- Helmi finally had her lambs this morning. They are twins and they are both female. I am amazed there are only two as she looked like she was pregnant with quads. I was praying for 3 or less since I think that is enough for a first time mother to worry about. But it turned out that the first one is as big as two lambs!

Because the first one is quite big, Helmi had a little trouble delivering it. Also being a first time mom, I think she was a little anxious and wanted to push the lamb out before she was totally dilated. (Similar to her sister Mara.) The big lamb is a piebald and marked really cute. She is a lot more solid colored than most piebald Finnsheep. Her body is solid black except for a thin white stripe down her chest. Her head is mostly white with panda eye spots. She also has the little bands on her back legs like Mara and Lumi's tiny lamb. She was really tired after being born, I think she was squeezed in the birth canal for a while. I got some milk into her and now she is sleeping it all off.

The second lamb is black. She is quite solid with just a tiny bit of white on her head and feet. She is average size for a Finn lamb. She had an easier time coming into the world so she is very active and almost hyper. Though she looks scrawny compared to her sister. Both lambs are doing fine so far. I always worry the first day and then after that I relax a bit. They just seem so small and fragile. Helmi had a struggle giving birth but she has been very calm and is being a good mama so far.

Helmi's twin ewe-lambs

Wednesday, April 5, 2006 -- Today Lumi, Uma and Mara and their 8 lambs got to go outside in the lamb pen. This is a small pen (approx 20' x 20') that is just off the barn. It is a nice, warm day with not too much wind and if they get cold they can get back inside the barn. Helmi is the only ewe left to lamb. She is in a pen by herself so that the lambs can't pester her too much. She is due to lamb at any time. She had better have her lambs soon... she can not possibly get any bigger. I am guessing that she has at least 4 lambs, which is quite a big "brood" to take care of for her first time.

Monday, April 3, 2006 -- Katja started have a few contractions in the morning when my friend Carol was here to visit the lambs. But then nothing happened for a long time. She has done this each of the three years that she has had lambs. She waits until nobody is in the barn for a long time... and then usually in the afternoon starts having her lambs.

After many barn checks in which I found Katja sitting around eating hay and chewing her cud, I went out to the barn at around 2 PM to find two little white female lambs cleaned of and walking around. After that she had two more white male lambs. We helped her dry them off and get them something to eat, but otherwise she did everything by herself.

She seems a little crabbier this year with four babies to take care of, rather than just two (in 2004 as a ewe lamb) or one (in 2005 via an AI breeding). However, keeping her hay basket full to the top seems to keep her a whole lot happier. I'm not sure why a full hay basket is better than a half full hay basket as either way she has something to eat. But as long as she is happy and feeding her babies, I can keep tossing hay in the basket. After all, she is eating for 5 right now!

Katja's Quads

Thursday, March 30, 2006 -- Evening -- I went out to do my evening chores to find Emmi in labor. They are triplets, a white male, a white female and a black male. All good sized. The ewe-lamb was breach (feet first) and I had to help her out. (Sometimes when they are breach, it doesn't seem to cue the ewe to push like usual.) But she seems fine. These are some active lambs! Finns lambs are quick to get up, but these are even more so.

Emmi cleaned off all three lambs but then once they were clean, they started trying to nurse and she was really confused and a bit "freaked out". This is unusual for Emmi who calm and is from a very calm line of sheep. I held Emmi and made sure everybody got some colostrum. Emmi just kept sniffing them and looking at the lambs like she couldn't figure out what they were or where they had come from. Once she decided that these little "aliens" posed no threat, she decided that maybe it would be OK if the two white ones nursed but that she absolutely hated the black one. I had to get him away from her because I was afraid she would hurt or kill him.

The black one isn't a little sickly lamb either. So it is not a case of the mother knowing that there is something wrong with one. He is actually the biggest and strongest. I have heard of mother sheep rejecting one lamb that is somehow different from the others. The rejected lamb is not necessarily different from the mother, but is different from the other lambs. However, I have never had a rejection in my flock. (Even if I have to feed or supplement a lamb, the ewe still allows the lamb to live with her and takes care of it.) It is werid that she hates this one so much as she is being an extremely good and attentive mother to the other two lambs. The only thing I can think of is that she had a hard time giving birth because of the breach lamb and by the time the black one was born last, she was exhausted and confused and did not bond with him properly, even though she cleaned him.

Emmi's male lambs

Emmi's female lamb

Wednesday, March 29, 2006 -- Evening -- I forgot to write about one sort-of scary experience. At 2 AM on Monday, I went out to feed the tiny girl and check on the other lambs. Sometimes when they are newborns, they haven't figured out how to go under the heat lamps to sleep yet and can get chilled. When I went outside, I heard Rio (our Great Pyr LGD) out in the back pasture by the woods barking like crazy. Then I heard the neighbor's horses gallop from the back of their pasture (near the woods) to the front (near their shelter).

Rio came charging up the alleyway, that connects our front and back pastures, still barking. At first, I thought that she was barking at me since sometimes we startle her when we go out in the middle of the night. (Of course when she sees it is us, she is fine.) So I was saying, "It's just me, Rio." At this point, I had almost walked up to the south end of our barn where the wethers and lambs were lying around the hay feeders outside. Just then I saw a shadow along the east side of the pasture fence and all the sheep jumped up and ran over to me. (Elias is the only one of our sheep who is truly "dog broke" for herding, so he knows to go to the person in the presence of a "predator" (or Border Collie). It turned out that the animal was outside the fence, but I couldn't see that at first.

Rio came flying up the inside of the fenceline still barking and chasing the animal. She continued to chase it all the way up the the road side of the pasture and across the front to the SW corner where the double gate is. So the animal must have run off in that direction. The shadow did not look or move like a deer. And Rio will bark at a dog outside the fence, but not with that degree of ferocity. So I think it had to be a coyote because she really hates them and is serious about chasing them down. (Fortunately for the coyotes, none have been stupid enough to challenge the fence and the dog yet.) She stood by the corner of the pasture and patrolled and barked for a long time.

Interestingly, one of our neighbors had just asked us that morning if we had seen any coyotes out on our property yet this year. We told him that we hadn't. (We know there are always coyotes out there, but only in late spring and early summer do we see them out in the open.) Ever since the first lambs were born on Friday, Rio has been on "high alert" so obviously she knows what is going on. Her instinct is amazing.

When I went in the barn and saw the beautiful baby lambs, I was so grateful to Rio for being out there to protect all of our sheep... and especially the baby lambs. See Rio's photo here.

Wednesday, March 29, 2006 -- No more babies yet and all the lambs are looking good. Given when I think the ewes were bred, I am expecting Katja's lambs around Sunday, April 2nd and Helmi's lambs around Tuesday, April 4th. Emmi is our "X factor". I never saw her in season, I never saw the ram interested in her and I never saw her being bred. She is quite big and looks like she could have lambs any minute. But she has looked that way for a few days now...

Tuesday, March 28, 2006 -- Good news! Lumi's tiny lamb is 100% nursing from her mother! No more bottles -- Yay!! We had noticed that on Monday, sometimes she would be very hungry and other times it was difficult to get her to take milk from the bottle at all. Then one time when Upal went out to feed her, she caught her nursing from the mom! This is better for everyone and we are so glad it happened. I still go out to the barn every 3 to 4 hours to check on them. I always feel her belly and it is plump and full.

Monday, March 27, 2006 -- Today we banded three of the little boy lambs. I absolutely hate this job, but since I do not have reservations for ram lambs this year, I am not going to keep many intact. These boys all have nice wool so maybe I will be able to sell some of them as fiber pets to handspinners. I had planned to keep just a couple intact this year and have decided to leave Uma's pretty white lamb as a ram to sell. I was also going to keep a black ram-lamb intact to sell. However, since I am planning to keep my new brown lamb, I may end up offering Bo (a 2 year old black ram) for sale. So that will make a black ram (2 years old) and a white ram (lamb) for sale. I do not have the facilities to keep many rams through the winter months, plus the rams are more work to handle.

Sunday, March 26, 2006 Today was a nice day, warm and not windy. So we took some of the lambs just outside the barn door in the sunshine for a few seconds so we could take better photos of their wool colors.

Mara's brown ram lamb - One day old I am planning to call him "Kahvi" (Finnish for coffee).

Confused about we got these lambs? First I'll explain the brown boy or how two black sheep can produce a brown baby. Mara (the dam) is black but carries carries for brown (thus has one gene for black and one gene for brown). I knew this already because her father Teddy IS brown. So she had to inherit a gene for brown from him.

Usko (the sire) is black and also carries for brown. I hoped for this but didn't know for sure. Usko's sire, Lotto in Finland, is grey. Because he had produced a fawn lamb for my friend Sandy, I knew that he carried a brown gene. So Lotto has one gene for black and one gene for brown. Plus he carries the pattern (modifier) for grey. The grey pattern modifies the expression of color so that a genetically "black" sheep has grey wool and a genetically "brown" sheep has fawn wool. There was also a 50/50 chance that Usko's dam, Katja (who is black), carries for brown.

Lumi's (reddish) white ram lamb - two days old
Note: ignore the bright orange spot on his belly. This is iodine from dipping his umbilical cord.

I had never seen a Finn lamb this color, let alone had it appear in my flock. I think it is beautiful though. I emailed Sandy DeMaster who sold me my original starter flock and knows a lot about color genetics. She said that she had never seen this in a Finn but had seen it in her Shetlands back when she had both breeds. This is the info. that I got from Sandy as well as a bit more that I found on the internet.

The reddish cast to this lamb is not a true "color" and not controlled by color genetics as we know it. Genetically, the lamb is white. However, it has a great deal of a pigment known as phaeomelanin. This pigment causes a yellow or red cast and is the same pigment that makes Yellow Labrador Retrievers be yellow. It is especially seen mostly in the hair on the sheep, such on the legs and face. Generally the color in the wool will grow out and fade by the time the lamb is 6 months old. The color on the legs/face may stay into adulthood or may fade a little or a lot.

Saturday, March 25, 2006 -- Mid-day -- Mara had triplets! The first one caused us a lot of worry and we were on the phone with the vet two times. In the end she delivered him fine. The problem was that she was trying to push him out when she was not dialated all the way yet. It reminded me of the birth scenes (on TV and through the stories of my maternal friends) where they doctor is saying, "Don't push yet. Don't push yet." And the new mother is saying, "Get it OUT!"

This is Mara's first litter of lambs. I did not breed my ewe lambs last year. On top of that she is a small ewe, so I would not have bred her until she was full grown. I am totally amazed that there was space inside her for three good sized lambs. I was expecting either twins or else little tiny triplets. All three of her lambs were born in less than 2 hours. Because of the worry, it seemed like longer.

Her lambs are:

That's right!! Our first brown sheep!!! When they are first born and are all wet, you can't really tell that they are brown. The main thing that Upal noticed was that he looked "naked" like he didn't have much wool. I think that is because you can see the skin through the wet wool. The brown lamb seems to have a reddish brown color of skin. The brown lamb also has a red tongue. The black lambs have black skin and a purplish black tongue.

R - Top: brown boy;
L to R - Bottom: black girl, black boy

Saturday, March 25, 2006 -- Wee hours of the morning -- Upal went out to the barn at about 3 AM to give the tiny girl her bottle. At this point, she cannot eat very much at a time, since she is both newborn and so tiny, so we are trying to feed her frequently. When he went out to the barn, there was a white lamb running around inside the barn! At first he thought that Lumi's white lamb had somehow escaped from the jug (pen for a mom and her newborn lambs), but Lumi's lamb was with his mom where he belonged. Once he noticed this, and perhaps started to really wake up, he saw that the new lamb was Uma's. (Her rear end had fluid on it.)

I had the possible due dates for Uma as Thursday, March 23rd or Monday, April 10. Uma always gets really huge and uncomfortable the last week before she lambs. When she had not gotten very big and didn't deliver lambs on March 23rd, I had decided she must have not gotten pregnant the first time she was in season, but perhaps she had gotten bred 16-17 days later. Guess I was wrong!

Upal came into the house and woke me up. I went out to the barn to be sure Uma did not have any more lambs inside her (since we had no idea how long she was in labor etc.) and she was empty. So she just had one male lamb. He is very pretty like all of Uma's lambs and was 9 lbs O oz.. He was probably born on day 145 since she was just carrying one lamb. Usually "white faced sheep" (sheep whose bodies and faces are the same color) deliver at 145 days. Finns are often born at 143 days because of the multiple births and limited space in the ewe. (In case you were wondering, "black faced sheep" (the meat sheep with the white bodies and black faces) deliver their babies at about 148 to 150 days.)

It is not usual for a Finn ewe to just have one lamb (especially if it is conceived naturally and not through AI). Really my only disappointment here is that he is not a female. I had really wanted to keep a ewe-lamb for myself out of this breeding since I would like more of this line in my flock.

I am planning to keep him whole to sell as a ram because he is so nice looking. Usually I would not register a single (because the breed standard calls for a ram to be a triplet or more). However, this is my most prolific line and the exact same breeding of Martti and Uma resulted in quadruplets - all male, but big and good looking - last year. So I feel it is not genetic. However, due to an accident on our farm this winter, I was worried about whether she would carry any lambs to term.

Here is the story: In the early hours of the morning January 5th, I went out to feed the sheep. The first thing that I saw was a white sheep collapsed, lying on the ground and another white sheep pawing it trying to get up. I was panicked and confused for a moment and then I realized that the sheep pawing her was Martti - a ram! There were not supposed to be any rams in with the ewes!! Then I noticed that the gate dividing the to pastures was open. I quickly ran back to the house and yelled to Upal to "suit up" in his farm clothes.

What had happened was that Frieda, my barren ewe (never had babies but still comes into season), had come into heat overnight. My testosterone crazed rams had leaned on the gate so much that they had snapped the metal clip on the chain that fastened the gate closed. The clip looked really sturdy, but I think it was the 600 to 700 lb leaning on the gate over time that created a weak spot. So the rams got into the pasture. Rammy-lamby claimed Frieda as his own and took her to the other end of the front pasture (by the road) and guarded her.

Martti decided he was going to breed Uma. Because she was pregnant and therefore not in season, she would not allow him to catch and breed her. So he must have chased her until she collapsed. (I am not sure why he singled her out. He was the ram she was bred to this year and last.) The other three rams just wandered around sniffing various sheep and eating hay.

It took us at least an hour to get the rams sorted back out and once Uma had a rest she was up and walking around. Now that gate has three separate chains and clips! And Frieda will be leaving the farm this spring as she causes too much trouble coming into season constantly. So while I wish she had produced a little girl for me to keep, at least she had this nice looking ram-lamb and didn't lose all her lambs!

Friday, March 24, 2006 -- Lumi delivered a litter of quadruplets between 11:15 and 12:55. The first three were born within 30 minutes and it was sort of a scramble. She hadn't even gotten the first lamb cleaned off yet, when the second lamb was born. The lambs are:

black - female - 3 lb 12 oz
black - female - 5 lb 4 oz
white (red) - male - 7 lb 0 oz
black - male - 6 lb 7 oz

The first tiny one got a little hypothermic but we got her warmed up and she is OK. (We have noted that our new lamb warming box needs a design modification in that the feet of the tiniest lambs can fall through the bars. This will be corrected soon.)

Her biggest problem now is that her mouth is a bit too tiny to fit on the teat well and her suck reflex is a bit inefficient. So we milked some colostrum out of Lumi and tube fed her (put it into the stomach) to be sure she got enough. She does not seem to be able to nurse off of Lumi so we will treat her as a bottle baby for now so we can be sure she gets enough to eat. She is still living with her family and the ewe is still accepting her.

The white boy is quite interesting. His legs are a reddish color and he has a bit of the reddish color on the lower part of his face and back of his ears. His wool is an oatmeal color. The skin on the inside of his ears has tons of pigment - very black. He is quite cute and his wool is really soft.

L to R - Top: smaller girl, white (red) boy;
L to R - Bottom: black boy, larger girl

Thursday, March 23, 2006 -- Still no lambs. I have gotten a lot of exercise walking out the barn every two hours over the past three days. After Monday, when she was a bit off her feed (sometimes a sign that labor is near), Lumi has been up at the hay and trough eating normally. The lambs have dropped really low in her body, but perhaps it is just because she is getting so big!

Yesterday, I finished painting the lamb warming box that Upal built for me out of some dowels and scrap plywood. This is a wooden box with a hole for a hairdryer to blow warm air in the side. There is a shelf in the middle that allows warm air to blow around the lamb, without having to blow it directly on him. In the previous two years, I had used a makeshift cardboard box. And while it was less than ideal, I did save some lambs with it. On the new box, there is a little door flap on the front which can be opened to check on the lamb and take its temp (proving you face the lamb the right way) without opening the whole top.

Monday, March 21, 2006 -- No lambs yet. We have 6 ewes bred and lambs are expected from now till April 12th.

Here are the breedings:
Martti x Uma
Martti x Katja
Usko x Lumi
Usko x Mara
Usko x Helmi
Usko x Emmi

Lumi looks like she could have her lambs anytime now and I think she will be the first. The lambs have dropped lower in her body and her udder is huge. Unfortunately, I don't know when she was bred as I never saw Usko interested in her. I don't use a marking harness anymore as I have had problems with them in the past. They don't seem to be very compatible with the jackets (wool covers) and in ram lambs it is even worse. I worry about the ram getting tangled up and injured. Because I am with my flock so much, I usually see when the ewes come into season... but sometimes they are sneaky!

I am going out to the barn every two hours to check on her. Not bad exercise, but we are in the midst of an Alberta clipper and the wind is brutal! When I win the lottery, I am going to purchase a barn cam. Note to self: start buying lottery tickets...

Lamb photos coming soon. We hope...

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Last update: June 22, 2008

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