The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Livestock => Sheep => Topic started by: CarolineJ on May 13, 2018, 08:20:31 am
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What do you do when you've got a straggler? After her fieldmate lambed last night, I now have one left to go, she's not bagged up yet and the lady I bought her from didn't take the tup out until mid-January, so in theory I could be waiting until June. Her fieldmate and new lamb are still in with her at the moment, I have four ewes and new lambs in the adjoining field (stock fencing, so they can all see each other) and all the rest are down the road in the big field. Ideally, I want to feed the ones with lambs and not the one still to lamb. Will the one still to go be okay on her own as long as she can see the other five, or do I put them all back in together now and stop feeding?
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Why don't you want to feed the one that's still to lamb? I would leave them together and let her lamb outside - we're past the worst of the weather and as long as she has some shelter she's likely to be fine, unless you have predators. I think it would do more harm to keep the pregnant one on her own. We lambed in April and have now stopped feeding them, except the most ancient one with twins, and she eats out of a bucket. The others are not interested in extra feed as the grass is zooming.
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Could you keep one buddy with her, make a small pen and either feed the mum in there or the mum to be, (with just a handful of feed if you are worried about overfeeding)
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Fleecewife - she's a gimmer and I stopped feeding them all a couple of weeks ago when I was getting some gigantic lambs that were getting stuck. Last night's was the first one since that's managed by herself without assistance since! They've all lambed outside, it's just field segregation I need to sort :)
I penned them both in the vegetable patch at lunchtime, to give the one who'd lambed a bit of grub, and the other one turned out to be hiding a fairly sizeable udder under some scraggy bits of fleece, so I'll leave them both together for now and hopefully nature will take its course over the next few days.