[Jacob-list] Babies are arriving!

[Susan J Martin]

We started lambing here at Stonecroft - Cassie presented us with a ram
and a ewe lamb in the wee hours of Monday morning.  Interestingly, the
little ewe lamb has a short tail.  I always dock tails, removing about
half the length but leaving plenty to cover all the "private" parts, and
then some.  I won't need to band this little gal's tail.....her brother
has a long tail, typical Jacob length.  I just came in from the barn
where I was sitting on an upside-down bucket with Cassie and her
babies.......marveling again at how absolutely beautiful & soft  Jacob
babies are........and how agile and able to fend for themselves they are
at birth.  Every year this miracle is renewed for me........guess I'm
just nuts about these sheep!  We have 13 more ewes to lamb..........so I
will have plenty of lambie babies to enjoy this spring.

We are always learning with our sheep and sometimes we finally figure out
an easy way to do something ~ and it's such a simple, obvious thing we
wonder why we never thought of it before.  We have been busy shearing our
sheep......we shear using a sheep stand, removing the fleece in two
halves.  Prior to shearing, I need to entice all the sheep into the barn
with some feed and then quickly shut the door.......and some of our girls
have pretty much figured this out and they are very wary, making it
difficult.  However, whenever we move our sheep from meadow to meadow, I
simply rattle some grain in a coffee can, walk in front of them calling
to them ~ and we literally move them this way through our yard, past the
flower beds, the birdbath, around the deck, etc., and they walk behind me
in classic Bo Peep fashion.  SOOOO, yesterday a little light finally
turned on in my middle aged brain and I tried a new way to lock up the
girls in the barn.  I shut the barn door into the meadow, opened the
front door of the barn, and then proceeded to open the meadow gate,
rattled grain, called to them, and it was too cute.............they all
came running and followed me right through our yard and then into the
front door of the barn, right into the pen and VOILA.........they were
locked up!!!  Now, lest you all write to remind of the intelligence and
memory of Jacobs............yes, yes, I know, they will remember and
figure this trick out also..........but it did work like a charm last
night.    And for those of you who, like us are middle aged and have bad
backs, shearing on a stand works like a charm.  We aren't very fast - my
husband shears and I skirt and separate the fleece.  This year for
skirting I simply used a 7' length of cattle panel, put a 7' length of
finely woven fencing wire on top ~ and placed both pieces on top of the
little wagon we pull behind our John Deere riding tractor..........as
Rich removed the fleece he placed it on the wire, I picked out junk/VM,
and then separated the colors.  There isn't a lot of skirting to do when
shearing is done on the stand because only the good stuff is removed in
one piece.........the rear end, belly, and neck are removed separately
and thrown out.  As always, it is so amazing to see the difference in
fleece from animal to animal....some long, some shorter, some more greasy
and tight, some more open, and one of our girls is a real "wutz" - in
Pennsylvania Dutch that means she is a pig!  She seems to be our dirtiest
sheep - poopy rear end and more than average dirt in her fleece.....that
has always been her style.....the others are very tidy, seemingly more
careful about themselves. 

Sue Martin 
Stonecroft
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