Sometimes you get a poddy lamb that touches your heart strings more than the others. This little lamb is so feisty and full of life. But she is a week old now and time to move out of the house and in with the other poddies. Sorry sweetie.
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Sometimes sheep get sick and despite our best efforts fail to recover. This recently occurred with a sheep that had a name: "Rosie". She was very thin and was vomiting up feed. We wormed her and gave her a course of antibiotics, still no improvement. Today, we took her to visit our friend the vet. Nothing obvious was found on examination, and she was euthanized. Then he conducted an autopsy: she had a scarred oesophagus which had seriously constricted to pencil thickness. Impossible to fix as it was between the diaphragm and the throat. Also difficult to determine the cause. But would have caused her a long slow death .
The native poa tussock has really thrived this season with the wet weather and the increased fertility from the sheep. When we came here, the tussock was confined to the river/swamp area with a few patches in the higher paddocks. We slashed it for the first five years which were the drought years and left it to rot to increase the organic matter in the soil. Now we have had a few wet years the tussock has grown too fast for us to keep up with. In some paddocks it has started to shade all the other grasses out. Enter the fire queen. I have been burning the paddocks to reduce the tussock density and to give the other grasses a chance. Fire does not kill the tussock which is a native, but lets the pasture get ahead in the spring.
We have been sweating on it for weeks and now the results are in. We passed, yay!!
New poddy lamb in the house, she is a tiny lamb born in another bout of bad weather. As she is the lamb of one of our ETs we thought she should be given a chance.
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