Hey All,
These past few days have been very busy despite not having any lambs yet. We finished rebuilding the inside of the barn, which looks fantastic, and we are definitely using it a ton. We have a nice new milking stanchion that can hold 3 goats at a time, so we can feed bums easier. We also have about 7 new jugs for new moms and their babies, as well as a bum pen and 4 new dog pens for dogs that are going to have puppies.
No new babies yet, but we are still working a lot with the ones we already have. The weather has been really crappy lately, so a few lambs have succumbed to the cold and come down with pneumonia and other illnesses. We are treating them and keeping our eyes on them, because we cannot afford to lose any more babies due to this weather. One lamb started getting really weak and puny so we have to supplement her with goat's milk whenever she isnt sucking off mom, and she had an inverted eyelid, so I got to help fix that.
When a lamb has an inverted eyelid (which is actually quite common) their eyelashes start growing into their eye, instead of outwards and it causes them to get a nasty eye infection. Marv and I had to fix her eyelid by cutting out a section of her lower eyelid so that it would form a hole. Then the hole would close up as it heals, pulling her lower eyelid down in the process and then the eyelid would start to grow down instead of up after that. Sometimes you have to cut their eyelid multiple times to get it to grow out instead of in, but with her we only had to do it once. Basically, you hold the lamb, and hold her head still, then pull out her bottom eyelid and the skin below it with tweezers, then take a small pair of scissors and cut the skin that the tweezers are holding. This creates an oval shaped hole under her eyelid, and it will bleed. But it will heal very fast, and her eyelid will grow out normally. The lamb didnt even move or make a sound or anything, and it was a fairly shocking procedure for me. But we put the lamb back with her mother and she went right back to sucking like nothing even happened. And the day after we did the procedure, I looked at her eye and the cut was closed and scabbed over already, so she healed very fast. We use the Vetericyn product a lot, and it is like a miracle cure for the animals. We also use it on cuts on ourselves because it doesnt dry out skin, is safe to use around eyes, nose and mouth and doesnt burn. I highly recommend it; it really does work great.
Thursday night I had to stay out at the ranch, and it started to snow a lot that night. It was incredibly windy and snowing a lot, and I had to wake up every 2 hours to check to see if we had any new lambs. The weather made it more stressful because the lambs cannot survive in the snow for very long, so if you dont find them right away, they could easily die. So I went out at about 3am to do a check, and it was snowing like crazy. I went out to the barn, and the pen outside the barn where all the sheep are. I saw one ewe (pregnant sheep) laying down in the snow and mud at the bottom of the pen and she looked dead from the way she was laying down. So I knew I had to go and get her because I didnt want any other animals or predators to be attracted to the carcass, so I had to walk all the way down the hill in the mud and snow and when I got over to her, she was still breathing, so she wasnt dead. Then I knew I had to get her out of the snow because she was pregnant and not doing well if she was laying out in the snow and couldnt get up. I tried picking her up to get her to stand, and she was completely limp. She couldnt even lift her head. So I had to drag her all the way up to the barn, through the mud and snow. She was really heavy, I thought about 100 pounds, and I had to drag her the whole way because I couldnt carry her. So I got her to the top of the hill by the barn, and I was going to leave her there out of the snow, but she was so cold and sick and weak that I knew if I left her there, she was going to die probably. So I had to drag her all the way through the barn and into a jug with a heat lamp. Then I dried her off with a towel and got some medication down her throat. She wouldnt eat, wouldnt drink water, and couldnt lift her head up. She was barely even breathing. So I figured I should just watch her and see if she gets worse or better. I kept checking on her, and by 8am she was still alive so I called Marv to see if there was anything else I could do for her. He felt it was a bit of an emergency so he came out right away. He told me that if she died before he got out there, I was going to have to cut her open and pull the lambs out. I was prepared to do it if I had to, but I felt like she was hanging in there long enough to not need me to do that. I figured she might recover, but she wasnt sick enough for us to have to kill her and get her lambs out. So Marv showed up and we gave her a ton of medications, and got her eating again. He agreed that we wouldnt need to kill her, so we just had to watch her in case she went downhill again. By that afternoon, she actually stood up on her own and started eating hay and drinking water again. She made a complete recovery, and I was so relieved. She probably isnt out of the clear just yet, but she is doing great compared to how I found her. I was glad I could save her, and glad that I did everything I could to get her out of the snow and into the barn. I definitely felt like giving up, but there was no way I was going to let her die without trying everything I possibly could. So later on that day, I asked Marv about how much that ewe weighed, and he said she actually weighed about 150 pounds! He said he was shocked that I actually drug her to the barn because she was heavy and weighed more than I did. He said he would have had a difficult time with it, and would have wanted to be there to see me actually drag her all that way uphill. I laughed because I was pretty shocked that she ended up weighing much more than I thought. I guess I am getting pretty strong out here doing all this manual labor.
So that was a good feeling, but of course it couldnt last. Yesterday, Friday, it snowed even harder than the night before and we still had a ton of work to do in the snow. Then, as we were about to leave for the day, Marv noticed that one of our cows had either had a baby or was going to have a baby, because some afterbirth matter was visibly hanging out of her. This meant that we had to go looking around 35 acres in the freezing snow for a calf that could have been anywhere. We knew it would be black, but we had no idea where to start looking, so we all had to walk around the trees, valleys and hills on the ranch looking for a calf. It was one of the coldest and most miserable moments of my life! And I knew that the calf had to be dead because it couldnt survive in this weather, especially if its mother walked away from it. Finally we found the calf, and it was dead. I suspect it might have been born dead, because the mother walked away and last year she had a calf and raised it fine on her own. Nevertheless, we brought it back inside the ranch and got rid of it. That was a sad day because I really wanted to see a calf born, and wanted to play with a baby calf. But this weather has really taken its toll on the animals and their offspring. It has been a very rough winter, and it is still cold enough to snow on some days here. The rest of my time here it is supposed to be warm, but the weather is still miserable compared to beautiful California.
I am looking forward to heading towards Kentucky because the weather there has been beautiful and warm and I love warm weather and sunshine!!
I have to go back out to the ranch now, and I am staying overnight, so I will be back tomorrow evening. Happy Easter to everyone, and thanks so much mommy for my Easter basket! Im never too old to get an Easter basket ;)
Love you all,
Sam
P.S. I will post pictures of the finished barn, and new pics of Penn when I get back.
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