March 8, 2024
Our life is always busy but once maple sugaring starts, it speeds up exponentially. Right now, I feel a bit like a piece of driftwood floating downstream. I can’t see around the corner or hear the approaching rapids, but the pace is picking up and I know that lambing season is coming quickly.
We are still a few weeks away from having “lambs on the ground,” but in essence they are already with us. They might still be in utero but they’re here just the same. The last few weeks of a ewe’s gestation always brings any underlying health problems to the surface as the lambs take up more and more of the mom’s energy and nutrition. This past winter has been way too wet and way too warm. Normally, freezing temperatures keep our pastures dry and kill off any parasites lingering in the soil. Those parasites- which I refer to as “micro-predators,” might not be as frightening as a hungry bear or a pack of coyotes but left unfettered, the end result is essentially the same.
This past week has been filled with numerous health issues none of which the vet could easily explain, but I suspect are a byproduct of this unusually wet and warm winter. In March 2020, at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, we had the lambing season from hell, and this is starting to feel eerily familiar. That year we had the vet out two weeks before lambing with 5 ewes too sick to stand. The symptoms were very similar to what we are dealing with now and the diagnosis was almost word for word the same;
“Huh, I’m not really sure.”
The treatment was also pretty much the same.
“Try this, and that, or that, and some of this. You can add this with that and see if it helps, if not stick with that- or this, and add a shot of that.” They left us with an arsenal of IV drips, antibiotics, anthelmintics, vitamin shots, pain meds, syringes, a leg splint, casting supplies, - and a bill.
In 2020, despite my fatalistic world view at the time, all the ewes got better, and they all had healthy lambs. In as much as life really can be compared to a piece of driftwood getting sucked downstream, I found myself standing in the barn last night, listening to the pounding rain. As I waited for the IV to finish dripping, I wondered “what if it’s not just a set of rapids around the corner, what if it’s a waterfall instead?” We’ve been here before, though, or at least somewhere like this and I know, like any good set of rapids, ultimately the only way out is through.