Lisa has the night shift during lambing, arriving in time to feed the dogs their evening meal, count and check all the sheep out in the pastures, and bring the ewes who are due soon into the barn for the night. She watches the barn through the evening, has her dinner in the barn, does laundry, mends coats, and sometimes gets busy with lambing. Delivering lambs is definitely not Lisa’s favorite thing, because she is always worried something is going to go terribly wrong. But Lisa had a flurry of lambing activity over the weekend that she handled smoothly, and even seemed to enjoy.
Friday night, things were quiet and Lisa was winding down and hoping to get out of the barn early, when Blossom broke a water bag and Lisa buckled down to wait out her labor. She looked at my notes and saw that I was hoping for a ram from Blossom, and decided if it was a ram, he had to be named “Bud.” Only Lisa would think of that! Unfortunately for me, Blossom had a single girl, a very nice lamb.
Saturday and Sunday were quiet with no births, and we thought we were headed into another lull in lambing (there have been a lot of lulls this season, with only 20 pregnant ewes). I went home Sunday afternoon and somehow missed a call from Lisa around 4:00: “Oh hey there, I’m up on the hillside with Faux-faux-Daisy, who’s lambing. I think it’s gonna be OK but I’m kind of stuck up here with her because she wants this spot. And it’s taking a while. I see the nose and front feet…but everything is on hold…”
(Faux-faux-Daisy is a ewe called Clara. She got her nickname because Lisa mistook her for a ewe she calls Faux-Daisy, because Lisa frequently mistakes HER for a ewe that has been a favorite pet of hers, called Daisy. Naming gets a bit convoluted around here sometimes. I won’t explain now how Daisy got HER name.)
I think Lisa was hoping I would come up and watch Clara while Lisa did the rest of the afternoon routine, but I missed her call so she was on her own. She delivered lovely twins, a boy and a girl, just what I wanted from Clara. They were VERY orange, a sign of some stress during delivery. But Clara got to work on them and by the morning they were licked snow-white.
Luckily it was still early, and even without my help Lisa was able to get Clara’s lambs weighed and be sure they had a first drink of colostrum, get them into a jug and then complete the afternoon routine before dark. She spent the evening in the barn and was just winding down when–Whoosh!—Quail broke a huge water bag and Lisa gave up the thought of an early evening.
Quail labored long and hard, with a big single lamb. Once she could see the nose and a foot, Lisa did a little exploring and found that one leg was back. She had a hard pull to deliver the lamb, a huge lamb, weighing in at 15 pounds, our biggest lamb this season. Lisa named him Hugo.
