HYBRID LAMBS ARE DROPPING

Well my sheep season is off to a good start.  First ewe had triplets at 143 days and the second had quads at 147 days.  Early births like this means my lambs are born at 1 to 2 pounds.  This is caused because rocky mountain bighorns gestation is 180 days and domestic hair sheep are 150 days.  So basically I have premature births which means lots of work to keep them alive for their first week of life.   I have to admit I like spring when all the babies start.  I really like the renew of life and nature plus I really like my sheep.   I'll get some lamb picture tomorrow for you guys. 

We are having a good start as we have 20 lambs on the ground.  Most are bottle babies as their body weight has been 1.5 pounds.  Most lambs are born at 4 plus pounds.  These small lambs we put on the bottle till they are about a week old and then graft them on another ewe when she births.  It's been a hard time as the lambs are born premature because of the gestation differences of domestic sheep (150 days) versus pure rocky mountain bighorn (180 days).  Guess if you want to raise sheep hybrids it's part of the game.  When the hybrids lamb they usually have a gestation period of 165 days and lambs are born at about 5 pounds.


Even though I tried to post pone the sheep from birthing early some still will birth at 146/150 days which is their natural birthing time.  Every day those ewes carry the lambs they are getting bigger and will require less work.


 


April 29 what a day we have 80 degree temps.  Had some 50% bighorn ewes birth at 3 AM today so the lambs are 75% bighorn.  They look real close to pure bighorn.  They were out of white 50% ewes.  The pictures are of 50% bighorn.

We got some real nice 75% bighorn lambs this season.  Here are some pictures of them along with the sire I collected from.  Last year was the first year we used all post mortem semen in our LAP AI project on sheep.  We were from 65% to 90% conception on the different groups of sheep we bred.


We make hybrids to improve the immune system of the animals.  Pure bighorns have little or no defense against pneumonia.  We make these crosses in the hopes we will get the better immune system from the domestic sheep.  It seems to be working.  We also wanted to introduce the twinning aspect of domestic sheep as bighorns only have single births.  We have twins in our hybrids so that worked also.


The last thing I wanted to do was get the horn growth of domestic sheep.  This has worked very well.  A two year old pure bighorn might have a half curl but a hybrid the same age will be a 3/4 curl to 7/8 curl.  A three year old hybrid will be full curl but it would take five years for a pure bighorn to get close to a full curl.


This year we hope to LAP AI with Stone sheep semen in our hybrids.  We also might use Desert bighorn semen in some of the hybrids.  A interesting thing has happened this year.  Our domestic sheep are mostly white stock.  First generation stock has been white or tan or tan and white lambs born.  The best color lambs born this year were out of the pure white ewes when LAP AI'd back to pure bighorn.  We also get good bighorn color lambs when we breed 50% stock back to each other.  I assume because the bighorn color is on both sides of the stock bighorn color is able to come out in some lambs.  All in all this project has been a great success.  In the past because we no longer have the ability to harvest our stock in Montana I have sold all lambs born.  This year I plan to raise harvest stock for out of State harvest facilities so I will be looking for some buyers from out of State who would want to have something else for their clients.  If interested please contact me.

Jack

Looking good out there . Keep us in mind when you are ready to send off to a harvest facility. Those Rams would look good in our northern Minnesota pines in about February with 3 feet of snow on the ground. We get a few calls every year from hunters looking for bighorns. Take care

Kevin

I know it has been some time since you posted, but would you have any guidance on breeders still operating Rocky Mountain Bighorns? Thanks, appreciate any help you can offer

We still raise rocky mountain bighorns. We will have three lambs in 2021 about in May. We just sold our 2020 lambs a few weeks ago. Message me for information. Thanks