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AgriCulture: When Do Rams Do It? Just Ask Cole Porter
AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week, Mark writes:
As Peter mentioned last week, the cornucopia of cuteness known as lambing season is in full swing here at Turkana Farms. Mira, one of our oldest ewes, and Theodora, one of the youngest of breeding age, both gave birth within a day of each other last week. The other mothers run the gamut of ages and colors. Our beloved Nilufer (whom we bottle fed when she was a lamb), joined the maternity wave today, producing a eweling and a ramling, both black with long floppy ears.
We can generally tell by the engorging of their udders when the ewes are readying to lamb. Often, too, when they are right on the verge of labor, they begin staying behind in the barn while the others go out to feed. This gives us an opportunity to prepare what Peter has referred to as a birthing pen, although we generally postpone isolating them there as long as possible, which often means until after the lambs are born. Sheep generally get distressed if isolated from the herd. We keep them in the pen for a day or two after the birth (Animal Welfare Approved standards limit such confinement to 72 hours) in order to make sure the ewe bonds with her lamb, and to keep the initially wet little creatures out of cold drafts. I think our approach to how much protection to offer is a moderate one. We know others who feel that even such minimal confinement is unnecessary. In their view, lambs will either be healthy enough to thrive with the herd right away, or they are not worth nurturing. At the other extreme, there are those who dress their lambs in little sweater outfits if it is cold, which always strikes me as a bit redundant.
A few years back, we regularly had our ewes sonogrammed in the fall so we’d have an idea as to how many lambs to expect and when to expect them. But even at the very reasonable price of $5 a head, we didn’t feel it all that useful or reliable. We’ve abandoned that procedure.
Other farmers may time their lambing by separating their rams and ewes until a fixed date. If they want to keep track of breeding dates precisely, they can do so by
affixing a “marking harness”, filled with colored crayon or chalk dust, to the chest of the ram, then recording when each ewe has been “covered” by the tell-tale markings on their hindquarters. Using this evidence, they can predict the date of lambing by counting forward roughly 145 to 155 days (the gestation period) from the date of cover.
Privacy advocate that I am, that practice has frankly always seemed to me a bit intrusive on the sheep’s constitutional rights, essentially forcing them to reveal their sexual activities and partner choices. Also, we have far more important items on our agenda in the late summer and early fall harvest season than to spend time snooping. Laissez-faire farmers like us, who like to experience lambing season as a delightful surprise, rather than as part of the commodity production schedule, don’t really need that kind of exactitude. We’d just like a general idea of when lambing is likely to happen.
Last week I considered whether there might be a much easier way to gain that predictability and tested my idea out. I had in mind the line from one of my favorite Cole Porter songs, It’s Too Darn Hot:
According to the
Kinsey report
Ev’ry average man
you know
Much prefers to play
his favorite sport
When the temperature
is low.
I counted backward 155 days from the birth of Hatun’s twins, who led off our lamb parade this year, and checked the weather records for early August, 2010. Sure enough, almost exactly 155 days before her lambs arrived, a heat wave had just broken. The daytime temperatures had not gone down that much, only about 5 degrees into the mid 80s, but the nighttime lows had gone from the upper 60s to the mid 50s. The temperatures climbed back up from that break quickly, but six days later there was another break, with nighttime temperatures again back into the 50s. Not so coincidentally, our next burst of lambs, a half dozen of them, took place after a six day lapse from Hatun’s births, 155 days after the next succession of cool nights. Here we had thought it was modesty that led our ram, Suleyman the Magnificent (below), to engage in sex in the darkness of the night, only to find out he’d really been choosing cooler temperatures—or listening to Cole Porter’s music.
Late next summer, when we start experiencing our first cool nights, I shall mark our calendar 155 days ahead to be on the lookout for our first lambs of the 2012 season. That should be predictability enough for us.
The subject of sexual urges, sheep mating, and lambing should naturally lead us to what might be described as literally the dark underside of lambing season, the banding of the scrotums of our new ramlings, a trauma for them and for me. But I will leave that uncomfortable topic to another day. —Mark Scherzer
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Posted by Rural Intelligence on 02/08/11 at 02:02 PM • Permalink
