Make Way for Lambing Time

I finished cleaning out the barn today, and we started getting ready to build the new lambing pens in the newly cleaned area.

To get the lumber for the new pens, Ken disassembled the sheep shelter that the wind destroyed last week, while I disassembled some wood-and-wire-mesh fence panels I had built when we first moved here. Those 2x4s plus a couple of extra metal goat panels are all we need for this design.

Once the new pens are built, I'll finish getting the place set up with my sleeping area, lambing kit, lights, etc., plus bedding, hay, and water buckets for the sheep. There's only about a week left until I have to start keeping watch for ewes that are going to go into labor soon. Paris, my milkiest ewe, already has a large udder, even though she's not due until April 9.

To help the sheep start getting used to the idea of being in there, I left the gates and doors open so they could wander in and out while I was cleaning up all the old spilled hay chaff on the floor. A lot of the sheep came right in and started eating the hay. Others peered in the door from outside and bleated, not daring to come in. Still others came in to explore but got nervous and ran back out again every time they heard a noise.

Since I want the sheep to be as relaxed as possible in the lambing pens, it's important for them to be able to see the place and explore a little bit ahead of time, so they don't think they're being dragged off someplace terrible when the time comes for me to put them in there to lamb.

Too Smart for Her Own Good

As a rule, Icelandic sheep tend to be very intelligent animals, but through the centuries certain bloodlines have been treasured and bred specifically for their EXTRA-high levels of smarts and sensitivity, which can allow them to sense danger in advance and lead the other sheep (and sometimes the shepherd) to safety.

These special sheep are called Leadersheep.

I have several sheep in my flock who are from leadersheep bloodlines. Although on my small, 26-acre farm there isn't much danger for them to avoid, it is always entertaining to watch their bright, alert personalities in action.

The most leader-like sheep in my flock is Salem:

If I'm outside in the barnyard, she is everywhere I am. Nothing escapes her notice. In the absence of wolves or avalanches to avoid, her entire concentration is constantly focused on discovering ways to get more tasty things to eat.

During the day, the sheep are free to roam about the yard as they please. Each evening, we bring them into the sheep paddock to feed them, and lock them in there briefly so we can finish feeding the horses without their "help."

Salem, having observed this, decided she would rather avoid being trapped in the paddock, and thus be free to assist with the horse feeding. So every night, all the sheep dutifully come into the paddock, except Salem, who stands just at the gate. She runs in if I shake the grain bucket and runs back out if I start to close the gate.

It's a minor inconvenience that I decided needed to stop. So tonight, carrying the feed buckets, I led all the sheep into the paddock and turned to shut the gate behind me. Salem, thinking she was oh-so-clever, ran out before I could close it. "Okay, good-bye," I said, and shut it anyway. Then I went and poured grain into all the feed dishes in the paddock, and the rest of the flock began eagerly eating their supper.

Whoops! Too late, Salem realized her terrible mistake! Her eyes got huge, and she stood up on her tiptoes against the gate, trying to push it open. "Sorry, no food for you!" I said cheerfully. "All the other sheep get lots of yummy, yummy grain, but you'll just have to starve."

Seeing that the gate was not going to open, Salem raced at full speed down to the other end of the paddock, hoping that the other gate would be open. But that one was closed too. She raced back up to the first gate and stood up against it again, her big eyes pleading.

She was very, very sorry she had done such a foolish thing, and wouldn't I PLEASE forgive her and let her into the paddock?

I held out for a few minutes, making her think that she really would miss out on the entire evening's feeding. Then I relented and let her in.

I bet it won't take too many evenings of doing that before she's a good little girl who promptly goes where she's supposed to at feeding time! :-)

First Flowers

Yesterday when I stepped outside to do chores, it smelled like spring for the first time. Our neighbors have daffodils blooming by the roadside. We'd probably have daffodils too, except we let the sheep roam the yard all winter, which means all flowers get eaten before they can grow.

However, this afternoon when I went to the mailbox to get the mail, I noticed a clump of Siberian Squill blooming there. So, it's official, we have flowers blooming here!

I sold some of the sheep hides from my website today, and am still waiting for two of the horse sales to finalize. It looks like one more horse may be sold soon too---Libby currently has 3 people interested in her, and one of them just contacted me about scheduling a pre-purchase exam, so it seems like a few of these sales ought to be finalized soon.

It's looking a little late for selling Maggie before she foals, though, since she's due in about 3-4 weeks. That's really too late for me to feel comfortable shipping her very far. So unless I find a local buyer within the next couple of weeks, we'll be having a foal here in early April. That's not such a bad thing, since Maggie is an experienced broodmare and a great mother. But I did hope to finalize most of the horse sales before lambing time started. Looks like it's going to be no such luck.

Web Work

I've been neglecting the blog for the past few days because I've been very busy doing web site design work.

First, I'm doing a very extensive site for lovely Bloomin Acres Farm in Arkansas. It has many pages and is taking a lot of planning and organizing to get it all set up. It's not done yet, but when it is, I'll post a link.

Second, I just updated my sheep website in preparation for spring lambing time. I'm getting lots of inquiries for lamb sales already, and some folks came this past weekend to look at the flock and buy my ENTIRE selection of bargain, salvage, and sale fleeces. Now all I have left for sale are 12 premium fleeces. And I haven't even advertised, that's how well these fleeces sell!

And third, I just redesigned my sister's farm site and gave it its first update in several years. Horses, ponies, Maine Coon cats, chickens, goats, gorgeous mountain scenery... Lots of pretty photos on this one. Everyone should check it out!

I still have my horse website to update too, and horse for sale ads to update. I'm getting a little tired of staring at the computer all day every day---I can't wait for lambing season!

Not much else has been going on, on the farm. We had another big windstorm this weekend, and it completely shattered our sturdiest sheep shelter that Ken built. Fortunately no sheep were hurt when the wreckage flipped over and crashed to the other side of the paddock! But this is all the more reason why we need to build real, solid sheep shelters before next winter. I'm getting tired of all these ugly tarp shelters that can't handle our extreme wind!

Spooky!

A little over a year ago, my very favorite cat of all time, an orange Maine Coon named Riley, got hit by a car and killed. When we found his body, we brought it home and buried it under a tree not far from our back porch.

Tonight, I was sitting in the house working at the computer, when our dogs kept barking. I opened the back door to see what was wrong and heard a cat howling really mournfully.

I assumed a couple of our cats were having an argument and were about to start fighting, as they sometimes do, so I went to get my shoes and a flashlight to go break it up. Oddly, as I walked through the house, all of my cats seemed to be inside already.

When I got outside, I followed the sound of the awful howling... right to the site of Riley's grave. There, in the dark, were two cats I didn't recognize, sitting on Riley's grave and wailing!

They ran away when I pointed the flashlight at them. Why they were there, I don't know. We don't keep any cat food outside, and all of my own cats were in the house at the time, so the strangers weren't there to fight. All of my cats are neutered, so I know there's no mating going on. And out of the whole farm, the strange cats chose to come sit right on Riley's grave. Creepy!

Peri is Pregnant!

Tis the season for me to be walking around behind my ewes all the time, groping their udders to see if they're pregnant. During the distraction of the evening feeding frenzy tonight, I managed to grope Peri---and sure enough, she has a nice udder developing. She's pregnant!

Normally, this wouldn't be big news, since pretty much all my ewes are expected to be pregnant this time of year. But if you've been reading this blog for a while, you probably remember that Peri was bitten by a rattlesnake last summer, and the resulting necrosis destroyed all of the tendons in one of her front ankles, leaving that foot completely floppy and useless.

(If you missed out on her story the first time around, here are the relevant entries: Peri's Reprieve, Not for the Faint of Heart, Peri's Progress and Other Photos, and A Peg Leg for Peri?)

Anyway, after a couple of failed attempts to stabilize the leg with a brace, I decided to just leave Peri alone and let her figure out her own best course. Even on three legs, she's doing great! She can still outrun me if she wants to. She still shoves other sheep away from the food dishes, just like she always did. And we feed her hay on the ground so that she can lie down and rest her legs while she eats. Overall, she's pretty happy.

I debated whether or not to let her breed this year, wondering if the extra weight of being pregnant would be too much for her on three legs. But when I turned all the other sheep into the breeding pens, she fussed so much at being left out, that I gave in and let her make her own choice.

She gets tired a little faster than usual lately, carrying the extra lamb weight on her three good legs. But the sheep aren't out on pasture now anyway, so it's not as if she has to walk far to reach food, water, or shelter. If she needs any extra help towards the end of her pregnancy, I'll make sure she gets it.

She's not looking particularly huge yet, but here are a couple of photos of her from last year, so you can see how enormous she gets. In the second photo, Ken says she's so fat she looks like a beanbag chair!

More Gremlins

Well, the gremlins have infested the dishwasher now. I loaded up the dishwasher tonight, started it going, and when I left the room it was working just fine. When I came back a few minutes later, it was dead. I thought it had tripped a circuit, but Ken checked the circuit box, and everything there was fine.

The dishwasher did this once before more than a year ago. Just stopped working. At the time, we went to the store and started reluctantly thinking about spending the money to get a new one. And then, all of a sudden, it started working again, without us doing anything to it, and has worked perfectly ever since. Until now.

The bizarre thing is, this is exactly what our pickup truck does, too. It will work fine for months, then one day it simply won't work. Sometimes, if we do nothing to it for a while (10 minutes, 3 days, the time varies), it will just start working again. When it starts working again on its own, that seems to last just as long as if we actually take it to the shop to be fixed.

It's very frustrating. If we knew what was wrong, we'd fix it. But our mechanic doesn't seem to be able to get those gremlins out of there! :-)

Spring Cleaning

It was a gorgeous warm day today (70 degrees!), so I took advantage of the pleasant weather to spend some time cleaning up the mess in the barn, in preparation for lambing season.

Some time a few months ago, my wobbly set of shelves in the barn finally gave in and fell over, scattering their contents all through the loose hay on the floor and mixing them in with the pile of hay strings next to the door. I was in a rush at the time that it happened, so I just shoved the fallen shelves out of the way and continued with the chores.

You know how it is when you let something like that go: Soon the shelf contents were scattered and lost beneath the hay, more hay strings piled up, and the whole place became a big mess. Since we don't really use that part of the barn for anything but storage in the winter, it didn't matter all that much at the time.

But that's where my lambing pens go in the spring, so now---with just 3 weeks left to go before my first possible lambs could be arriving---it's time to finally get organized again. Knowing how much I hate cold weather, I waited until this gorgeous day to tackle the job, and it turned out not to be as hard as I'd thought. It only took about an hour to do the bulk of the organizing. Ken will take a load of stuff to the dump for me later, and then some other afternoon, I'll finish the real cleanup: sweeping, scrubbing, organizing, and setting up the lambing pens.

I have a new plan for how I'm going to make the lambing pens this year, which I think will be more compact and efficient. Once those are ready, I'll scrub everything in my lambing kit, restock any supplies that are old or have run out, and set up my bed in the barn.

Icelandic sheep really do very well lambing on their own, and don't usually need any help lambing. But I like to be there for all the births anyway, if possible, partly for my own education to learn as much about all aspects of the sheep that I can, and partly to help out on those few occasions when a ewe does have a hard time.

Plus, I admit, waiting for the lambs to arrive is kind of like waiting for Christmas morning as a child. Why would I want to sleep in my own bed and not see the new arrivals until the next day, when I could be there and see them at once?

So for the bulk of lambing season (late March through May), if I have any ewes that are due soon, I'll sleep out in the barn with them. I lay 4 hay bales side-by-side to make a bed, spread a blanket over them to ward off prickles, and then put my camping mattress, pillow, and sleeping bag on top. It's surprisingly comfortable.

Still, I don't get much sleep out there some nights, because some of the ewes make a lot of noise. Even if they are not giving birth, it's amazing how much chewing, sighing, stomping, banging, and groaning a vastly pregnant sheep can do all night long!

I also spent some time in the late afternoon just sitting with the ewes in their paddock. I can tell that lambing time is approaching by their behavior. Some of the ewes (Persia, Salem, and Tansy, for instance), are always friendly. But as lambing time approaches, several of the other, non-tame sheep start getting really cuddly too.

For the other 11 months of the year, Poppy is nearly impossible to catch. She is wary and when it's time for shots or worming, she knows better than to be coaxed with grain. She's always the last one we manage to catch.

But when she's getting close to lambing, she gets really calm, cuddly, and friendly. Today, for the first time this year, she approached me and asked to be petted. As I scratched her under her chin, she wagged her tail like a happy lamb. In a few more days, she'll be so relaxed that if I sit down in the ewe paddock, she'll lie down next to me and fall asleep with her head in my lap.

This, the sheep I can't catch any other time of year!

Another Dream

I had another dream last night about preparing to start an enormous and difficult task.

All winter, I had hiked on foot from Maine across to western Canada with a snow blower, clearing a path in the snow. That was hard and exhausting enough, but after hiking all those thousands of miles through the snow and cold, when I got to my destination, I realized that the real task was yet to begin.

I reached a ranch where I owned a large herd of horses. With some help from people on the ranch, I was now about to start the journey BACK to Maine, in the path I'd cleared, driving my herd of horses with me, so they could all be sold. I would not be on foot this time, but driving a large wagon pulled by a pair of large, not-completely-trained horses.

Before I could even get started, challenges started to arise. While the ranch hands were trying to round up my horses from the various fields, the horses got over-excited and started leaping over the pasture fences and running wild everywhere. The ranch only had barbed wire fences, so every time one of my horses approached a fence, my heart was in my throat, waiting for them to hit the wire, get caught on the barbs, and shred themselves.

Before long, the ranch hands were there helping bandage dozens of cuts and scrapes on my horses legs before I could start my journey, and I was driving my unruly team of wagon horses around, trying to get them to steer in the direction I wanted.

Only a few thousand miles left to go!


I have to admit, I'm a little worried about having two dreams in a row indicating that my subconscious thinks everything I've done up to now has only been preparation and now my REAL difficult task is about to begin.

It's been such a hard year, and I'm exhausted. I've been looking forward to getting all the horse sales completed and having things ease up a little in the coming year. I don't even want to think about what this next big task might be that my subconscious keeps warning about!

But whatever it is, I guess I'll just tackle it when it comes.

Pivotal Moments

In my dream, there was a term for them: those pivotal moments in your life where your actions or inactions can change the course of your life forever. But the phrase was in a foreign language---Japanese, maybe, or Latin---and when I woke up I couldn't remember what it was.

In my dream, I was having one of those pivotal moments. I was about to do a task that was apparently what my subconscious considered the epitome of what I would consider "difficult." I was about to meet a group of Asian dignitaries for the purpose of negotiating something to do with nuclear weapons. The meeting was to take place in my barnyard!

There were also groups of school children running everywhere, watching a troupe of performers who were putting on several short, philosophical plays in different parts of the farm, allegorical works concerning the nature of these pivotal life moments.

In the midst of all the chaos, one of the children asked me if I was nervous about my upcoming negotiation. Suddenly, I realized that I had lived this part of my life before and had somehow traveled back in time, retaining the knowledge of how I had gotten through the situation successfully the first time around.

"No, I'm not nervous," I told the child. "After all, I've done this before."

I felt so calm that, while I waited for the very formally dressed Asian businessmen to gather for our meeting in my muddy sheep paddock, I passed the time by poking around in the mud. I started pulling out chunks of broken glass (this is something I have to do frequently on my real farm in my waking life---the previous generations who lived here were very careless about where they threw their glass bottles, so every time it rains, old broken glass comes up through the mud. I pick it up whenever I see it. My pockets are always full of shards of glass).

But in the dream, as I was poking around pulling up chunks of sharp glass, I also started finding huge slabs of chocolate, buried under the ground too, so I pulled those up as well. (I'm sure this was inspired to the extremely rich, gourmet chocolate bar that my good friend Nyxana slipped into my birthday card when she sent it to me. It was so good, it took me four days to eat the whole thing. Thanks Nyx!)

Anyway, I took this dream to be a message of hope and returning confidence from my subconscious. I have a difficult task ahead of me, but I know I can do it. In the meantime, I may encounter some unpleasant, painful things, but there is also the promise that I will discover unexpected pleasures as well.

Can't ask for more than that!