Dandelion’s Delivery & Lessons Learned

April 3, 2023

After helping Anne Shirley deliver, and very little sleep the night before, I was wiped out. Happy because I had a healthy mother & two vigorous beautiful ewe lambs, but so tired. All I wanted was to be warm, dry & fed. I decided to check the upper pasture, where I was waiting on three more ewes, before going to eat soup.

I didn’t think the day could get any tougher. I was so wrong. I arrived to see Dandelion, a veteran of three successful, unassisted pasture lambings, sheltered from the wind in a thicket of trees where I’d spread straw into protected spaces. I smiled because Dandelion is the type of ewe you can always depend on to use common sense. She is a fiercely protective mother & makes good choices. She was born on the farm, four years ago, to my favorite ewe & favorite ram. I love her. I was tired & truthfully expecting zero issues so I took a sit in the grass, it was starting to sprinkle but I didn’t care. I was exhausted. I took a little video as she repositioned herself. I could see the amniotic sack, but nothing else. We were in open pasture & I didn’t want to inadvertently frighten her from her chosen, protected location. I watched for fifteen more minutes. No progress. Not good.

I got some alfalfa pellets & tried to lure her to me. I carried only a handful, in an effort not to attract the other ewes and all their lambs. I failed. Dandelion got up to move & I grabbed her horn quickly. I always feel terrible pulling on a delivering ewe, but I also thought getting her contained was the top priority. I brought her to the recently cleaned & laid out with fresh straw horse trailer that I’ve been using as a ‘remote maternity suite’ in our upper pasture. After getting her inside, I could quickly see there was more blood than usual. I knew starting without all my supplies on hand would be premature, so I left her to get the lambing kit & wash my hands. When I returned, I put on lub and began an internal exam.

I could see two front feet, but no nose. The feet were barely emerging so something was stopping their progress. Most likely the head. I was expecting the horn buds to be caught just on the other side of the vaginal opening, but if that was the case, I should see more of the nose and the feet should be further extended. I was confused. Most intervention I do is what I call ‘wrist to mid forearm’ assistance. This covers re-situating most bent legs or getting most heads into position. Breech births require deeper assistance, as do tangled up multiples, or occasionally extracting a twin if the mothers contractions slow after a rough first lamb entry, but those are exceptions on our farm. We work hard to avoid dystocia & mid-forearm is usually plenty & I feel far safer for the ewe.

Sadly, when I went looking for the head it wasn’t there because massive horn buds had caught on her pelvic bone as tightly as fish hooks. These were unlike any horn buds I had ever felt. It was literally bone grinding on bone & I wanted to cry. I tried rotating the head to see if I could get more clearance with a quarter turn. There wasn’t clearance. I tried to use the lamb puller but the horns were wedged too tightly and it felt as if the lamb was too big to push back even a 1/2 inch. This seemed impossible & operating blind I couldn’t find a place. The head was lodged firmly & couldn’t enter the birth canal. There aren’t words for how terrible this all felt. I patiently kept turning his head. I didn’t have a choice. There was no magical solution & there was not a vet to provide a C-section. I was sitting in a trailer with a beautiful resilient animal that was in excruciating pain.

Finally one of the horns (these were not buds) slipped past the pelvic bone. It took time but then the second followed. The head moved far enough forward to allow the legs to finally emerge, but I could see all we’d done was reach the point where the horn buds usually get stuck on ewes. Dandelion was now where most ewes have trouble with horn buds & we’d been at it for 45 minutes. I needed to manipulate the vaginal opening to get the horns out without tearing Dandelion. I was thankful for the lube jug because I could grab it one handed and pour it on rapidly. Dandelion’s contractions had pretty much ended. She was exhausted & lost a lot of blood. I reached for the lamb puller and managed to hook it over the horns (yes, they were real horns thankfully capable of being a solid hook for the plastic covered lamb puller). Once I got it behind both horns, the space made by the removal of my hands, allowed enough room for the head to finally emerge.

I’d been hoping in vain to apply downward traction to the head & legs & be rewarded with that wonderful sliding motion of the lamb emerging. It wasn’t to be. He was enormous & and the breadth of his chest wasn’t allowing him out of the birth canal. Lots of lube and patient pulling at just before the shoulder (I could never have pulled as hard as needed using his legs, they would have been damaged). Dandelion seemed to realize I needed her & made a final valiant effort to push. We finally got him out.

He was massive & barely breathing. I’d lost a big ram lamb the year before within 30 minutes of pulling him & I was desperate for Dandelion’s sake to avoid that happening. I brought him to Dandelion & we went to work. He was struggling to breathe so every trick I knew, I tried. There was blood coming from his mouth & at first I thought he’d sustained organ damage, but then I realized it was fluid he’d ingested during the long delivery before his head reached the birth canal. He was coughing & suffocating on it. I needed the bulb syringe. I didn’t have it (shepherdess fail). I turned him upside down and gently thumped his chest. He coughed more. I pulled slime out of his mouth. This continued for multiple attempts with small breaks to let mom keep kissing him & provide a reason to live. I’d been reading up on the Madigan technique & wasn’t prepared to do it, but I could see how firm rubbing & pressure on his main body cavity kept ‘waking’ him back up.

Together Dandelion & I kept stimulating him while clearing his nose & mouth. He went into a legs flailing, asphyxiating spasm, but we pulled him through. Then out of nowhere his tail began to wag! I was shocked. He also began to shake with cold. Only 4-5 minutes after emerging, but keep in mind just the delivery I was present for was well over an hour. I feel they come out with less brown fat & reserves when the delivery is long & traumatic. He was going hypothermic. I wrapped him in my jacket. I could take him to the house, but I knew that would destroy Dandelion who hadn’t been able to stand yet. It seemed wrong to leave her in a pool of blood & in her eyes ‘steal’ her lamb. I was also worried that if she got agitated, she could potentially lose more blood. I left the lamb wrapped in my jacket beside her & ran to make colostrum.

I knew Dandelion had plenty of colostrum, but in her condition I didn’t know if I’d be able to milk her. She had fallen over when she tried to stand. I grabbed a warm dry towel, colostrum, the survive supplement I like, BoSe etc and raced back up. I opened the door to find Dandelion standing, braced against the wall, dripping blood, & her huge ram lamb nursing! Keep in mind this horse trailer looked like a scene from a slasher movie. I’m still not sure how blood got on every wall, yet here it was: this beautiful maternal scene unfolding in the midst of it all. I may never have loved Icelandics more than at that moment. This was good mothering on a heroic level. Due to the ram’s immense size he had to nurse fully lying down. I watched in awe, overwhelmed by the strength of this ancient breed. I watched to make sure he had firmly latched on. It blew my mind he was toddering around, his mother doting on him, only 20 minutes after I was extracting bloody slime & watching his body spasm as he fought to get air.

I shifted quickly from lamb care to ewe care. I made up a bucket of molasses water, grabbed banamine for pain & the antibiotic Exceede. This is the first time I’ve given pain meds or an antibiotic after delivery. I felt the quantity of blood and the sharpness of the horn buds warranted the antibiotic. The possibility of a tear was there. I grabbed the banamine to help with pain & inflammation. I‘d used it with horses, but never sheep. I called a wonderful, fellow Icelandic shepherdess in CA who also happens to be a vet. I love the way she cares for her ewes & wanted her thoughts. She concurred that both meds were needed & gave me a couple things to watch for.

Instagram story.

By this point we had a full blown thunderstorm & I was so wet, cold & tired my brain was fritzing. Thankfully I’d made a big pot of soup with our lamb, which is always the protein that I crave during the long weeks of lambing. Once they were settled, I sat down to think & let the last few hours sink in. It felt surreal. I remembered in the early years when I had injured a lamb’s leg while assisting a ewe. The intensity of that early delivery had overwhelmed me & I’d been scared & hurried. I’d carried the guilt of injuring the lamb for a long time. I guess what I’m saying is that situations, where you have no parachute, no rescue, & death & pain & blood are your only colleagues, it’s those moments that teach you calm courage, how to keep soothing an animal even when you want to cry, & how to keep moving slowly forward. If you’d told me years ago, a 13 lb ram lamb with huge horns could be delivered alive from a mid-sized ewe, much less that I could do it, I’d have never believed it.

So in the moments, whether it be on your shepherding journey, or your life journey, where you don’t get the results you hoped for, or worse you know clearly you made a mistake, just remember that those missteps are often preparing you to overcome odds you could never have expected. Stay brave, keep moving forward, & don’t forget to breath. I use to panic. My flock has taught me how to move slower in more ways than one & this ram will always be a symbol of that to me. A clear reminder that we all face challenges, but the best way to overcome them is to dig deep for your courage, stay calm & let your breath settle you.