Welcome to The Chronicles. I hope you will enjoy my posts about the joys of raising the oldest breed of sheep in the world -- the always intriguing, easy-to-raise Soay sheep. With few exceptions, posts contain what I hope is useful information interspersed with a bit of whimsy. Feel free to comment on anything you find here. If you want to send me a private message, that's okay, too. Send your note to the address on the "contact us" page of our main website (***saltmarshranch-dot-com). Meanwhile, enjoy The Soay Sheep Chronicles! Priscilla
Nothing beats luck when it comes to using photos to make a point about raising Soay sheep, or anything else for that matter. Let me explain. A few weeks ago when I was putting together the update about annual ram horn growth, I stumbled across pictures of our ram Hesket taken in 2013, about a […]
Soay sheep are legendary for their hardiness, including their resistance to disease. They don’t need much in the way of vaccinations — just one per year in our experience — but that one annual immunization is important to their good health. As for other shots, a pair of vitamin and mineral injections for newborns will […]
Every year at the winter solstice, usually December 21st, sheep horns (and for that matter all heritage sheep and other mammals’ horns as far as I have been able to determine) begin growing, a process that lasts for about three months and then tapers off through the spring and stops until the next December. To […]
Without doubt the longest-standing widespread myth about Soay sheep is that they “lack the flocking instinct of many breeds. Attempts to work them using sheep dogs result in a scattering of the group.” As far as I know, this statement first appeared in an old writeup about Soay sheep on a site associated with the […]
The third in a series of posts about white spotting. Part I addressed a series of questions about the frequency of white spotting in Soay sheep, whether skewbald is “normal” in Soay, and whether breeders should try to get more or less white spotting in their flocks. Part II presented extensive lambing data in an […]
The second in a series of posts about white spotting. The first addressed a series of questions about the frequency of white spotting in Soay sheep, whether skewbald is “normal” in Soay, and whether breeders should try to get more or less white spotting in their flocks. Apology and Caution: following contains excessive amounts of […]