Andy found a teeny itty bitty egg today. This is the smallest egg by far. Perhaps one of the younger hens has started laying? We didn’t crack it open. I think Andy was scared a teeny tiny chicken baby would fall out. The egg next to the wee egg is a “normal” egg for our chickens. The marker next to that egg is…a marker.

Sheep Update: Pumpernickle seems to be doing very well. Sourdough seems to be getting a tiny bit better, but she’s still pretty sick. She did go out side and eat a few leaves of clover this evening, and that made me happy.

About a week or two ago we noticed the sheep seemed sort of thin. It’s really hard to tell if a sheep is skinny or fat or regular because she often has 8 inches of fluff hiding her body. You have to really wiggle your fingers down into the sheepy fur to find the actual sheep. When we noticed the thinness, we started trying to fatten them up by feeding them more. We also gave them a dose of dewormer. Turns out, the dosage levels on the container of wormer aren’t all that effective…or so says the big animal vet we went to today.

This weekend, we noticed that Sourdough wasn’t quite as hyper as usual, and the grain they get every night wasn’t all gone in the morning. Yesterday when I went to let the sheep out of the barn, Sourdough was flumped in a corner and had to be prodded to get up. Not good. Nope. Not good at all. We gave her another dose of dewormer.

This morning, she was even more listless. We did see her eat and go potty a little, but she just was not doing well. I went to work, and Andy turned detective. All the signs pointed to severe worm levels. Andy called our cat vet who referred us to a big animal vet who told us to bring in poo.

While we were waiting for the test results, I heard someone in the back of the vet clinic say, ‘Hey, you remember the other day when you had that goat that had more worms then you’d ever seen before? Well, come look at this.’

Sourdough’s worm levels were extremely high. Extremely. The vet told us to dose both sheep (Pumpernickle seems mostly okay, but her worm levels were high, too) with six times the amount recommended on the bottle. Wow. The vet also suggested we give them some watery yogurt to help get their gut bacteria going again.

The only good thing about Sourdough being so listless was that it was pretty easy to get her meds and her yogurt into her tummy. We got everyone dosed, and Sourdough even joined Pumpernickle at the hay for a few munches.

We’ll see how they are in the morning. Here’s a picture of them a few weeks ago. Hopefully they’ll be out munching grass and baaing at us again soon.