Friday, March 29, 2024

FROM THE RIDGE: Lamb fishing brings surprising results

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Every August for the last 35 years part of my daily ritual each morning and evening is to go around the stud ewes and tag the new stud lambs.
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Even when I was younger it had to be twice a day because it is surprising how fast a 24-hour old lamb can run. 

Now in my 60th year, even at 12 hours old they are fast enough. I’ve taken to using a fishing net now, which I use at times and is also handy for popping one of the triplet lambs under and standing on the handle while I deal with their siblings.

Being on my own I’ve always worried I might be crook or injured at this time of year but to date have been fortunate.

There are still a lot of fellow stud breeders who tag at birth but many of the bigger studs rely on the DNA samples taken at docking or weaning to set parentage. 

I use DNA to verify parentage of the top 10% from whence the stud rams come and to add to the DNA information used by SIL.

Tagging at birth allows one to observe mothering ability, teat placement, udder size, get lamb birth weights and do an early assessment of the lambs.

And you get to see some odd things. 

Usually around auntie behaviour as we have been breeding for good mothering ability for 50 years but sometimes they just go too far. 

I’ve got two examples from this year that really take the cake.

Let’s start with 50/16 (her actual identity to protect the innocent). On August 22 she had a nice set of triplets. 

An older lamb was hanging around and pinching milk so I tagged the triplets then caught and dropped him off on the other side of the paddock.

Next day he was back with the triplet ewe and she was certain he plus the three new ones were hers. 

Once again I was able to catch him, checked his tag and my notebook told me his dam’s number so I rode around looking for her finally realising it was in fact 50/16. Eleven days earlier she had been recorded having had two lambs, the other now apparently with another ewe.

He had stripped all the colostrum and she had come into milk 11 days early and done a good job rearing him but he had to go. 

I saw the other three the other day and they don’t seem to have suffered greatly.

As an older lamb he wasn’t too happy being in the lost lamb pen and after some difficulty I managed to get him mothered onto a lost lamber that was likely surprised at the size of this new-born.

Yesterday I had to shed out a ewe with two untagged lambs I’d somehow missed from a paddock I hadn’t been in for two or three weeks because they were well finished lambing a month earlier.

These lambs looked a couple of weeks old.

I tagged them, took her number (441/15) and let her into a nearby paddock.

However, my field notebook claimed she had lambed six weeks earlier. I went back and checked her number but knew it was right as I now remembered her from that paddock during tagging.

I had found her with the scungiest of lambs, just 3kg and no dead twin anywhere to be found. She didn’t appear to have lambed and I suspected she was an auntie so kept an eye on her over the next week until I shedded that paddock but she was adamant this was her lamb and despite it being one of the most unappealing of sheep I’d seen, determined to rear it.

But it wasn’t to be as a couple of weeks later, I’d picked that lamb up and fated it off as dead.

She must have been surprised when a couple of weeks after ‘her’ lamb died, she gave birth to two sound and far more attractive ones.

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