Spring Lambs

Elaine Shirley: My names is Elaine Shirley, I work for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, and I’m the manager of the Rare Breeds Program.

Well this is lambing time, generally we lamb from about the middle of March to the middle of May. Luckily, nature has equipped them to pretty much do it on their own. We put them behind Wetherburn's tavern, because we have a little shelter there.

They generally do it on their own and we put them in a pen so that we know the moms are making milk in both halves of their udder, and we need to make sure that the lamb is healthy and that the mom is healthy, cause lots of things can happen in the birthing process.

Someone who I'm sure thought they were being very nice to the sheep pulled the leaves off of a poisonous tree and fed them to the sheep. I had 14 sheep in there and we lost eight of them. The real shame was, a large portion of what we lost were very young females. This would have been their first time lambing, right now.

So I had a lot of years of potential that I lost. But, we'll come back from it. We'll just keep plugging along. There were a number of ewes who I was thinking of selling. They were older ewes. I had a couple who had not lambed for a year or two.

The point of them being here is to reproduce, so I typically give them two years, so a couple of them got three years this time. And it seems like most of them actually – one of them lambed just the other day did not lamb last year, and she had only had singles before, and she had a set of twins. So maybe she knew it was time to perform.

The Leicester Longwool -- it's kind of like looking at dogs and saying, "What makes a German Shepard different from a Chihuahua or what makes a Cocker Spaniel different from an English Spaniel?" There are very subtle differences.

Sometimes there are real distinct differences. A couple of the things about this breed are that they're an older breed. They're one of the oldest breeds of sheep around. So longevity in the sheep world is a big part of their importance. The reason for keeping the sheep around is multifold.

Obviously, one of the main reasons we keep them here is because of their historic aspect. This breed of sheep was developed in the 18th century, the same time period we talk about here.

I think even a bigger importance is that this is part of what makes up sheep. There are hundreds of breeds of sheep, and you know, if we lost Leicester Longwools, we wouldn’t lose sheep, but we’d lose a little bit of genetic material that’s unique.

We don’t know what we’re losing with that genetic material. We might be losing the ability to forage on extremely poor forage and still do very well. We might be losing the ability to live through some kind of pandemic.

We might be losing the ability to live in a very hot climate, or a very dry climate. To let these breeds die out is really to lose a little bit of genetic information that we may need farther down the road.

© 2010 The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation