I baked a fruit cake for Charlie yesterday. I think it's important that sharing is always agreed upon by everyone involved.
Today I’m heading back to the farmhouse. Something is killing our cade lambs. Three have died from swollen stomachs, and a fourth nearly died but has been nursed back to health.
I saw the dead cade lamb. She is badly swollen, so we think poison may be the cause. The cade lamb that survived is swollen on her left rear side and front right side, and she also has very loose stools.
Our other lambs are OK.
The only ewe left to lamb is the Herdwick. We expect her to have her lamb either this week or next.
Crows at Woodburn.
Frogs procreating in the farmhouse pond.
We make sure the flock is well cared for. They will be moved to the grass keep soon.
This ewe crushed her lamb, so she will be sold soon. Her brother was the difficult tup we sold at St Boswells.
Smaller birds are frequenting the farmhouse more often.
The farmhouse pond is full of activity right now, with frogs and toads mating and the water packed with spawn. If you look closely, you can spot tadpoles starting to develop. Around 5:20pm, something startled a mother ewe near the poly tunnel, and she began bleating at the cade lamb shed. I rushed outside to see what might have caused it, but found nothing. It felt a bit like the film "Signs"—maybe I should check the sky for alien spaceships. The whole thing was so strange, it was almost funny.
Here is the other tup. We will be using both of these tups later this year.
Some of the other cade lambs, which are kept apart from their mothers and the other lambs, have started to bloat and are losing their appetite. Charlie has given antibiotics to the five remaining cade lambs, and we are checking on them every couple of hours. The cade lamb that survived started to bloat again, but giving her a little black tea with a syringe seemed to help reduce the swelling in her stomach. Today, she left her cage, and I carried her out to the paddock. She played with two tups and one ewe lamb before I brought her back to the warmth of her heat lamp.