adult issues, including how and when to trim
In my last post, I talked about how sheep horns grow and what shapes they can take, and I touched on the issue of when horns need to be cut for health reasons. Here I will walk you through a more detailed horn evaluation of two rams and then provide a pictorial demonstration of how […]
Soay sheep horns come in all sizes and shapes. The rams may have tightly spiraled horns; thick horns of varying diameters; horns tilted at an angle before turning back in a corkscrew (or remaining in a flat plane); open, wide-angled spirals in the shape of a Celtic “M”; and everything in between. There’s more: the spiral […]
Several readers brought me up short by chastising me for unfairly omitting the yearling ewes (gimmers) from my report on the late-winter spurt of ram horn growth. I was tempted to ignore their criticisms, so certain was I that only rams could possibly exhibit dramatic horn growth. But then good manners and a little nagging voice in my head prevailed, and it was back to […]
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 […]