Chronicles of a yarn farmer, shepherdess, and fiber geek!

Chronicles of a yarn farmer, shepherdess, and fiber geek!

May 12, 2010

Bunnies, Surprise Lambs, New Goats

This last month has been a whorl wind of activity. I sort of felt like a drop spindle making continuous rotations going faster and faster. But I think things may start to slow down, and usually when I say that the spindle starts spinning faster and faster. Anyway, since my last post I attended the International Association of German Angora Rabbit Breeders (IAGARB) annual event held in Frankenmuth, MI. I don’t breed my bunnies but this event had some really good information on rabbit nutrition that I wanted to absorb. Plus my friend from California (who does breed her Germans) came for the four-day event and stayed with me for a couple of nights. Good times! Here are pics of Zeilinger's Wool Mill. We toured the mill at the IAGARB event.

But the weekend before IAGARB, we had a few wooly surprises. I gathered the 20 February lambs in a catch pen area to get their 60 day weight and all the sudden I heard a tiny newborn bleat above all the lamb noise and commotion. Of course my “what the heck is that” antenna went up. Was it kids from the prego goats in the big barn over 30 feet away? Couldn’t be. I’d never hear that over the ruckus coming from the lambs. Long story short, we have a group of five yearling ewes that were going to be put into the breeding group this fall. I looked in their stall and sure enough a little black ewe lamb was in the middle of the stall. Two days later twin black ewes were born, the following week a white ram lamb, and then last week a white ewe lamb. Four of the five girls lambed and this was very unexpected (on our part). But now the few oddities that occurred this last month or so make sense (ewes getting fat, wool not as I expected, laying around a lot….DUH). How you ask? Escaped ram clearing the fence? Fenceline breeding? No, just little ole ram lamb who we let hang out with the ewes for a few months. We quickly put him in with the girls one weekend and he just sort of blended in and seemed like “one of the gals”. Well I guess his ram-ness surfaced once the barn lights were out. Lesson learned! It’s a good thing BFL lambs are so cute. This really knocked my whole spring schedule off balance. Oh well, we’ll adjust. Here are a few pics of the new surprise lambs.

Rachel: A good helper (my daughter)

Then yesterday one of our Angora goats finally kidded. She had twin bucklings, one white and one chocolate brown. They are just gorgeous! This is the first time we’ve had goats that kidded. Oh boy, I might be hooked!






Oliver, another great helper (my son)

3 comments:

Somerhill said...

Nothin' cuter than a baby goat!

Did the ewe lambs all lamb without assistance and accept their lambs?
What a nice surprise they are. :^)

Carol said...

Lisa,
The ewes were great. All unassisted births, lambs nursed right away. The first ewe that lambed was a bit nervous about letting the lamb nurse. She was the youngest one (exactly one yr old when she lambed). But once I sheared her and put her in the head gate so the lamb could nurse, she got it and was fine. All are doing fabulous. I still can't believe it. Things were just settling down from the February lambing and then the stork dropped five more....whew!

Somerhill said...

Isn't that the funniest thing? Once they realize that strange little thing is not planning to bite them in a tender place, they do fine.