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
When you raise small livestock as appealing and mellow as Soay sheep, you tend to forget that even smaller animals live right alongside them. The other day I was rummaging through our electronic photo “scrapbooks” looking for pictures of one of our rams who is going to a new home in the next few weeks […]
Please welcome the smallest viable British Soay sheep ever born on our farm –OR119-360. Is it any wonder we named him “Peanut”? Here he is the day he was born — all 1 pound 15 ounces of him: [Note: click on any picture to see a bigger version] We may eventually give this little guy […]
In our first five years of breeding British Soay sheep (2006-2010), our lambs’ birth weights ranged from 6 pounds 12 ounces all the way down to 2 pounds 5 ounces – quite a large spread. The largest lamb was almost three times as large as the smallest lamb, yet virtually all were healthy, and although […]
The third in a three-part series Part I: our 2008 AI lambs, posted March 10, 2011 Part II: our 2009 AI lambs, posted March 12, 2011 If you’ve been here recently, you know I talked at length about the increased variety of coat color and pattern in British Soay sheep as a result of bringing […]
The second in a three-part series Part I: our 2008 AI lambs, posted on March 10, 2011 Part III: more new colors in our 2010 lambs, posted on March 14, 2011 Once Norris sired two uniform dark charcoal British Soay lambs in 2008, we figured that was it for new colors and patterns from the […]
The first in a three-part series Part II: more new colors in our 2009 AI lambs, posted March 12, 2011 Part III: more new colors in our 2010 lambs, posted March 14, 2011 In the last three years, the color palette of British Soay sheep in the United States and Canada has expanded dramatically. Looking […]