Warning! So. Many. Pictures.

What a difference a year makes!

 Last year the pastures were nothing more than dusty lots offering only a few measly blades of dry grass for the sheep to munch on.

Today, however, is a completely different story! So much grass!

I wanted to get some photos taken of the lambs out on pasture since I am now officially done lambing for the season, so I grabbed my trusty camera and headed for the pasture, but I ran into a little bit of trouble trying to get the photographs.

This is Edrea's ewe lamb...I think...wait...no, that's dandelion fluff...errr..... 

This is one of Lilly's lambs. Maybe.

I think we all know who this is...I don't know what he's doing-I don't ask anymore.

Okay, time to move to shorter grass for this photo op, but first, the rundown of lambing 2013.

We finally finished lambing on Monday morning. This was the most drawn-out lambing season that I have had to date, and I will not be repeating that scenario anytime soon...or anytime-ever. Spreading it out seemed like a good idea at the time, but in retrospect, not so much. The first lambs were born April 12th, and the last were born May 20th. I much prefer the hectic two-three week sprint that I normally have, to this nearly 5 1/2 week marathon. If I was lambing out 100 ewes, the longer time frame might make sense, but not for this small flock. I now have lambs that will be ready to wean by the middle of July, and some that won't be ready until late August-which also throws off my vaccination schedule ( I like to vaccinate everyone at the same time if they are closer in age). 

The final count was 16 lambs:10 ewes, 6 rams. In addition to being long, and drawn out, it was also a very strange lambing season. A few experienced moms-that historically have always had twins-gave birth to very large, single lambs this year. And when I say very large, I mean huge. I spoke with my vet about the unusual number of single births, and we decided to blame it on last summer's drought. No scientific basis for that conclusion, just a guess. He had also been seeing some strange things with calving this spring. I am sure there is some correlation between the low birth numbers and the drought. Last summer was also the first year ever that the sheep were fed hay year round because of the lack of pasture. 

So, here are some lambie pictures. A lot of lambie pictures. 

I will be evaluating lambs over the coming weeks, and I have a few ewe lambs that I am already planning on retaining, pending their final evaluations.

You've already met Holly's girls, both of whom are staying here. OH! We actually have names too. We went with Shakespearean characters.

Luciana and Olivia. 

 I can't really find any faults with these girls. I am really loving the fleece.

Lilly's ewe lamb Cleopatra. This one is a little corker!

Llama surfing.

Cleopatra's twin, Rosaline

Ashumet's ram lamb, Sampson. I am waiting to see how his fleece turns out, he is very soft, but doesn't have much crimp yet, but many times these 'dog coats' end up really nice. 

It looks like he will have striped horns-love those!

Kind of leggy right now..

Odessa's ewe lamb, Celia.

Love this little girl's conformation.

Athena's girls. Bianca and Beatrice. Athena is a first-time mom and she had twins. Bianca is teeny tiny.

Beatrice

Laurel's boys

Romeo and Sebastian

By now you may have noticed a particular theme with markings on these lambs? I have (completely unintentionally), produced an entire lamb flock with essentially the same color, and markings. White heads and varying degrees of socks. Cute, but I need my wild spots back! Also, I'm going with a black-based ram this fall for breeding. He can carry moorit (brown) if he wants to, but he can not be moorit. Out of these 16 lambs, I have 14 moorit-based lambs, and only 2 black-based. For those of you not familiar with Shetland genetics, brown is recessive, so brown+brown equals brown. Obviously, I knew that I would get all brown out of my brown-based ewes in this lamb crop, but I have several black-based ewes as well, so I was hoping for the possibility of a few more black-based lambs out of those girls. The black ewes carry moorit though, so when bred to a moorit ram, those recessive moorit genes were pairing up everywhere this year.

Edrea's ewe.

Oh, look! She's moorit with a white head and legs. So unusual. 

So much anger, or determination in this photo...not sure which.

Menemsha's ram, Winchester. 

He's a big, ole tank. So far he has a dog-coat so he should end up with nice fleece as he matures.

Bella's twin moorit lambs...with white heads..and socks. WOW! Shocking, I know! I don't have many pictures of this set of twins, or the very last set of twins since they haven't been out of the jug very long.

Ewe lamb Emilia

Luna's twins. The ewe is named Iris, and the ram is Leonardo. 

Can you guess the marking? Good job! Moorit...white heads...aaaand socks.

That's all for now. 

Off to see if any lambs are lost in the grass.

Lambing, round two.

This is a quick lambing update before things get any crazier here. 

We had one lamb born last night. One GIANT ram lamb.

I thought Ashumet was expecting twins, but last night she gave birth to this single, practically full grown, ram lamb. Of course that is an exaggeration, but he is huge. Poor girl had a hard time getting this one out, and to make matters worse for her, he also has large horn buds, so I am sure mama is feeling a little sore today.

Black, yuglet gulmoget.

 Mama Llama is doing her quality control inspection.

I'm not sure what to think of his fleece yet, but his purse is very crimpy. Time will tell.

There are (at least) 4 other ewes that were bred right around the same day as Ashumet, I know this because the second that the ram was introduced to his ladies, romance ensued. He was not shy in the least bit. So I expect the next couple of days to be a bit hectic.

Sommarnag Ivar is the sire to this ram lamb, as well as the rest of the lambs that are due. I leased him from my friends Craig and Cindy Bowser at Whispering Winds Farm. I should get lots of spots and great horns!

Off to do a barn check!

Spring-loaded lambs.

Don't worry, you're not missing anything. I haven't been secretly delivering lambs and posting photos of new babies on another blog.
Nothing has changed, only two ewes have lambed thus far. I have several ewes that are planning...or, more accurately,  plotting something. I just know it. They are all going to lamb in rapid-fire succession and make me even more crazy than I already am!

There are about three ewes that are really close to lambing and are looking something akin to the Hindenburg at this point.
Because there will be some first time mamas in this group, I have gotten up several times in the past few nights to check on them. I shuffle out to the barn at all hours of the night, I flip on the light, they all look up at me like, "Meh, what are you doing out here at this hour?" They chew their cud. They burp. I sigh. I flip off the light. I turn and walk back to the house, knowing full-well that they are laughing their sheepy little laugh at me behind my back. I go back to bed and do it all over again in a couple of hours.
So, because I have no new lambs yet, I will show you updated photos of the 4 that I have. Still 4. Still the same lambs. Still.

These are Holly's girls. I am pretty sure that they will be staying here.

 As you can see, Holly's milk came in just fine.

Yeah! Milk! Boing! Boing! Boing!

The spotted girl's tail is not as long as it looks here. 

She has baby hair on the tip that makes it look ridiculous!

These are Lilly's girls.

 I'm waiting to see how fleece develops on the darker moorit girl-she's got loose crimp right now, but I have learned to be patient when evaluating lamb fleece. I love her color. I don't know if I have ever had a moorit lamb this dark before.

So, that's it. I am going out to do a barn check in a few minutes...wish me luck!

Trashy people

Something new is happening at Crosswinds Farm this year. We have adopted a section of the road that runs in front of our farm. We are now responsible for picking up litter along the ditches twice a year.

No, surprisingly, this is not court-ordered...why would you even think that?

We volunteered for this project...and when I say, "we", what I really mean is: I volunteered, and I also roped my husband, and my sister Marie, into helping. What do we get out of this? Well, we get the satisfaction of looking at clean ditches along our road, and we get this nifty sign in front of our house.

We spent a good chunk of the day last Sunday picking up litter along the 2 1/2 mile stretch from our place to the edge of town.  

The amount of trash along the road was unbelievable, but it provided an interesting, yet completely unscientific, insight as to who exactly is littering. I think the fact that a High School was in close proximity had much to do with our findings. Ninety percent of the trash we collected was beer cans. More specifically, beer cans from really cheap beer. I'm not sure what can be deduced about the folks that are tossing trash out of their car windows, other than their taste in beer is questionable, but I found it interesting, nonetheless. I don't even drink beer, so I'm not judging, but if I had to speculate based on what we picked up, it seems that a conclusion could be drawn that taste in beer has some bearing on one's propensity to litter...or maybe there is just one really slobby person out there that drinks a lot of cheap beer

I'm just sayin', just an observation. 

Does that sound judgey? 

I shouldn't judge, but after spending several hours up close and personal with other people's smelly cast-offs, one tends to get a bit judgey. 

This is probably not a good job for a crotchety, old, OCD woman like myself. Seeing all of this garbage completely stressed me out.

This pile really irked me. It was already in a bag so it could have been easily placed in a dumpster, and these cans were all returnable for deposit...okay, so the return for deposit is only 5 cents per can, but given the astronomical number of cans that we found, these folks could have returned the cans and purchased several cases of their classy beer from the proceeds. Geesh! Come on guys, return the cans for the cash, throw them in the recycling, or at least throw them in a dumpster, they're already in a bag for gosh sake!

The rest of the trash was a mixture of miscellaneous debris. 

Luckily, the county provided us with lots of trash bags and some heavy gloves with which we could pick up all of these treasures. We found everything from car parts, to cigarette packages, empty boxes from condoms, yes, even some used condoms (I did NOT pick those up), and a used pregnancy test (perhaps the previously mentioned condoms did not do their job?), crushed cell phones, sunglasses, chewing tobacco containers....a few trucker bombs..O.M.G., not enough antibacterial lotion in the world for those. 

Seemingly, this relationship did not end well.

Marie and I (with the help of our feisty 79-year-old mother, who happens to have dementia), started our collection at the end of the road closest to town and worked our way back to the house. For those of you who have met me and Marie, you know how flaky we can be, so you can probably guess what it might be like with Mama thrown into the mix.  Before you report us for elder abuse for dragging Mama around to pick up trash, you should know that our mother lives for this kind of stuff. She prides herself on the fact that her father taught her to be environmentally-conscious back in the days when that wasn't even a 'thing.'

As one might imagine, the three of us got easily distracted a few times along the way.

Marie made friends with a little field mouse that captured her attention. 

Yeah....it's a wonder that we aren't still out there wandering around aimlessly.

We also found this Crayfish, who was angrily threatening me with his one good claw. 

Who's being judgey now Mr. Crayfish? I'm only trying to clean up your ditch!

I found a Praying Mantis egg case...

we are going to talk more about those in another post.

When all was said and done, we ended up with a ginormous pile of trash. Approximately 52 BIG construction-size bags full, and lots of miscellaneous loose bits of junk. We aren't even done yet. Some of the ditches still had standing water from all of the recent rain, so those will have to get cleaned another day.

Of course, you know that this project has just set me up for more stress in my life, because now I am going to start twitching every time I see a new piece of litter while driving down our road, and I'll have to stop and pick it up. 

But it does feel good to see it all clean.