How satisfying to have showered early, be in my PJs, and have a gourmet Memorial Day dinner almost ready to enjoy--grilled trout, baked potatoes, roasted veggies, and salad. Um-umm. While lingering at the window, to enjoy evening light illuminating the bench to the northwest, I noted an odd shape in the sheep pasture, a shape that looked wrong. The magnified view through our mono-scope confirmed what I feared: a black-faced ewe lying in the ditch. Her head was up, a positive sign, but, if she'd been able to stand and move, she would have traveled with the other ewes and lambs out of the pasture and to our corrals for the night. Using higher powered binoculars, Jim double checked me. Yes, we had a ewe down. We turned off the grill and oven, hurried into chore clothes, and headed out, me on the 4-wheeler with a halter and ropes to tie her legs and immobilize her for the ride home, and Jim in the skid-steer with its bucket for loading and carrying her. What we discovered, recumbent in the ditch, was a sheep lookalike, a galvanized hot water tank that had been converted into a culvert. Its galvanized surface, oriented diagonally to our window vantage point, was just the right size and color to be a sheep's body and the dark shadow cast on the interior looked exactly like a Suffolk ewe's head. Since our evening rush to rescue (followed by a delicious, if delayed, dinner), I have carefully observed that offending culvert numerous times and in all sorts of lighting. It continues to look disturbingly like a black-faced ewe who has given up on life. We lease the pasture, so the culvert is not ours to move, but I make a point to count off our black-faced ewes each evening when I move sheep to the safety of our corrals for the night.         

Don't ever question my vigilance or credentials as an amateur scatologist! WARNING: Read no further if squeamish or weak of stomach.

Having completed Weed's prednisone treatment last week, a regimen of steadily-diminished doses that began in mid-February, I am observing her closely and hoping that her auto-immune disorder has been cured. I noted early this week that she was passing segments of parasitic tapeworms. That called for a weight-based dose of an appropriate dewormer that we duly administered. Not being one to assume success, I observed her post-treatment deposits, just to make sure that her dewormer did what it ought. One such recent deposit filled me with horror. It contained what appeared to be a large, green, circular worm, of the sort that one occasionally finds in garden soil. I call them cutworms; they roll into a ball and demand quick response, a lethal squish between two rocks. In the case of Weed's sample, I sought out a stout twig to probe and more thoroughly inspectigate the offending worm. What I discovered brought a chuckle and total relief. Her dreadful exotic parasite was, in fact, one of the rubber bands that we use for docking each lamb's tail, the undigestable remnant of what we call Wooly Pops, dessicated delicacies that she seeks out after they drop from lambs, and that she eats like, yes, popsicles.       

With her baggy skin, wrinkles, and spidery way of moving, our lamb, Gollum, is well named. Her mother is a beautiful yearling, acquired with a winning raffle ticket at the 2016 National Columbia Sheep Show and Sale. For now, however, we're not worried about beauty, for we suspect that Gollum needed several more days of gestation. She spent her first hours in front of our wood stove, sustained by two tube feedings of colostrum from the freezer. Later, while we were outside doing afternoon chores, she propelled herself out of her cozy swaddling and swam across the kitchen floor where we found her sprawled out, scrawny legs stretched full length fore and aft. Mid-evening, we returned her to the barn for a brief reunion with her mother who welcomed her with all the right maternal sounds and attention. I milked the ewe and we returned Gollum to the house, this time to a cozy, but restrictive, box in front of the wood stove. From her new digs, she heard President Trump address Congress and provided us with welcome diversion from the over-long speech. Before we returned her to the barn for the night, she sucked down a generous feed of her mother's milk from a bottle. Now, two days later, she is able to get up and nurse on her own. Despite her fragile condition, she seems determined to survive; despite her homely gnome looks, her mother loves her.    

Super Bowl Sunday 2017 may be memorable for Lady Gaga's bungee jump and a come-from-behind Patriot OT win, but it was shearing day at Prairie Island. The weather forecast called for 38 degrees; the weather reality was cold fog and a high of 12 degrees. The day was long, though everything went as smoothly as possible. Thank you, Brent, for your smooth, careful, and conscientious shearing; thank you Heidi, Conner, and Bruce for helping to boost resistant ewes into the shearing lane. Jim vaccinated, gathered fleeces, and stomped wool into wool bags. I did the pre-planning and set-up, helped push/drag/bamboozle/cajole ewes into the shearing lineup, and had lunch ready in a jiffy--veggie/burger soup, pumpkin pull-apart bread (Thank you, Katrina.), cranberry/orange relish, dilly bean pickles, and lemon bread for dessert. We all worked to get the Klick contingent off-loaded, on-loaded, and homeward-bound safely, sans wool. Only Heidi and I know of the mothering-up scene that occurred just before lunch when five jolly lambs scampered willynilly, bleated frantically, and temporarily defeated our best efforts to connect them with their concerned mothers. Ultimately, we allowed them all to suck, then popped them back into their portable dog kennels for safe keeping during our lunch break. After all was done, Jim and I deconstructed our barn set up, constructed a pen large enough to hold all of our ewes, spread a generous bed of straw and locked the ewes inside for the night, a cold one. Lastly, Jim held our "house ewe" while I milked 2 1/2 quarts of milk from the swollen half of her udder that became obvious only after she was sheared, a half that looked dangerously like it was infected with mastitis. Whew! Milking returned it to soft symmetricality. Later that night the lamb was nursing from that side and the ewe seemed comfortable.

You may wonder why we shear in early February. Importantly, that is when Brent is available for our small job, but for multiple other reasons, it is best for ewes to be sheared before they lamb. First, ewes are more likely to lamb in a sheltered spot if they are not wearing five inch thick, storm-proof woolen insulation; second, shearing exposes the udder and removes wool tags that newborn lambs may waste precious energy sucking when they're first figuring out how to nurse; additionally, sheared sheep release a great deal of heat that serves to warm a properly-sized lambing barn to temperatures survivable by newborns; finally, lambs are easily smothered when ewes in full fleece lie down nearby.

So, here are our ewes the morning after Super Bowl 2017, greeted by snow and zero degrees. Yup, they're cold. Now, however, as I compose this segment, they are nested into straw in the barn and stoking their inner fire with contented cudding.                

A picture of my temporary barn set up for shearing:

Taking advantage of the past few days of above-freezing temperatures, today I readied the barn for shearing, which is scheduled for early February. We do not have enough sheep to warrant setting up the portable chutes and shearing floor that professional shearing crews travel with. In past years, our dog, Weed, has been a great help in pushing groups of 20 - 30 ewes into a holding pen in the barn. However, she has never assisted in moving the sheep, three or four at a time, into an adjacent small catch pen, out of which each ewe must be backed, one by one, onto a sheet of plywood where the shearer takes over.  Of course, naive first-time ewe lambs are easy to push into that small pen; experienced older ewes are decidedly less cooperative. Inexplicably, the older I get, the more resistant they get.

I have lost a fair bit of sleep recently visualizing a solution to that resistance, and today I worked to bring my nighttime envisioning to reality. I was able to drive metal posts where needed, despite hitting frozen hard pan not far beneath the surface. The holding pen is essentially unchanged from previous years, so Weed will still have an important job. In place of the catch pen I created a crowding alley and chute out of metal posts and portable panels. Most of my time was spent measuring and trying to anticipate sheep-think that would thwart my best efforts to create a smoothly-functional set up. By the time I finished, the sun was low and the barn dark; tomorrow I'll try to get a picture. If the layout works as intended, our upcoming job will be a breeze for all but the shearers. Of course, the cautionary tale of best-laid plans made by mice, men, and, yes, me, is in the back of my mind. Stay tuned.