Eating and Snoozing
April, 2005
Like a unicorn, I impale a round bale of hay with the spear chained to the front-end loader of my tractor and feed it to the sheep. Round bales of hay weigh about 750 lbs. and measure 4' in diameter by 5' in length. Once a week, I feed four round bales to the ewes; and every third week, I feed one round bale to the rams. A sheep eats about 3 lbs of hay a day. During lambing, I also feed square bales. A square bale weighs about 35 lbs. and measures 36"x 24"x 16". It is held together by two strands of sisal twine that run lengthwise along the bale. Squares are cumbersome to carry; with a bale in each gloved hand, gripped by the twine, I walk across the barn slowly, swaying diagonally for balance; the bales press against my knees which push them forward, right then left. To open the bale I pull the twine off the side, the bale expands into 8 individual sections that are fed to ewes with newborns in 4'x 5' pens called jugs. Twice a day, I carry water in buckets to the jugged ewes and feed them grain once a day.
The ewe flock is divided into those gestating and those lactating; when a ewe lambs, she and her lamb(s) are moved to the lactating pens of which there are two. The first pen may have several ewes with their lambs running free in it; these are the most recent births: the lambs are strong and the ewes are taking good care of their babies. The jugs within this pen are reserved for ewes and lambs with problems: the lambs may be weak (they could be small twins or triplets) and there may be mismothering due to the anxiety of birth sometimes seen in new mothers. These sheep need to be separated from the others so mothering can proceed with minimal distraction. When the lambs are doing well, usually after a day or two, they are taken out of the jugs and mixed with the other ewes and lambs in the first lactating pen.
There I tag the lamb by piercing its right ear with a plastic eartag (they do wince) and record the ewe's and lamb's tag numbers, sex, birth date, and any comments. Then I dock the lamb's tail by placing an elastic band around it about an inch from the body; this cuts off the circulation to the tail which will drop away in 10 days. The lamb feels no pain from this procedure but is unaccustomed to the pressure felt around its tail, 10 minutes later it acts as if nothing happened. Out of curiosity and to confirm my observations, I placed a band around my finger and left it there for a minute, I felt pressure but no pain.
When the tagged and docked lambs become playful, I let them and the ewes into the larger pen with the older lambs. In a day or two, they race about with the older lambs. When they tire, after having been to the teat with their bellies full of milk, one lamb will find a comfy and warm place in the bale feeder, another lamb will cuddle up next to him, when another next to her and another, and another...six or seven little white lambs, side by side in the hay, snoozing on a chilly afternoon.
Eugene Wyatt