Lamorna evened up our boy/girl numbers this evening by giving us two cracking ram lambs. It was another unassisted birth (around 11pm) and Lamorna then took her ‘licking and cleaning’ duties very seriously. Trouble was that the next stage, that of ‘standing still whilst allowing my lambs to suckle’ was obviously not part of the mum-to-be manual she’d read and so every time either twin went near her udder, she backed away. Such a problem is not uncommon with first time mums and so Jack then spent the next hour and a half or so, ‘encouraging’ Lamorna to stand still and the lambs to latch on to a teat. We had them penned in a small pen in the main lambing stall so that Lamorna could not ‘run away’ and also so it was easy to hold her in position against one side and keep her there. It did not help that her udder was in fact quite small and the teats really set far back so the lambs really did need help in locating them.
Fortunately however, Lamorna got the hang of it quite quickly and soon she started to stand still whilst the two boys drank. Eventually Jack was able to leave the stall and then watch as the suckling continued without her having to be there.
It is a huge relief that Lamorna has now finally given birth although we cannot explain why she was so overdue, in the end by 17 days which is in fact a full cycle, lending credence to the theory that she actually was NOT caught that first time round after all???
So our lambing stats have slightly changed now: we are still at 200% lambing rate, with 0% interference but our ratio female to male is now 1:1