Not such a Happy Halloween for our boys–we took the rams out today, a couple of weeks earlier than we usually do. They have been in with the ewes just 21 days, which is just a bit longer than a ewes’ 17-day cycle. We find that most of our ewes get bred in the first cycle, and so each year most of our lambs come in the first 2 weeks of March. But there always are a few stragglers, and we put a lot of labor into waiting for and raising those last lambs, at a time of year when we are pretty exhausted from lambing. We decided that this season we’d take the rams out early, so all of our lambs come in early March (when my cousin Linda will be here!) and then we will be done. And if that means that we have a higher percentage of open ewes (not pregnant), we can live with that. We wound up breeding 38 ewes, when I was originally planning to reduce the flock to 30 or fewer. When Dr Dotti comes to do the ultrasound in December, we will know how busy we will be when Linda is here in March! (Photos: Lolo and Melinda moving Pistol’s group of ewe lambs to the corrals for sorting.)
