What’s up?

Posted by kenleighacres on January 19, 2009
Posted in: Lambing. 6 Comments

Still no lambs 🙂 but on one of my many trips to the barn this weekend I got to thinking that very rarely are the lambs born when my husband is home on the weekends.  So, I sat down with a calendar and figured out the percentage of weekday lambings and weekend lambings (I didn’t have anything better to do anyways).  It turns out that over 6 years – 75% of the lambs are born during the week with only 25% born on the weekend – very weird.  Last year it was – 90% during the week!!!  I accused him of putting something in their water over the weekend.  The even stranger thing is that I was talking to my mom and only one of us kids was born over the weekend – I am the oldest of six!  Is this common?  Are most babies born during the week?  What is different?  Why does this happen?  Oh well, there is your little piece of statistical, doesn’t mean anything, bit of information for the day 🙂 

6 comments on “What’s up?”

  1. But 71% of the days of the week are weekdays, and 29% of the days are weekend days, so it only stands to reason that a larger percentage of lambs are born on weekdays….right? Am I missing something? I mean, if you had 10 lambs born, you could expect roughly 70% to pop out on a weekday, and 30% to pop out on a weekend, just given the odds of days of the week. 90% is high, but probably not statistically significant…I’m not a statistician though…

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  3. Claire is obviously very mathematical though… I don’t have any reason in that area. 🙂 Writing and reading any day! LOL

    HA! Just remembered I need to call you back… Been a long weekend and last week (Thurs & Fri) were very busy. Sorry Shannon!

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  6. Oh yes! I agree! It sort of depends on your total number of lambs. So for instance, if you had 10 lambs, 7 on weekdays, 3 on a weekend, that would be “perfect” but if your ewes are having triplets and whatnot, then it’s really better to count how many ewes are giving birth on a week day/weekend, rather than # of lambs. If you had 10 ewes and 3 gave birth to triplets on a weekend and 7 gave birth to singles during the week, you’d have 7 weekday lambs and 9 weekend lambs, which would appear to be statistically wonky (44% weekday lambs, 56% weekend lambs), but really, you’ve got your 30% weekend lambing and 70% weekday lambing. It’s just the multiple births messing it up. Even if you had the 7 give twins, so 14 weekday lambs and 9 weekend lambs, then you’ve got 61% weekday lambs and 39% weekend lambs. Still makes the weekend look heavy, but falsely so. So I think you need to look at days of the week when ewes birthed, not # of lambs. I suddenly feel like such a geek…

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