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
Absent a big win in the gender lottery, we end lambing season with more ram lambs than we need or can sell. When the lambs are about 8-14 weeks old, we convert some rams to wethers, i.e., we castrate them. Why castrate at all, rather than leave things be? I can think of at […]
When last we met to discuss signs of spring, the topic was chicken eggs. It’s about time to re-direct attention to Soay sheep, don’t you think? Every year along about January or early February, our previous spring’s ram lambs — what I refer to loosely as our “yearlings” — begin an impressive growth spurt which by the end of summer will take them nearly […]
I have a confession to make: it is not always easy being married to a professional geneticist. To be sure, it was fun to watch Steve put the Open Flockbook Project together and it is heart-warming to get e-mails from breeders who are able to put together authentic conservation breeding groups or find the Soay they want to […]
As regular readers of this blog have learned, I am crazy about Soay sheep and so is Steve. Both of us are prepared to ascribe all sorts of wondrous attributes and talents to them, justified or not. However, Soay are no good at all in predicting the approach of spring. Try as we might, we have […]
For those of us lucky enough to have grass pastures in summer, feeding hay twice a day through the winter in the cold and rain is an annual reminder that not everything related to sheep-raising is fun. In plain fact, it’s a nuisance having the animals’ dietary needs dictate our daily schedule. How to keep […]
No sooner had the post about making pies from the blackberry thickets our Soay sheep have not yet eradicated hit the web than I received an e-mail from my college roommate (class of 1969, in the interests of full disclosure) alerting me to a terrific website created and run by one of our other classmates. Life intervened, as […]