Here's whats been happening at the Sheep Camp

Boy, so much has happened this Winter and I have not had the time to sit down and post about each event separately, so here is just a "little catch up" on events post, from the Sheep Camp. We lost my son Jacob's black Suffolk ewe in January, after she had given birth to two still born lambs. We think it was septic shock. Her name was Lily, she was 7 years old and had quite the personality. He had her since she was 8 weeks old, she was one of his first 4-H project lambs. She was the only full black sheep we had and was built the way you would want a show animal to be built for the show ring. But, unfortunately my son was never able to show her because she was just to wild and bull headed to tame down enough to show. In turn it made her the perfect farm breeding ewe. She had beautiful built lambs, was very protective of them, and her body confirmation held up over the years. I wish I could say the same for myself. You would of never known how old she was by looking at her just grazing in the field. She will truly be missed.

Lily, taken 2013

This was a picture of Lily and her lamb from February 2013

My other son Tanner's luck during lambing season was not any better. His main ewe Jasmine had delivered freckled twins. They were beautiful lambs but a short time afterwards Jasmine accidently laid on one of them and it died.

Jasmine and her 2014 freckled lambs

A freckled lamb is the result of breeding a
white faced sheep with a black face sheep.
In this case - Jasmine (ewe) who is a Hampshire
was bread to McRamsey (ram) who is a North Country Cheviot. 

The other lamb grew nicely and was looking great then when we were docking tails and castrating it went into shock and died as well. I have heard of lambs doing this but we had never had it happen in all our years of raising sheep. We tried hard to save it but there was nothing that would work. The rest of the sheep flourished and lambing season hit into full gear.

We have 12 lambs so far all doing well. We are expecting 3 to 6 ewes to still lamb. I say expecting because 3 of them are yearling ewe lambs that were not suppose to get bread this last year but the ram snuck in with them. So we are not sure of the results. We do not do pregnancy test on our ewes just because of the extra cost and we are not that large of an outfit to justify the procedure, YET! 

Out of the 12 lambs there are 5 cross bread ewe lambs, the big question will be - "Do we keep them to add to the flock or do we sell them to add to the bank?"