We were also a little late in separating the lambs from their mothers, so with one thing and another diverting our attention elsewhere, a certain little dad took rather too many liberties with ladies who should have known better. We thought nothing of it at the time, putting it down to boys games.
Then in February we lost both our beautiful tups, Norman had suffered a throat infection, which reoccurred and unfortunately we had to do the decent thing, then a fortnight later, my beautiful Dylan got kidney stones, with the same awful result, so we were tupless!!
I decided to go down to the Exeter Sales with my very good friend Sheila, where to cut a very long story short we returned home with a Poorton tup each, we have called ours Bentley, and he's a wonderfully kind and sensitive lad. He was promptly put to work, but we were very surprised when some of the ewes refused to come into season..... We were even more surprised when a lamb appeared with Dora on 24th June, followed by another 2 days later with Noodle!
We then noticed that Louisa's udder was becoming enlarged, in fact it ended up looking more like a cow that a sheep, however on the evening of my birthday she became very licky so we new something was afoot! By 6.30 she had a son and by 7.00 she had 2 daughters, both born backwards, but fine. We came home to get some colostrum as she had settled down and we made sure that they were all suckling. I returned a couple of hours later to check on the family and to my amazement there was a 4th lamb.
All are doing really well and I have started training them to the bottle today, which they are doing without any problems at all, so once they are coming to me we can assist and let them out into the field!!! Situation normal here in the Yorkshire Dales!!!!!
p.s. it's so nice to be writing again! I've missed you!