Since lambing has clearly begun, I anxiously checked the lamb-cam several times last night. Eleven pm. All was quiet. I woke at 1:00 and checked again. All quiet. Not a ewe was moving, no sign of labor or lambs. I woke again at 4:00, but the app wasn’t working right and I couldn’t call up the cameras, but I went back to sleep thinking it had been fine at 1:00 and there were only a few hours until morning.
At 7:00 I arrived at the barn to find Lisa and Lolo quite excited. “Melinda had a busy night last night,” Lisa exclaimed. And I saw one of the Corriedales in a jug. It was Soot, number 275, a second-time mother who had twins last year. She had been looking REALLY huge, like East-Friesian-style huge, and had been slowing down the past few days and I was worried she would go into pregnancy toxemia. But instead, she had triplets in the night! Hmmm…I was transitioning to Corriedales and Romneys so that we would have fewer lambs per ewe!
Melinda had left copious notes…she had checked the barn cam around 2:00, but it wouldn’t work for her either, so she decided to go up to the barn to check. And there was Soot with a lamb. Melinda looked back in the recordings and saw the lamb being born at 1:00, just after I had checked the camera. But it was a stealth birth if ever there was one. On the recording, there was Soot, laying down looking quite relaxed. Laying there, laying there, no drama, no obvious pushing or getting up and laying back down–nothing at all to indicate she was in labor. She certainly was laid back about the whole thing. Then, a little after 1:00 she gets up and turns around, and look! A little black lamb! I was pretty unnerved that I had checked the camera just minutes before she delivered and didn’t notice anything, but there wasn’t much to see.
Over the next hour the video shows her cleaning up and loving that lamb, but she was too active to let it nurse.
Melinda got there around 2:00, found the new family, and put them in a jug to slow Soot down enough for her lamb to nurse. Soot clearly had more but wasn’t pushing them out, so Melinda wound up pulling the next two lambs, who were just a bit hung up in the birth canal. Soot wound up with two boys and a girl, all black and energetic! Melinda stayed long enough to see them all nurse, then left Soot and her babes in an expanded “triplet-suite” and headed home to bed.
Meanwhile, Bingo is a model first-time mother, loving her two lambs. The firstborn girl with the white ear-rims has figured out how to cozy up to Mom’s bag while she is resting, and sneak a sip right there. Based on her color pattern, I think she got the “dark blue” gene from her dad, O’Hara, but I’m double-checking this with Maggie Howard, the color-gene expert.
