SURPRISE LAMB
Dusty, our Lincoln ewe didn't have a lamb last spring. This was surprising, because the year before we had bred her to Bouillon, our Rambouillet ram, and in the Spring of 2000, she produced Misty, a ewe lamb with great fleece. We had hoped for another lamb like Misty in the Spring of 2001, but for some reason, they didn't repeat the process the second time around.
We decided to breed Dusty to a Jacob ram this year. In late September, we 
thinned the flock, selling off those sheep we didn't need for breeding, and divided those remaining into four breeding groups.
October 6 began with a drizzly, foggy morning. Phebe looked out of the back window and said that one of the sheep in the back pasture seemed to be playing with a cat. That's not unusual, as the various species at Rainbow Farm frequently interact with each other. When Paul went out back later in the morning, he discovered that it wasn't a cat but a new lamb the Phebe had seen that morning. The picture shows the new lamb at about one day old, with Dusty. She's very protective of her lamb; when we try to take a picture of him, she gets nervous about all the attention being paid to him and tries to move between him and the camera.
We decided to call the lamb "Nearly". We had given all of our lambs for 2001 names beginning with the letter "N", and this one nearly didn't make the N group.
His father was obviously a Jacob, as he has the typical look of a lamb produced by one Jacob parent and one "normal sheep" parent. He's all black, with white markings around his head. Nearly has a symmetrical white marking, which Phebe calls his "grin mark". It starts under the point of his jaw on one side, wraps around his throat like a necklace, and ends under the point of the jaw on the other side. Looking at him head on from a distance, all you see is this little black animal with a big white grin and some marks on his forehead.
We'll be sure to post information about how his wool turns out. We got the cross we wanted, just five months earlier than expected.
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