lambing season

Actually, this is a little late for us, we usually lamb mid-February thru mid-March, but it was a weird winter. Other sheep farmers I've spoken to have said the same, nobody's having a particulary great lambing year. I had hoped the ewes that are lambing now would have been bred by our good brown ram, Hershey, but I can tell by the lambing dates (and the colors of the lambs!) that they were bred by our black clean-up ram Eko. (It's hard to keep a mature ram safely on the premesis, so we remove him once we know the ewes have been bred, then keep a ram lamb or two in with the ewes in case their breedings to the ram don't work, so we still get lambs, even if they're not of the genetics we prefer.)

The first photo is our 3 year old ewe Nilla and her day-old twin ram lambs, Gaius and Helo. We use a theme for naming our sheep each year -- the year Nilla was born it was flavors (Nilla is short for Vanilla). This year we're using names from the cable TV series Battlestar Galactica, which The Map Man and I are a bit obsessed with watching on DVD at the moment.

Two more of this year's lambs, twins out of our best ewe, Freckles. On the left is a ewe lamb named Kara, on the right is a ram lamb (who will become our new flock ram) Apollo. These babies were sired by Hershey, you can see how different they look from Nilla's lambs. They were born mid-February, and are about 6 weeks old in this photo.

Here's a soon-to-lamb 5 year old ewe named Buttercup. These are Katahdin sheep, which are a "hair breed" of sheep -- that means that they don't grow wool, but rather have a coat of hair like a deer. The breed was developed in Maine on Mount Katahdin (hence the name). We can tell that Buttercup is getting close to lambing by her very swollen udder and the way her back has "hollowed out" as her big pregnant belly has dropped in preparation for giving birth.

And finally, here are some of our yearlings (last year's lambs). All were sired by Hershey, so they are 1/2 siblings of Kara and Apollo (you can see the resemblence). Last year's theme was the TV series LOST, so we have Kate, Claire, Jack, Charlie, Sawyer, Sun and Anna Lucia. The two ram lambs we kept for clean-up breeding from last year were Eko and Jin, but they have since left our farm.