A bittersweet closing to lambing season 2024
a death and a life unexpected
The engineer in me can’t resist graphing just about everything.
Here’s a cold and impersonal quantitative way of looking at our farm’s population over time, with particular events labeled by number:
How cold and impersonal, you ask?
Event (1) on the graph in late January represents when we took two barrows to the local abattoir to generate the year’s inventory of breakfast and Italian sausage. Our pig population is now down to two: Milhouse and Jessie, our boar and sow. We’re excitedly anticipating an uptick in the blue line on the graph whenever piglets are born…
Event (2) was much happier when this cute lil girl and her baby brother were born one day in early February…
…followed a few days later by this precious singleton eweling:
Event (3), in the goat kidd-zone, turned out to be touch-and-go. Miranda threw a robust buckling along with this adorable lil squirt:
When I checked on her the next morning she laid limp, cold, and lifeless in the straw on the floor of the barn stall where we put her with her mom and big brother overnight. I thought for sure she was dead. When I scooped up her cold, damp, frail little body and carried her out for burial, she let out the faintest whimper and twitched her leg.
Just like in The Princess Bride she was only “mostly dead”!
I wrapped her in a towel, rushed her down the mountain to Rachael’s clinic. And using a very similar procedure to that performed by Miracle Max, she was revived!
She was adopted by one of the girls at the clinic for bottle raising. That’s why the gray line on the graph dips - she didn’t die, she just left our farm population. I’m happy to report she’s doing great two months later! They named her Petunia but they call her Tuna for short.
Bye-bye Petunia! Have fun storming the castle!
Events (4) and (5) were a double-header. Event (4) was when I drove to Knoxville and back in a day in a rattle-trap truck-n-trailer to bring home seven Katahdins - a ram, two ewes, and four babies. Event (5) was a bonus round when my favorite ewe Sweet Girl saw my seven imported Katahdins and raised me a Shetland ramling:
Event (6) happened on a beautiful day in mid-March when prissy mama Shallot blessed us with a precious little eweling:
Now we come to the bittersweet pair of occurrences I’ve lumped together as Event (7).
We were batting a thousand this year. Petunia was a close call, but by some miracle of veterinary witchcraft made her way back from death’s door.
Lambing season last year (2023) was rough and heartbreaking - we lost two mamas and three babies due to problems while trying to give birth. One of the mamas was Emerald - our favorite sheep and the matriarch of the flock.
So I was crossing my fingers we’d make it through this lambing season without any losses.
But heartbreak struck again when Sweet Girl’s buckling had a bad reaction to the anesthetic during castration surgery and Rachael was unable to revive him. We’ve been through it before, but this kind of thing just never gets any easier.
I carried his limp-but-still-warm body out of the barn and laid him down for Sweet Girl to sniff him and understand as best she could what had happened.
I took him to our special place deep in the woods where we give our animals that die back to Nature. Sweet Girl cried for him through the night and all through the next day. It was so sad. I was working around the house all day and heard her plaintive cries from my office window. I wished there was some way I could give her comfort.
But soon after, Providence blessed us with an unexpected life. A yearling ewe that we did not know was pregnant gave birth to another ramling.
As such a young mama she was a high-risk first pregnancy. And it wasn’t completely clear at first that she was going to take to her baby and nurse him properly.
But we got them in a barn stall, got him all cleaned up and toweled off, and mother and baby bonded as they’re supposed to do.
A cute lil guy once we got all the birthing goo off him!
At the end of the first week mama and baby are doing great!
We’re sad to lose Sweet Girl’s boy, but overall we are feeling blessed and joyous with an excellent lambing season Spring 2024!
Next stop: regenerative rotational grazing!
You need a "total" population line to show the general trend! My girls once did a family tree of all the chickens, they know all the names, who belongs to who, who's died, it's incredible.