A Brief Progress Report

Posted 6th April 2008 by Dan 0 comments

We now have 6 sheep left to lamb: 2 older sheep and 4 hoggs (a hogg is a sheep that is 12 months old (last year's lambs)). All 6 sheep are now indoors for the night as the weather has already become bitterly cold.

20 sheep have now lambed and they have had 36 lambs between them: a mix of single-lamb families, twins and triplets. North, West and Tonight are one of the triplet families and they are all doing fine - they are getting to the very playful age now, getting bigger and chasing around their little field. Dianne is one of a set of twins, who is also doing fine. We do still go out with a bottle of milk to top her up but she has become less and less interested in the bottled milk suggesting that she is getting enough from her mother which is great news. You may recall that Dianne's family were featured in the third BBC NWT feature as one of the families that were born at 4am in the morning. Dianne's mother became strangely lame shortly after giving birth and she was struggling to even stand up because of this. We checked her feet but there was no sign of any problems so it was a mystery as to why her lameness had set in. Because of this though we thought her offspring (Dianne) was not going to get enough milk which is why we started to top her up with bottled milk. Thankfully though she seems to have recovered from her lameness and Dianne seems to be getting more and more of her milk from her mother .

We have had a couple of other occasions where sheep have decided to lamb in the middle of the night and the latest arrival came this morning (not too early this time though - 6am). It was a hogg and it gave birth all on its own which was a surprise, although Howard did get up at 2am and noticed it was starting to lamb but left it alone. It is not often that a hogg can give birth without assistance from the farmer so it was a nice surprise!

This afternoon has been quite a snowy afternoon at the farm but snow isn't as bad as strong winds and driving cold rain for the lambs. The snow has now melted but it has become bitterly cold so we have just got the remaining 6 lambing sheep indoors for the night. The lambs in the LambWatch field are all now old enough to be able to stay out at night and are between 1 and 3 weeks old.

During the day we keep the hoggs and the older lambing sheep separate. The reason for this is that we do not give the hoggs any extra supplements (we refer to this as cake) whereas we do give the older lambing sheep extra cake. We do not give the hoggs any extra cake because if we were to, all the nutrients from it would go into their lambs and not the mother herself, making her lambs much larger and increasing the risk of a difficult lambing. The risk is already a lot higher with a hogg than an older sheep for the same reason as a first-time human mother so we try and do all we can to reduce the risk of difficulties with hoggs and this is one way. With the older sheep, the nutrients from the cake go into the energy of the mother - the older mothers need to extra energy because they are older and to help them through the lambing time and birth. Of course, some of the nutrients go into the lamb of the older sheep but not all of it.