Updates
I wanted to send out a quick post on this amazingly beautiful day to report that we appear to have finally stopped the chicken craziness. I reported in my last post that we have had some real problems with our new layers. We finally took the rather drastic step of completely removing the one breed that seemed to be the brunt of the attacks. We chose three different breeds to continue our practice of producing eggs with a variety of color.
Three Breeds / Three Colors
There has been little hostility since moving the one breed apart, the whole atmosphere seems to have settled down too. May be a little hard to believe but there is a palpable difference in the space now. Phew! We will keep our fingers crossed... up to about 35 eggs a day now, more birds coming on-line every day.
Lambs too continue to show up. We now have 8 lambs out of 4 ewes.... two twins, a triple, and a single. All are happy and healthy although we do have a ewe with one side of her udder not functioning. Of course it is the one with triplets.
We noticed the day after they were born that they were all competing for only one teat. Once in a while there is a plug that lambs are not able to remove during the first sucklings. We thought it was plugged... alas it is not. Nothing is coming out at all. We do not know what happened, she may have sustained an injury last year we were not aware of that resulted in tissue damage inside the udder. Pretty sure she will not produce again out of that side.
Not ready to think yet about what this means down the road. For now we simply lament the situation and beging the process of supplemental feeding (bottle) of the triplets. They will continue to battle for the one real milk spout but it will in no way cover their needs. A new chore is born!
So far the ewe does not seem to be in too much discomfort and she is not running a temperature. We'll see where this leads, hopefully the udder decreases in size and her body adjusts. We'll see.
Three Breeds / Three Colors There has been little hostility since moving the one breed apart, the whole atmosphere seems to have settled down too. May be a little hard to believe but there is a palpable difference in the space now. Phew! We will keep our fingers crossed... up to about 35 eggs a day now, more birds coming on-line every day.
Lambs too continue to show up. We now have 8 lambs out of 4 ewes.... two twins, a triple, and a single. All are happy and healthy although we do have a ewe with one side of her udder not functioning. Of course it is the one with triplets.
We noticed the day after they were born that they were all competing for only one teat. Once in a while there is a plug that lambs are not able to remove during the first sucklings. We thought it was plugged... alas it is not. Nothing is coming out at all. We do not know what happened, she may have sustained an injury last year we were not aware of that resulted in tissue damage inside the udder. Pretty sure she will not produce again out of that side.
Not ready to think yet about what this means down the road. For now we simply lament the situation and beging the process of supplemental feeding (bottle) of the triplets. They will continue to battle for the one real milk spout but it will in no way cover their needs. A new chore is born!
So far the ewe does not seem to be in too much discomfort and she is not running a temperature. We'll see where this leads, hopefully the udder decreases in size and her body adjusts. We'll see.