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
I just realized Emmett — our ram who illustrates the physical changes in rut so well — will be cycling off the front page the next time I put up something about lambing. Before he disappears into the annals of blog history, I wanted to share one more photo of him … well, not really […]
As we were waiting around this week for our ewes to swing into action, it occurred to us that it really is not fair for the lambs to get all the attention. They do the all the work, after all. So we decided to put together an introduction to lambing that features some of our […]
I spent much less time than usual in the bullpen this fall, so I missed the gradual “bulking up” of the rams that happens every year as they go into rut for mating. Earlier this week on New Year’s Day, I went out for my first 2013 look at our flock and was startled to […]
Could there be a more unlikely topic to intersect with the high-tech world of computing in the clouds than castrating Soay sheep? Bet that got your attention. Today was castration day on the farm, Priscilla having much belatedly persuaded the Chief Shepherd that we are keeping — “just in case” — way too many rams. […]
Ah, the yearly dilemma of figuring out whether a Soay lamb is light phase. We Soay breeders never seem to tire of talking and fussing about it, do we? At least I don’t. I have written about it several times right here, and people tell me they find one of those posts particularly useful in […]
Of the many ways shepherds can fritter away hours waiting for their Soay lambs to arrive, none is more useless than trying to figure out how many lambs we’ll get in total, i.e., which ewes will have twins and which will have just one lamb. We kid ourselves into thinking the exercise is useful for “planning.” […]