Two months on from lamb number one!

With the pressure of exams/assessments over the past few weeks I have not had the chance to post to update everyone on how everything is going but now my exams are over and I am free from college it's about time I did!

I reckon the first thing I should mention is how Gigi is doing. When I last made a post on here I mentioned how we were still waiting for her to produce and those of you how follow the instagram page will see that she has had twins! A boy and a girl. I also mentioned in the last post that she was already a week over due and the day she finally had them was more than 2 weeks past our due date so it looks like the handsome tup Junior caught her much later than we thought!

Now, in the days before Gigi giving birth there was definitely some questioning to say the least. As the days over due started to add up, all sorts of thoughts started to pop into our heads as it would with any person expecting newborns. For example, one of the thoughts was that maybe she had given birth over night, abandoned them and possibly lost them to a fox as this would not be unheard of.

A couple of days before Gigi gave birth, one of the dogs on the farm appeared with what seemed to be the remains of what once was a black newborn lamb. With no coloured/black sheep in the area other than mine, we obviously thought this could have been one of Gigi's. This incident and the fact that Gigi wasn't showing any signs of being close to producing lead us to believe she'd lost her lambs to "nature", but LONE BEHOLD, as you've probably guessed by now, that was not the case.

I am very pleased to say that the two little ones, though a month younger than the rest of the lambs, are doing very well and Gigi is being a great mother. Gigi lambed wonderfully and had no trouble taking the little ones on, even licking them dry which the other two new mothers didn't do. I've also done the same tail docking and castration procedure for these that I mentioned in the last post.

With lambing time well and truly over it's time to start looking towards the future of the flock, maybe I should first rename this blog to The 8 Ryelands!

Next on the list for the flock is going to be shearing. This only applies to the mothers of course and we are aiming to get them done by the end of May so look out for another post in the next few weeks!

After shearing, another thing I would like to do is halter train some of my lambs and possibly the mothers too if all goes well. Sheep are normally trained on a halter for when they're taken to shows and originally I was going to halter train some of my sheep to take them to the Burwarton Show in August of this year but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the show has been canceled. However, I am still going to train mine because it will be a great skill to learn and will make it easier for me to handle the lambs when they are all grown! Part of halter training includes getting the sheep used to being handled and felt. This is because in the ring at shows, you may want to position your sheep to make them look the best they can (like a person would pose for a photo). This process could help me greatly even if I am not going to be able to show them as it will make it easier when I need to handle them and inspect them myself if they fall ill or injure themselves. I will do another post on my process of halter training and aim to start it next week!

I also need to register my lambs as pedigrees on the Ryeland Flockbook Society. I will make a post about this too at a late date.

Now for some pictures: