I’m slowly figuring out what the little Shetlands like. I took all the left-over veggies from Thanksgiving day out there mid-morning, determined to find something they’ll like. When I go inside the pen and just sit there, today they crowded all around me, and I got generally sniffed and prodded, and got to do a little bit of touching myself. I also found that they really like bell peppers and cucumbers. Good to know!
The lambs, of course, know I’m the treat lady, so going in to their pen and getting lots of attention is easy, but I keep doing it. I’m going to be around less often for the next unknown bit of time, so Frank’s going to have to learn to be Mom, and I was showing him how I do it. We’ve got to get them all socialized really well if we’re going to be able to move them around from pasture to pasture in the spring. Frank said something like the Shetlands are so small I’ll just carry them, heh. But I don’t think that has much class, does it? One does not normally carry your sheep about.
Poor little Panic, the young Shetland ram. He is always away from the herd, because Raven (the ram) and Leon (his side-kick wether) don’t like him at all. I understand it, they are trying to drive him away, but there’s no where to drive him to, so he is always off in a little corner, as far away as he can get. Even then, Raven and Leon won’t let him be, and yesterday, he got his horns caught in the fence and Leon was butting him, taking advantage of his helplessness. I got him unentagled pretty easily, but man, what if I wasn’t there?
I really wish I could just put him in with my Icelandic lambs in the middle pen, but then we’d have 78000 lambs in the spring, all unregisterable. Also, I’m worried that having one ram in each pen means that Panic would then fight with both Sue and Raven, one on each side, and we’d be back to the hell is was with Sue and Raven in pens next to each other.
Sue seems to have healed just fine from his cuts from last Sunday, and having the airspace between the two rams is working out well. They glare at each other across the space, but there is no ramming, so all it well.
We’ve also named the rest of the lambs. Fiona’s older twins are both very white, though one is blonder than the other, and they are both complete flirts. They go back and forth from side to side, flirting with all three rams. So I named one Marilyn and the other after a flirty friend of mine who is also blonde, June.
Fiona’s younger set of twins is now Naomi and Lou. The little one who will forever be called limpy, as she’s the one who had the tendon cut by the sheerer, we’ve taken to calling limpy-lou, so hopefully by naming her Lou officially, we can drop the limpy part. And her sister is the little one with Sue’s black markings, and we are naming her Naomi after a beautiful and small black friend of ours.
Kaytla’s baby is Minx, which is self-explanatory. If you can pull the electric wire off of the fence charger, you are a minx.