Sunday, April 13, 2008

not again.....argh!

I was going out to take some photos today. Good day...no sunshine...most of the stuff falling from the sky is frozen...so it doesn't get on the camera lens....
But,
Seems the fences were worse than I had seen. Under the cedar trees, the fences were leaning. It only took a few days for the ewes to decide that meant more food. Over they went, taking their lambs with them. It took me a while to notice. On the far side of the gates by the creek...you know the one with the five foot hole in the ground.....were some white things? Dogs? Are those our dogs, playing with some smaller dogs? Then as my husband heard dogs....and ran for his gun....I saw the lamb in the middle. As I jumped the fences, I could tell those were not dogs...but ewes on the wrong side of the fences. Seems almost all of the 40 some ewes and 70 some lambs had made a break for the woods. Lambs were running and ewes and lambs screaming. "where's my other lamb?"" Where's my mommy?" Unfortunately, the ewes were in several places. Some of the east fence was down too. Moms and lambs ran up to the road. Now we were paniced....what if a car came by? Grain buckets meant the moms jumped back over the fence...but fat little lambs tried to slip thru the holes....I was grabbing stuck lambs and lifting them over. As we pounded some of the posts upright...I picked up ewes and handed them to my husband over the fence. I found a ewe who had gotten caught in the old electric fence wire. She wrapped and twisted the wire first around her neck, then around her legs....slowing her down so she hadn't choked by the time I found her.
I really hate floods now. It's one thing to stand a few hundred feet of fencing back up so the sheep might not jump it.....but this job of detaching fencing and redoing posts will take all summer. As night falls, I can fence the group out of the questionable fencing....and open a bale of hay. More grain and hay should get us thru the night.
Tomorrows another day.
One of these days the sun will shine.

1 Comments:

At 4:24 PM, Blogger Rayna said...

whew, good thing you got to that ewe! Glad everyones back safe and you didn't have any "other dogs"...that's always scary. We had wolves up almost in our yard the other day...Luckily they don't stay in the area for long....

 

Post a Comment

<< Home