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
With the number “70” getting perilously close for Priscilla, we have concluded we can no longer maintain a flock of the size we are accustomed to and that we love. We realize we need to cut back our flock of 140 heritage British Soay sheep, perhaps by as much as half, and we hope you […]
With the decision by the new owners of Dalton not to bring back their wonderful Supersmall eartags, breeders of small heritage sheep are left to search yet again for a source of eartags small enough for their lambs’ ears. It is tempting to just put adult tags in and hope the lamb’s ear will not […]
We occasionally pause in our lives as Soay shepherds to celebrate notable anniversaries or milestones, this time the eighth birthday of our guardian llama Hank, and to recall how dumb, and dumbfounded, we were when he arrived on our farm. Let me explain. Shortly after we began our heritage sheep adventure, we fell heir to […]
Every few years we end up with an unexplained runt in our flock, not the one who is slowed down by a touch of coccidia or the littler twin who has trouble competing for its mother’s milk supply, but an unusually small animal who for some unknown reason simply falls behind. We had one of […]
This post serves two purposes: to provide an example of trying to time the start of breeding in order to enhance the odds of having at least a couple, and hopefully several, lambings in a very narrow window of time the next spring, and as a fitting ending to the saga of Lamb Camp 2015 […]
I forgot to mention at the end of my report on Day 2 of Lamb Camp that just before we all turned in for the night, a final trip to the Maternity Ward revealed yet another cute new lamb, still pretty gooey and wobbly. Favoring practicality over husbandry perfection, and confident that the ewe had […]