Well, Monday I posted about how it’s been a dry few days, lamb-speaking anyway, with no new additions. Then if you follow us on Facebook, Tuesday we had twins!
This is a Clun Forest/Hog Island cross-bred ewe and her lambs are a very dark gray this year. I think they’re a bit of a throwback to her Hog Island grandfather (our old ram Ozzie), because you’ll notice that most of the Clun Forest lambs are a medium gray to white and lighten as they grow. But they are bright and vigorous and she’s a good momma.
Being cross-bred these lambs will definitely be sold for meat in the Fall. Our old Hog Island ram, Ozzie, was very enthusiastic about his job around here and when our Clun Forest ram, Tiberius, didn’t seem to getting the job done quickly enough one year, he just busted through the fences and handled it himself.
Most of our pure-bred Hog Islands (including good-old Ozzie) have moved on to a different farm in Virginia to help with genetic preservation, but we kept most of the cross-bred lambs in our flock since we sell meat lambs as well as breeding stock. They seem to have a lot of good traits from the cross-breeding. You know, like the way some people think that mutts make the best dogs.
Then on Thursday at lunchtime this little one made it’s appearance!
That’s my favorite ewe there. I call her Bug-Eyes. You can probably see why, but watch what you say. It’s like that family thing where you can make fun of your siblings but no one else can. I don’t take kindly to folks making fun of my animals. {grin}
By the way, he’s all yellow like that because she’s not done cleaning him off. That’s part of the birth fluids coloring his wool. She’ll get it cleaned up and it will disappear in a few days. He really is brand new in these pictures.
Last week we had a bit of confusion between our two previous sets of twins. The oldest two lambs were napping and had some hay pulled down over top of them and were a little buried. Their momma heard the newborn twins start crying for their momma and panicked and raced over to them as if they belonged to her and started trying to sniff and nurse them and lead them away from their real momma–who got terribly upset, of course.
I headed out there and dug the older two out of the hay and woke them up (they were snuggled up snoozing away!) and they immediately started baaaaaing for their momma and racing off across the field to her, which snapped her out of her baby-stealing mindset.
I appreciate their dedication to motherhood, but it can get a little wild out there when lambing season hits full stride, I tell ya!
