Birchtree Farm

Today I opened the gate between Flint and the ewes. Now is about the time that you would want to start breeding season if you want lambs in the April-May timeframe. Flint's been showing interest for several weeks on and off, but today I noticed Cozette in particular was following Flint up and down the fenceline. She was definitely in heat and things proceeded pretty much as you would expect. :-) If all goes well, Cozette should lamb around April 7. If she didn't catch this time, she should cycle again in about 17 days.

Orange however is not impressed. In fact, she was downright hostile. If Flint came in her direction at all she would turn and face him and put her head down and they had several bouts of head-butting. She even butted him in the backside as he was paying attention to Cozette, as if she thought she needed to guard the other ewes. I think she's coming into heat though, and I hope she breeds this year. She has very nice conformation and fleece and I'd really like to have those genes passed on. They seemed to all have settled down by the afternoon, so hopefully things will sort themselves out.

In other news, it's raining AGAIN. We had about a week and a half or two weeks without significant rain and things had begun drying out a bit. But the ground is still saturated and so any amount of rain just pools and puddles. The sheep yard is turning into a mud pit. I guess now I'm just hoping for it to get cold and freeze. We really could have probably gone without rain until Spring and things would have been fine. At least the sheep have the barn shelter and the hoop house, both of which are dry so they can get out of it when they want to.