This is Freckles. She started growing that big beautiful bag of milk about one month before she was due to lamb. Since we were new to sheep and this is our first year for lambing, we thought this was a great thing!
Freckles lambed triplets! We came around the corner of the sheep shed just in time to watch this little guy be born.
She gave us a brown ewe lamb and two rams lambs, both white with brown spots.
We were apsolutely positive that she would have plenty of milk for all. At least at first. Shucks, her bag was a big as some of our milk goats!
Awwwww.
Unfortunately, it turned out that we should have been watching Freckles a little more carefully, feeding her a little less grain, and making sure her bag was not getting congested, which it was. One side of Freckles bag is so congested that absolutely nothing will come out. Not one drop of liquid. So, we made sure that all the lambs got plenty of colostrum, tube fed the littlest guy for a couple of days and finally took him off his mom completely and are bottle feeding him. We may have to do the same for another lamb after a while. We'll have to keep a close watch on them. Freckles has one good side producing milk. The other side is useless at this point. This is a huge disapointment to us, since we just purchased her and she may need to be culled from our herd already. We will give her another chance next year, keep a better eye on her, and hope for the best. In the mean time, ClaireAnna will have a lot of fun taking care of "Ron."
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