(Getting back to) Taking care of business.

I’m back to blogging after a long hiatus. I’ve been awfully busy this winter and the old ones’ deaths took the wind out of my sails. Today would have been Baasha’s 14th birthday. I really miss that sweet old girl.

However, yesterday I put Mopple on a lead and discovered he’s forgotten quite a bit since last fall, so now I’m chomping at the bit to get him back on track. I find he’s doing better wearing a halter than a collar and fortunately the alpaca halter I keep for my Classic/Miniature Cheviots fits him to a tee.

On the sheepy front, two of my ewes are fit to burst with lambs. I expect the older ewe, Shebaa (Wolf Moon Findabar; pictured near the top of this entry), to lamb within 24 hours because she’s all hollowed out and her udder is fairly bursting.

The other ewe, Wren (Wolf Moon Wren, pictured in profile) is due on the 10th. Both are bred to Maxx (Wolf Moon Fin Bheara), our young, spotted ram. The lambs will be his first offspring, so I’m really looking forward to their arrival. They are 3/4 sisters, both out of old Rebaa (Coats' High Ridge Farm's Rosy Lolita), so they are Baasha's grand-daughters. Maxx's mom is Wolf Moon Baatiste, so Baasha is his maternal grand-dam too.

Let there be lambs!

Too many irons in the fire

Sorry I haven’t posted lately. It seems as though I’m going a dozen different directions at once these days and apart from ongoing leading lessons for Mopple and all the young goats, none of it has to do with training animals.

I did something stupid this week. With the economy so slow, I decided I’d breed only two of my little ewes this year rather than be overrun with lambs. I noticed old Rebaa (Coates Farm’s Rosy Lolita) in heat and lounging by Ramsgate 2 (that’s our rams’ pasture; Ramsgate is the pen they had when we had just three rams). So, on a whim, I asked John to help me round up Rebaa, Shebaa (Rebaa’s daughter, Wolf Moon Findabar, one of my best ewes), and Maxx (Wolf Moon Fin Bheara [pictured above], our young paint Miniature/Classic Cheviot ram) and put them in a breeding pen.

I hadn’t planned to breed Rebaa again since I thought she would be ten in March (I didn’t breed her due to her age last year either), but she’s such a wonderful producer that I thought why not? We’ll baby her a bit and she’ll be just fine. I asked her to please have two nice ewe lambs and Maxx bred her right away.

Later that evening I dug out her papers to check her age. I thought perhaps she was going to be nine instead of ten. But she’ll be eleven on March 22! I’ve really lost track of passing time. She’s in great shape but we’ll take her directly from the breeding pen to the elder sheep paddock so she gets extra TLC from start to finish.

Rebaa always has twins or triplets and for her past three lambings she’s picked out one for me to raise (the white sheep is Baa Baa Louie, the wethered son I raised in 2008). She looks them over for about an hour, decides which one is mine, then starts gently nudging it away. If I don’t take the hint and remove that lamb (which I didn’t, the first time this happened), she gets tougher until baby is bouncing off the sides of the lambing jug. Why does she do it? I honestly think she knows I love bottle lambs and wants to share. Sheep are amazingly astute!