2017 Lambing

We had another good lambing season in 2017 here at Ye Olde Whispering Pines Shetland Sheep Farm! Time isn't allowing me to post all of them, but I will post some of the noteworthy ones. At this point in our breeding program, the bar for what is noteworthy is quite high now, so there are really nice lambs that don't get noticed like they once would have.

In general, we had more rams than ewes, which isn't terribly helpful, but once again, the quality of the rams is off the charts. If anyone knows why we consistently find our ram lambs to be consistently of higher quality than our ewes, I'd love to hear a theory. I don't have one, but it happens every year without fail.

This has been a year of firsts for us in many ways, but I would say, the biggest one had to be Genoa's lambs. We've been doing this now since 2002, and this is the first time one of our ewes has had triplets.

Two black ewes and a moorit ram. All very nice. It's also the first time we have had lambs born 5 hours apart. The second ewe lamb arrived five hours after the first one! The ram very soon after. I just could not get to the second lamb, so I opted to wait it out. These lambs are out of Nitro. Nitro's two year old fleece micron tested very well at a Spinning Fineness of 20.2 microns. We have rams that are finer, and some very close, but none have the full package of fleece traits that he has. It would be nice  to get that in black. I've also often said I would take a full flock with Genoa's fleece, so I would be happy if the lambs took after either parent.