Yesterday I found this pile of lambs napping just inside the barn door after a very busy morning. A recent discovery has caused a flurry of excitement within the fold. With the milder days I have been allowing the lambs access to the small yard adjacent to the birthing barn. Their initial response to setting foot outdoors for the first time is one of amazement and tentative curiosity. Although they have been able to see outside through the panel in the barn doorway for weeks, clearly it had never occured to them that they could ever actually go there. As the ewes meander out into the yard, the lambs are emboldened and begin to explore. By the second or third day of venturing outdoors, their initial apprehension has turned to sheer exuberance. They can’t wait for me to lift the panel that holds them inside at night. Now, as I was fill water buckets and spread fresh straw, the lambs get down to the serious business of their new favorite pastimes.
Leaping from the barn threshold is a good way to warm up. There’s a contest to see who can get the most air.
Racing is the next order of business. While the mother’s are at the manger, every lamb gets swept up in the mini stampede that starts in the back of the barn, runs down the aisle, spills out the door . . .
down the hill toward the fence . . . .
and then up the home stretch back to the barn. I know these shots are a little fuzzy but it’s nearly impossible to capture this pack of woolly thoroughbreds in motion. As if running a mini Derby, they repeat this loop, again and again, until finally some of the older ones lose interest and look for some rocks to climb and some little ones simply collapse in an exhausted heap.
This intense burst of activity is a phenomena that seems to start at about two weeks of age and then last for about two weeks. I suspect it’s developmental; they are testing their bodies, discovering what their spindly legs can do, what it’s like to jump high, to run fast. There’s the added novelty of the newly discovered outdoors I love watching them and get a little sad when they pass this phase and settle into proper sheep behavior (ie: serious grazing as they venture out to pasture).
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copyright 2008 Barbara Parry, Foxfire Fiber & Designs. All rights reserved.
