Footprints on the Web

The foster lambs had grown quite a bit in number. My mornings are filled with 20+ wiggly lambs all over me trying to suck on me, nibble on me, kiss me, trip me, loving me and making me laugh. I was getting the hang of feeding them one at a time unless ofcourse a rookie joins the group and doesn’t know how to suck or latch. Oh boy!

Sheeps and lambs have a funny way of laying down. It looks like they almost fall over. They lean into their front legs, bend their knees and put their body weight on it and fall to the ground. The back legs then just follows and rest. Had to witness few more still born little lambs this week. I will not quite get the sight of the mama sheep in the trumbull  with her 2 little still borns by her feet. She looked so helpless. She kept looking down at them and then up at me. Was I humanizing her emotions? Sure one could say that. But I know what I saw. She had birthed lambs in the past years. She had a track record of being a good mom. Last year, she had fought off a coyote to save her lambs, one of who did not make it but she stood by the other one. The big gashing deep cut she endured from that face off had left a significant scar on her left shoulder. That was how we were able to identify her. But this year she lost both her lambs.   

Quintuplets! First time in years in the history of the farm and where all the lambs and mother had lived and was healthy. Social media responses were overwhelming. Just seeing how the mother was so proud of her labor and lambs was a sight. You could tell she loved them all. But it is physically tolling for a sheep to feed all 5 lambs. And then we had a sheep who had just lost both lambs and was yearning to mother a lamb. So we decided to give 2 of the 5 lambs to her to equally divide the labor of feeding them all. Unfortunately, its not like a human baby where you jus give it to a human and they accept or adopt them. In order for the sheep to accept a lamb, firstly they need to smell like her. So we rubbed 2 of the lambs with the 2 dead lambs with all the bodily fluids and blood still fresh and spray them with a vanilla scent that is meant to confuse the sheep as to whether they are hers, before leaving them in the pen with the lambless sheep. She seemed to accept them. However, one of the lambs looked hypothermic. We rushed her to the warming box. It took a really long time for her temperature to even be picked up because it was lower than 32 degrees. We had to tube her with colostrum twice down her mouth being careful as to not push the tube down her lungs instead in which case it would come out of her nostrils. Her condition was not improving so we gave her a shot of antibiotics so that her body got a boost of energy to not just fight the cold but also break down the food she was just fed. It was absolutely astonishing at the recovery she made. A frail, withered little lamb was now holding her head up and able to stand on her little limbs. We tried to rub her again over the dead lambs and spray the vanilla scent before put her back in the pen with the lambless sheep who now was busy cleaning and feeding the other lamb from the quintuplets. However, this time the sheep did not accept the lamb back from the warming box. So she went onto being a foster lamb and joined the rest of the wiggly and frolicky little bunch. When trying to get a lamb adopted by another sheep, rubbing it on dead lambs is not always how its done. Sometimes dead little lambs are skinned and the skin is put on the lamb just like a jacket before its put in the pen with the sheep we are hoping will be confused and adopt the new lamb as its own. I got to see these skinning and wearing of them. Hard to watch and accept for sure. But when the end game is a happily little family, it makes it easier to cope.

One of the reasons we go on daily routine checks, is to ensure that the mama sheep does not stray away too far from her lambs. Sheeps can get distracted easily by delicious grass and tasty hay. Us driving the ATV towards them makes them scurry towards their lambs just like when we get too close to their lambs and hear their lambs cry, they come running to their rescue. Untamed sheeps are fearful of humans. And other living creatures. I remember my little dog had been head butted a few times by mama sheeps in the barn and he was not even interested in the lambs but just rolling around in sheep poop and munching on it. But to them he is a threat. One particular head butt incident was bad where he yelped out so I put him in the yurt while working with the sheep and lambs in the barn. A bunch of relaxed laying down mama sheeps in the barn who was grazing on grass in a fenced in pen on the main farm area with their lambs, all stood up when they saw my little dog running towards to me. They were on high alert. They thought he is there to attack their little ones and they were ready to put up a fight. You could tell.

It always amazed me how the farmers who easily tell which lambs belonged to which sheep. I mean they all look alike!!! I guess it would be the same as me walking into a room full of Malteses. I would always be able to pick out my little guy. Every field had what we called the babysitting club or maternity ward. This is when you see a large group of sheeps with lambs just hanging out in one spot. There is an understanding that if one of the sheep steered away to go graze, the other mothers would keep an eye on their lambs until she is back from grazing. So we were less concerned about the lambs sticking with their mothers in this group because they are all looking out for each other. The farmers started playing a game with me – Guess how old the lambs were. This is not easy. They come out very little, smaller than my 10lbs dog but are able to stand on their feet in 10 minutes of being birthed. And they grow pretty fast. I was getting better at telling their age. I still could do better in getting closer in my approximate range guess. Like I would not necessarily be able to tell the difference between 4 hours old vs. 8 hours old or 24 hours old vs. 48 hours old or 5days old vs. just over a week old.

The sheep who had the C-section continued to persevere. Her colostrum was being used to saved the lives of many lambs who had been abandoned by their mothers. Whenever we noted a mother sheep who had had quads or more and looked like she needed medical attention, we would load the whole family in a trumbull and take them to the barn so that we could keep an eye on it and give better R&R. However, loading the mother and its lambs is so no easy task. If a mother cares for its lambs, we would try to catch the lambs first by just leaping on them and tying them in trumbull so that the mother would voluntarily get in there to be with her young ones. If the mother couldn’t care less for her lambs, it becomes very challenging because now she could run off in a vast field with hundreds of sheeps making it impossible for us to catch her. I got to partake one where the mother cared for her lambs. She cried and cried for her lambs who we had tied up in the trumbull. She went frantically from side to side sniffing them for awhile and eventually giving up and getting in the trumbull herself to be with them. It was a really heartwarming sight.

The peeping toms around me very many. During my daily outdoor showers, I could always count on the stares of the highland cow who seems to have never seen a female anatomy. Also the birds in my toilet space. A bird had built a nest with 3 little ones. While taking a dump, many times I got to witness how the mama bird would bring earthworms and gag into their little tiny mouths. Their eyes hadn’t even opened yet. The whole experience was therapeutic to watch especially while doing something very boring and shitty (no pun intended). One morning when I went in, I spooked them. The mama bird flew out of my toilet space and the little ones who could fly by now fell out of their nest and started flying all around frantically the tiny room crying. I could not make it to my bucket as they wouldn’t settle down. All I really wanted to do was pee for Christ’s sake. They eventually found their wings and flew out of the toilet space and so I could shit in my bucket in peace again.

Little lambs have a hard time keeping track of which one their mom is. Sheeps move around in groups except when they are in labor and then they go off on their own and have their lambs. So in a big group, the lambs are a little lost. They basically go around asking are you my mom? Are you? Not you? It is funny to watch. If you get too close to them, the lambs might even follow you and you don’t want this happening. You want to either drive away as fast as possible to go put the lamb back to where the sheep is but not too close. You just kinda gently throw the lamb towards the sheep so that she can sniff and accept it. Also be carefeul not to get any of your scent on the lamb and for this reason always handle it by dangling and holding it by the front 2 paws. It looked absolutely inhumane and insensitive when I first saw someone do it but now know this is the right way. It does not hurt them. Lambs and sheeps are tough as fuck! Unless they are fosters in which case you case cuddle them all you want.

When we go on lambing checks, we sometimes hear mama sheeps baah constantly and just when you wonder what its crying about, you see a frolicky little lamb running across the field towards it bleating. It is the mother’s way of calling out to their lambs when they wander off. In the evenings, around 730pm to be exact, little lambs get the zoomies just like dogs do. This is when I love to sit on my large rocking chair in my yurt looking out my back door on the pastures where the sheeps and lambs are. The lambs hang out in packs frolicking non stop left to right and back to front having no idea where they are going, what they are doing. It is an absolute bliss to watch. I don’t think anyone can see that sight and not think positively or be reassured that everything will be ok.

Sheeps are not very intelligent creatures. They are all over the place and easily distracted. Yet they care for its own or adopts another’s and raises as its own. Seeing maternal instincts kick in with zero training, zero commands, zero verbal communications is nature’s miracles at its best.