Below is a picture, taken by my nine-year-old friend Kenneth, of Sierra and her twins (now 1 week old) and Minerva with her little one (1 day old). It's a bit blurry but a great shot.
Kenneth, his six-year-old sister Violet, and their parents helped me shear Freyja yesterday. She is likely pregnant and had too much wool on her to offer easy access to milk for lambs. If a sheep has lots of wool in the udder area, new lambs can end up sucking on wool instead of a teat in their search for milk. It's best to give them a clear path to dinner.
The shearing went very well. Freyja behaved nicely except for shearing her tail and back legs. Every sheep seems to have particularly ticklish spots: the tail, the front legs, the top of the head, somewhere that they get really fidgety, or downright troublesome, when you shear that area. Also, they tend to wag their short tails just when I'm trying to shear that area, which can make safe shearing quite tricky!
At one point, Kenneth climbed through the window into the room where the hay is stored in order to get a couple handfuls of hay to feed to Freyja. Unfortunately, the other sheep saw him enter the Sacred Hay Area and raced to the door, eagerly awaiting hay and leaving no room for him to climb back out again. Violet went to his rescue, explaining to the sheep they needed to move and scolding them when they didn't listen to her. She and her father finally convinced them to shift out of the way enough for Kenneth to escape.
Everyone had a good time.
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2 comments:
Poor Kenneth! (But how funny...)
The lambs are just lovely.
Thanks, Julia! Actually, I think Kenneth really enjoyed getting trapped by the sheep, and Violet certainly appreciated the opportunity to rescue him.
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