A dancing lamb - hypoxia?

The second of our twins, Hinge, staggers around a bit.

Pep says this is probably due to hypoxia - a lack of oxygen - during the birth process. There are a number of possible causes (see for example http://www.sheepvet.com.au/sheepvet/page3.htm); none of the rest of the flock is affected, and he seems OK, so far; he feeds normally. We're keeping him and his mum in the field while we review his progress.

Twins!

Benbecula, the sheep whose life we saved in 2011, when she was a few months old (see http://croftingcatalunya.blogspot.com.es/2011/04/she-lived.html) gave birth yesterday...to our first set of twins.

Hinge and Bracket were helped into the world by the Crofters (I was away). Pep the Wonder-Vet came to help too. Hinge, the male, is a bit staggery - Pep thinks he may have lacked oxygen at birth (Dystocia injury) - but so far he is fine, and is managing to feed. Bracket, the dark-legged female is already the boss.

Hang on, it`s my turn

Another lamb, just

It is only thanks to very careful attention by Crofter's mate, and good advice from the saintly Pep-the-Vet, that we still have little Nosey around.

He was born on the 30th September to Ballachulish, her second lamb. Last time we'd noticed a wee bit of blood on a teat, and this time Ballachulish had full-blown mastitis. One half of her udder hot and lumpy, the other secreting puss. Not a good scenario for the new lamb.

I was away, so Crofter's mate spent hours with the wee one, making up a mixture of milk, egg and honey to get him started, and then feeding him some cow colustrum from our neighbour's farm.

 

Boy on the bottle

Finally we found that the wonderful Dolors down the road had a nanny goat that was milking, so we put him onto a diet of goat milk. Mum's been on a programme of antibiotics (she had a raised temperature and was really under the weather.)

Now, six days later, Mum is recovering and he is beginning to get a little milk from her. He looks skinny, but is growing.

Mastitis is not nice at all. We try to be as clean as possible, clearing the stable and disinfecting with lime, but this is the countryside, and that's bacteria soup.

Limey stable

Limping Sheep

Thistle was limping yesterday, and worse today. Pep the Vet said "splinter" - and, as always, was right.

I extracted this from her foot this morning:

Stick that in your toe

An hour, and 4ml of penicillin later, she's doing fine.

Test-tube Baby

Thistle is our problematic mother. Two of her three lambs have died at 4 days old, after desperate attempts to keep them alive. We don't know why. They simply do not take to their mother's milk, gradually get sleepier and eventually doze out of the world.

So when she gave birth on Tuesday we became hyper-active. Pep the wonderful vet came up and gave the new lamb a shot of vitamins. I gave him a shot of Thermovite Plus. He had the same dozy approach to milking, approaching Thistle's flank, vaguely looking for an udder and then wandering past to lie down. "Walk-Past Disease."

So I intubated the new lamb. This time I did it within 4 hours of birth - 150ml of his mother's milk, laboriously squeezed from her teats. Then 4 hours later a further 150ml, and again, by now at 23:00 with the lamb still not having fed naturally, a third batch of 150ml.

Tube of life

And this was the result; the next morning he was feeding himself, and now he is growing fast.

Now 100% natural

Thanks to Pep and his vitamins, and above all thanks to the stomach tube, the new lamb lives. We called him, naturally, Pep.

Tiddles toddles into the world

He was born at 18:00 yesterday - a blustery day. Geisha, his mum, was distracted with the messy business of getting rid of her placenta, walking round and round the shed dragging the bloody bits behind her.


The new Tiddles didn't pay much attention to anything, so I milked Geisha and gave him a few drops of colostrum, and then a little more from a syringe. I tried to put him onto the nipple, but he was not really interested. I checked him late into the night - and still he was toddling around, not really paying attention.

No, Tiddles, the milk's near the back...

This morning the slightly sleepy, dazed lamb was lying down and I began to get seriously concerned. So I milked Geisha and intubated the lamb with 75ml of her milk. I also took his temperature - 39.5º C and thus pretty normal. Pep the wonderful vet suggested 3ml of multivitamins, so I injected him with that.

...and the result, this evening, is a much more alert bouncy wee lamb who has definitely started to suckle. He's a bit hazy-lazy, and takes a little drink before wandering off, but he's looking much more alert.

Lambing - it's a life-and-death business.

Taking the Tube to Work

There is a good side to the double life led by crofters.

I woke up at 5am, thinking about two things: a complicated piece of research using a database, and our VAT return. Either one of these work nightmares would be enough to wake me – both together got me jumping out of bed in a cold sweat.

A couple of hours later I was doing this:

Bertie gets it in the stomach. Directly

Delicately sliding a plastic tube into the stomach of our new lamb, one-day-old Bertie (thank you, Dominic, for the name…) to try to ensure that he stays alive.

And of course I was thinking only about little Bertie and his need for milk. Everything else, databases, tax, research… were all blown out of my mind by this one, desperate, caring need.

Take the tube to work. Forget all your other worries. 

Saved by a tube

Rap was born into the warmth of the evening of 6^th July.

Is he really suckling?

He started OK – seemed to find a teat and seemed to have a suckle, but by midnight he was looking weak. I had given him a couple of shots of Thermovite (as recommended by Tim Tyne) but was not too happy with his appearance. We milked Morag, a new and slightly reluctant mum, and gave him some from a dropper.

By 9am on the 7^th I was really concerned about him.

Pep the Vet had kindly given me a stomach tube for lambs, and encouraged me to use it. So I read the instructions in The Sheep Book for Smallholders (Tim Tyne, The Good Life Press, 2009) and in The Sheep Keeper’s Veterinary Handbook (Agnes Winter and Judith Charnley, Crowood Press, 2007).

After a couple of failed (and scarily gurgling) attempts I used the syringe to get a few ml of milk into his mouth. This seemed to help him swallow. I managed to intubate Rap, and got 100ml of milk into him.

The effect was immediate. He got up and went over to Morag and started suckling. As though the intubation had given him a start and now he wanted a lot more.

I had been determined not to lose another lamb after losingLuna. Rap had many of the same characteristics – a weak lamb, not that interested in feeding, not finding the teat, preferring to lie down and rest rather than feed. Luna had faded away like that. Intubation seemed to kickstart Rap’s feeding reflex.

Thanks for the tube, Pep!

Stomach Tube Culture

There are, I’m learning, subtle differences between sheep care here in Catalunya and sheep care in the UK. An example is the humble stomach tube.

The two UK books I have on lambing both talk about this as a good and normal practice with lambs. And here is an article from 1987 by a UK vet, Andrew Eales, saying that

“...feeding lambs by stomach tube is probably the most significant advance in lamb care in the last 20 years.”

Over here in Catalunya things are different. A friend who is an expert in sheep and lambing says that stomach tubing is a dangerous practice – one drop of colostrum in the lungs and bye-bye lamb – and it appears to be something that is either rarely practiced here, or only carried out in extremis by the vet.

To Tube. Or Not to Tube. That is the question.

Investigations continue on this important element of cultural contrast…

St John's wort

Here is St John’s wort, Hypericum perforatum.

Take my wort for it, it's lovely

We have lots here at the Croft, growing wild on the field margins. It has just been in flower – in time for St John’s day (John the Baptist) on the 24^th June when people used to hang the plant above the icons in their house to ward off evil spirits. The leaves held up to the sunlight seem to have tiny holes in them (the “perforatum” in the name.) These are little packets of plant oil.

It’s an enigmatic plant. It is good for humans; here in Catalunya an infusion of St John’s wort is used to treat mild depression, and an oil made by soaking the plant for 40 days in olive oil is used as a rub for strained backs and muscles. But it’s bad for sheep – the plant makes them photosensitive, and can make them seriously ill.

I want to grow more, but the seeds are tiny and hard to collect. If I succeed you’ll hear about it first, here.

Tranquility and Chaos

Last night, around 3am, I looked up to the heavens and saw a sea of tranquillity. The stars in their constellations and the Milky Way slicing across the sky. The sky was sparkling hypnotically as we spun slowly below.

Down on spinning Earth it was a different story. A rat (Rattus rattus, the country black rat) had burrowed into the cage with the Maran chicks and had attacked one. There was blood and feathers everywhere – and one still-living chick. I took her inside and coated the puncture wound with StockholmTar. This morning she is still on earth…although her journey to the chicken Milky Way may be not far away. She is in a makeshift chicken hospital, the hen equivalent of M*A*S*H.

The other Marans had covered their wounded sister to protect her, and made enough noise to wake me (that’s a lot of noise.) They are doughty fighters, so I hope the survivors will make a strong brood.

Heaven and Earth. Tranquility and Chaos. Especially at 3am.

An Udder Viper?

The photograph is a little graphic, but it’s an interesting case. This is the udder of Ballachulish. See the red spots, in pairs?

Spot the Udder

 

I did, when I turned her over the other day for a regular inspection. I called Pep the vet, who came the next day. We treated the udder with antiseptic.

Pep says that these spots may be puncture marks where a viper, possibly an Asp Viper (Vipera aspis) has bitten her. When a sheep walks over the spot where a viper is lying, it reaches up and bites the nearest pink flesh it can see – which, in poor Ballachulish’s case was her udder. He would normally expect the tissue around the bite to become necrotic (dead) but this has not happened – so maybe it’s not a viper. 

Maybe its an udder biter…

The Nature of Knowledge

Dolors, our lovely 70 year old neighbour told me last week that she had a problem with low blood pressure. “So I made up a tea with some herbs from round here, including ivy.”

“Ivy,” I said, “but that’s poisonous!”

“Yes of course it’s poisonous. But that means it has properties that can help you too – if you take it in small amounts. Think of digitalis!”

She’s right, of course. Digitalis purpurea, foxglove, contains digitoxin, used to treat heart failure.

Dolors has a lifetime of knowledge about the plants that grow in our area (like many older people here she has rarely travelled further than the county town, 25km away.) She has both types of knowledge – explicit knowledge, in part from her extensive library of books on herbal medicines, and tacit knowledge, the secret knowledge that it is hard to explain to others. Why she makes a specific mixture, why she picks plants from one area rather than another… there is knowledge behind these choices, but it’s hard to explain.

Dolors strolls around the countryside in her housecoat collecting plants and talking about this and that. It takes time and patience to learn from her.

And she is the antithesis of what we think of knowledge. We have come to believe that (a) it’s all in the internet and (b) that the man in the white laboratory coat is a reliable source.

Dolors is a reminder of the true nature of knowledge – a secret substance that it takes time, patience and empathy to find. 

The nature of knowledge. Like the knowledge of nature.

Tincture

I have just made tincture of rosemary flowers. It is not a job for the lazy. Our hillside is covered in rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis), so there is no shortage. But I wanted just the flowers. Only 20g of flowers, but that’s a bagful. It took hours to pick.

I’ll have a kilo of flowers please…

 

I love doing this stuff – the mixture of making something, the chemistry and science, and the fact that is made for someone else. Cooking is the same – it is invention, science, and love, warmed up together.

She Lived

Benbecula, the prettiest of the sheep with a wee sharp black face and black tail, staggered out of the field last night, foaming at the mouth and then jerking around, on her back, as I tried to calm her.
Pep the vet diagnosed Clostridial disease, and we treated her with a beer-bottle full of water with bicarbonate of soda (to reduce her stomach acidity) and a pack of dried yeast (to restore intestinal flora) as well as with Flunixin and penicillin.

Montseny beer - so good, even the sheep like it.

This morning she´s fully recovered.
I'm not.
Keeping sheep is an emotional business, a sort of low-level emotional catharsis, cleaning out your heart as you focus your feelings on an (apparently dying) animal. 'Low-level' because it is not, really not, the same as the feelings one has for a human but also because it's visceral, a feeling from deep in the guts (as it was, in this case, for Benbecula...)