Winter lambing update

Just one more ewe left to lamb and then we will be done until March. As much as I love the tiny newborns I will be very relieved to not have to worry about fresh lambs out in the winter weather. Our one ewe left to lamb is Shirley, our registered Katahdin, and she's apparently decided to hold on to her babies since she was actually due yesterday but is showing no signs of labor any time soon. I'm just waiting for her to repeat last year's schedule and have them like 3 days past their due date, which this year would put her lambing smack in the middle of a freezing cold spell. I'm just glad she's tame and easy to work with...

I'll have a final count once Shirley lambs, but right now our live count is 21 ewe lambs and 6 ram lambs. We've surprisingly had a lower loss rate with winter lambing compared to last spring/summer. So far we've only lost 2, one of them being a stillborn ram lamb and the other was one of our oldest ewe lambs who had an accident in an old pig barn. So no losses due to the weather at least. Part of that may be because we've been hastier to bring in bottle babies this year. Right now I am feeding 6 of them! It's a bit hectic but I've loved having them. They've almost all been over-exuberant firstborns who wandered away from their mothers while their younger siblings were being born, which is making me long for when our new sheep barn is built and we can have proper lambing jugs set up.

I'm hoping Shirley's lambs don't end up needing to be bottle-fed because it's already a bit of hassle managing feeding lambs when their age range is from 5 days to 7 weeks!

Piper, our youngest bottle lamb at 5 days old, helping me draft this blog post (she jumped on my keyboard almost immediately after this picture)