As many of you know, one of our ewes went missing. Maxine is big, and brown, and sweet. She has not been found, so we are not hopeful. I have followed several leads which found me trolling the streets of a village some 15 - 20 miles from our farm on the tip that a brown sheep was roaming the streets there. No luck. After more photographic evidence appeared, I could see that the markings were wrong and it was not our sheep.
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| Maxine |
This weekend we started coordinating the lists for breeding groups. This is when we really took notice of some inconsistencies in the udders on one of our other first group of sheep, a ewe named Arwen. She is a big, beautiful white ewe who has given us three generations of lovely white lambs. She was skittish to start with, and had a tough time settling into motherhood on her first lambing, but has been very attentive and giving us strong lambs, ever since. Last season she gave us our first quadruplets - all white, and all did well. It appears, however, that she developed a form of sub-clinical mastitis - an infection in the udders. It can return, spread to others in the flock, so we will have to cull her.
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| Arwen, just before giving birth to quads. |
I am not very good at this part of farming. The selling, the culling; nope, not good at all. However, we cannot have infection in the flock, so if a chronic condition develops, this is the answer. So breeding lists will have to be re-worked, and we will have to say goodbye to another friend. Next year will mean selling at least one of our original rams, as we need to introduce new genetics to the flock, and I am steeling myself for that by talking about it early.
