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
Here we are in the dead of winter, minding our own business, whittling away at the projects that we put off all spring and summer and fall, and our pregnant ewes have gone totally ditzy. About 6-8 weeks out from lambing, they should be settling in to a nice matronly, placid late gestation, like ovine […]
Over the last few days we have been talking with a potential customer about the feasibility of shipping several lambs by air to her next summer. In the course of those conversations she wanted to know how much our lambs weigh when they are sufficiently past weaning to be ready to ship by land or […]
By now many of you have heard about this outstanding new book by Deborah Robson and Carol Ekarius, but for those of you who might have missed it, here’s why you will want to put it on your Christmas wish list. The F&FS is simply the most fact-packed, comprehensive, fun, and just plain beautiful book […]
It seems Peanut has a fan club. Almost every week I get either an email or an in-person question about whether he survived, is he okay, what’s his fate, and so forth. Most creatures wait until they are a little older to use up their 15 minutes of fame. Peanut stayed in the high, dry […]
There’s no need to mark your calendar to remind yourself that it’s breeding season for your Soay sheep – the rams will let you know by their appearance and their behavior. As usual, a few pictures tell the story best. Eight days ago we taped the horns of rams going to new homes this fall, including […]
Veteran readers of this blog know what firm believers we are in using jugs to house our Soay ewes with their newborn lambs. The first couple of years we made jugs from our Shaul panels and that was nice, but the lambs sometimes crawled through and wandered off. So Steve and Shawn designed wood-sided jugs […]