Saturday marked the final weaning date for all of our lambs. The oldest lambs were done a few weeks ago, but since we wean in two groups, the lamb flock still had the mothers of the youngest lambs in with them. The project this past Saturday was to pull out all of the adult ewes - except for Zoe, who would act as "granny" and provide leadership for the lambs - and put them into the timber with the rest of the ewes.
We then planned on splitting the lambs into two groups.... The youngest lambs who would be weaning this week would stay in the barn with the lambs who will be leaving for new homes next weekend - both of these groups would get a little extra attention this week, so keeping them close just made sense. The rest of the lambs went with Zoe to a new, fresh pasture.
Our bottle lambs, Jasper, January, and Jareau, were weaned with the first group in late April, so they ended up being split up between the two groups: Jasper stayed in the barn because he is leaving next weekend, and January and Jareau were intended to go with Zoe's group out to the pasture. At the last minute, January got in with the barn group, so we decided to leave her there as a companion for Jasper. One more lamb eating hay is no big deal, and she seems like a fixture in the barn - it would almost be odd to go to the barn and not find January there, getting into places and things that she wasn't supposed to!
That left Jareau in with the older lambs in Zoe's group, going down across the lawn, through the orchard, across the ram pasture, out across our small foot-bridge over the wetlands, to the newly opened south pasture. All of the lambs moved easily, following Zoe with llama Vinnie in the lead. The remaining lambs at the barn were given lots of hay and water, and then barricaded in so that they couldn't take off to find their mothers in the timber. The day's project seemed done, and I went inside the house to call it a day at about five in the afternoon. However....
It wasn't long before I noticed that there was a lamb outside of the enclosure around the barn! This really couldn't be possible, as we had used the same barricade that we used a few weeks ago, and that we knew was lamb-proof! How could a lamb have gotten out? I turned off the TV news and went to investigate....
It turns out that our barricade is indeed escape-proof - no lambs had gotten out: they were all still inside their enclosure. There was a lamb outside, though, poking her head into every nook and cranny, but she had not come from inside - she had come from Zoe's group in the new pasture! It was Jareau! Missing her two bottle-lamb friends, she had decided to strike out to find them, rain or shine, over high ground or wetlands. She had obviously taken the hard route, as she was wet and filthy, but happy to have found her friends. Her biggest issue now was that they were inside and she was out - but she was determined to change that!
January and Jasper, on the other hand, were the cheering section inside the panelled fence, calling and calling to their friend, Jareau. By the time I got up to the barn, Jareau had put her head into the only opening into the area and gotten stuck there with Jasper and January jumping onto her and rubbing against her, encouraging her on. The whole scene made me smile - these three friends, of two different breeds, had become 'family' only because of chance - they all had to be bottle fed to survive. Yet, they are now so connected that separating them into distant pastures had caused such a scene.
So what could I do?! Jasper leaves next Sunday for his new home, so I decided to let them have their time together this week - what is one more lamb eating hay in the barn? So now, January, Jasper, and Jareau have one more week to celebrate their friendship. When I went out this morning, the three of them were busy chowing down a flake of hay from the same hay feeder, keeping all of the other lambs at other feeders - this was "their" feeder, and they worked in unison to defend it. I know that their time together is short, and that this is the way life on the farm goes, but I am going to be sorry to break up this little trio.... I am happy that two of them will have a permanent place here, and that Jasper has found a good home, but I can't help but feel just a bit of sadness each year as our lambs leave our care and disperse to start their new lives. As always, I wish them well.
No comments:
Post a Comment