Early Arrival | Foxfire Fiber & Designs

My game plan was to immerse myself in working on my book this weekend. And while I got quite a lot of that accomplished, a call from a neighbor Saturday morning put a different spin on the weekend.

My neighbor Barbara (another Barbara; funny, there are three shepherds living here in the Patten, all Barbaras) had a newborn lamb in her kitchen when I arrived with my lamb emergency kit. Her eldest ewe surprised her with an early delivery of a seemingly healthy set of triplets on Friday night. Oddly enough, by Saturday morning one had died and another, a white ram lamb, was not looking so great. He was weak, not nursing, not even standing, so Barbara had brought him indoors and had been trying to get some colostrum into him using a small syringe. There was very little swallowing reflex and most of what went in trickled out the side of his mouth.

He wasn't cold, so we tried taking him back to his mother, to see if her presence or the presence of his surviving sibling, a little ewe much smaller than him, would stimulate a response. But this little guy just stood there, completely out of it. I stripped more colostrum from the mother and showed Barbara how to stomach tube a lamb. It sounds scarier than it is, but it's the sure-fire way to get a couple of ounces into a lamb's belly and sometimes once they've had that, they rally.

By the time I checked in later that day, Barbara had tubed the lamb again, but he was still lethargic and weak. She had mixed some of the lamb milk replacement I had brought along and was managing to get a few ounces into him. When I stopped in on Sunday morning, the lamb had taken up residence in a cardboard box on the dining room table. While Barbara's family had breakfast, Barbara and I took the little guy's temperature and mused about his condition. It's a puzzle. He is reasonable in size and otherwise looks healthy. But sometimes there's more to a situation than meets the eye. If he makes it through to today, maybe her vet will have some answers.

And so I am reminded of how once lambing starts, you never know what each day will bring. My visits to Barbara's barn (and dining room!) have kicked my brain into lambing mode a few weeks ahead of schedule, since my flock won't begin until late March. It's not too early to place that order with Pipestone Sheep Supply and restock my kit for the season. As soon as we're done with shearing later this week, we had better prepare the lambing pens.