18 Jan On the move!
In November the rams are put in with the ewes and 147 days later (or thereabouts) the lambs will be seen skipping around the park.
As a rule there are four options with scanning; empty, single, twins & triplets, but rules are made to be broken and occasionally even 6 lambs are born as reported in Wexford last year. When triplets are born, Keith adopts the third lamb on to a ewe which has had a single. The older ewes are incredibly adept at this and will accept another ewes lamb quite easily. The ewe lambs will more than likely only have a single but the older ewes can produce singles, twins and triplets. The ewe lambs will be sold with lambs at foot and the ewes with lambs will stay on the Estate.
The colours on the ewes backs indicate when the ewes will lamb as the rams ‘raddle’ chalk is changed every few weeks. As of yesterday the ewes now have an additional spray colour on their wool showing how many lambs they are going to have.
They are a colourful bunch at the moment!
Now the all important numbers!
Alex arrived this week from Friars Moor, set up in his scanning equipment and scanned 130 twins, 7 triplets and 180 singles.
We can’t wait to see the lambs in a few months time, balancing on their mothers backs and racing round and round tree stumps and all of us realising Spring is finally here!