The Soay Sheep Chronicles

For Soay sheep and their shepherds, summer is an easy, laid-back season.  All the sheep are feasting on grass, so there is no hay to tote.  Moving the animals from one area to another to keep them rotating through the pastures is a welcome task, since we get to be with our Soay flock and watch them race to the new section on the other side of the fence, where the grass really is greener.  With so much open air and so much movement, our fret about worm load goes away until winter and the return to close quarters.  All the creatures, great and small, are content to bask in the summer sun.

If I had to pick one phrase to describe summertime with our Soay sheep, it would be “a feast for the eyes.”  Everything is good to look at  — the sheep, the dogs, the llamas, the pastures.  I have been so intent to talk here about the “working” side of shepherding that it is high time I show you the mellow side for a change.
Our tour begins with the view from our upper pastures, the ones we hay, looking down on a section of the pasture we use for the sheep.  You can see two of the shelters in the distance.

Ever since we started raising Soay sheep, green definitely has become my favorite color!  We are lucky to live on a river, the Little Applegate, and it is right down there beyond the grass, lined by the big trees.  It is the river that makes these lush pastures possible for Soay sheep food.  The next picture shows one of the essential parts of the irrigation operation.

The pipe running right up the middle is in the same upper pasture shown in the foreground of the first picture.  It is that pipe, complete with its rainbird just peeking through the grass, hooked to a riser, and laid end-to-end with 17 other pieces of pipe, that brings the water up from the river to the upper pastures.  In the next picture, you can just barely see the rainbirds spewing water up the hillside, the little white spots at the edge of the grass.

I will never forget how excited Steve was last year when we were able to hay the upper pastures for the first time.  Here’s what this luscious green grass will look like in about a month, after it is baled and ready for winter feeding:

Pop quiz:  Is this man having fun raising Soay sheep?

As for the animals, it is not just about loads of green grass to eat.  For the ewes, there is the peace and quiet of post-weaning and the chance to put a little weight back on after the lambs have taken their fair share of their mom’s body mass.  Have a look.

I took this picture recently when we put our adult ewes into an area of our property that has never seen sheep, and for decades was a neglected area overgrown with blackberry and star thistle.  I am fairly certain the tan ewe in the middle is Libretto.  The pretty white-faced ewe in front is Ellerbeck, the cover girl on the front page of our farm website.

This nearby group of ewes is about to attack a “mature” stand of blackberries, right behind them.  It didn’t take long for these determined ladies to turn that blackberry thicket into bare stalks.  The ewes will volunteer to return next April to munch on the tender new growth of blackberry that will dare to rear its ugly head in the pasture.

Once they’ve had their fill, the ewes take time out for a late-afternoon snooze and cud-chew.  The ewe against the fence right in the middle is Vieva, one of our 2008 AI lambs, with a darker face than has been seen in the US-based British flock previously.  Over on the left is another of our 2008 AI ewes, Ossie, with the completely white face other than her black eye and nose.  The ewe with the yellow tape on her horn is the mother of at least one of our AI lambs from this year, but I honestly cannot tell which one.  Sheep may safely graze.

Life for the rams is quiet, too, in the months before rut starts and the guys have to prove they are the most worthy breeding candidates by periodically bashing each other.  Here they are earlier in the summer on new grass.  You can see the most recent rotation pattern, over on the left where it looks not so lush any more.

While we are down here in the bull pen, let me brag on a couple of our rams.  I took this picture of Cinnabar a couple of days ago because he reminds me so much of his sire, Fenugreek.  Some day we may figure out where this longer fleece came from originally, but for now we simply enjoy looking at it.

The equally handsome fellow in the back with the yellow-taped horns is Emmett, sire of a number of British AI grandchildren this year (Emmett’s father is Gaerllywd Mustard, who resides in the U.K.).

As for the lambs, they are out from under their moms’ watchful eyes and free to cavort around the pastures eating grass to their rumens’ content.  I tried in vain to get some of them to stop and pose as they started out in a new area of grass a few weeks ago, but was lucky just to capture one little Brit ewe lamb who found the grass so high she had to jump over it!

One of our priorities this lambing season was to focus on our lambs’ non-milk nutrition, especially during weaning, when they are under stress and are more vulnerable to coccidia.  This tan ewe lamb is not quite four months old and weighs 35 pounds, a robust weight and a size that confirms she has not been carrying a worm load.

I had to laugh when I saw the next picture come out of the camera.  This is one of our mahogany Blue Mountain-derived American Soay lambs in a pasture area that had seen better days by the time I got there, but I love seeing the ewe lamb so comfortable being with our guardian llama, Llucy, who you can see looming over her in the background.

Alas, the grass does not last forever.  Here are our youngest British lamb (an AI granddaughter named Heywood) and her mother Xanthoria (Heywood’s sire Curtis is way down in the bull pen of course), trying to scrounge just a little more grass from an area they clearly have taken down about as far as we want it to go.

Not surprisingly, their pitiful attempts prompted me to summon Steve right away to move Heywood’s group to a new section of pasture.

As for our livestock guardian dogs, we are not sure whether they are so content during the summer because they are out in the open pastures, or because the sheep are so content on grass, or because the coyote babies also have been weaned and their mothers are no longer frantically looking for food, but whatever the reason, our big guys mellow out come summertime as well.  Here is Isaac in the cool grass and shade, watching his ewes enjoy a new pasture area.

There is one animal on our farm, our border collie Molly, who never takes a vacation from work, but she is mighty content during the summer when she can find a water tank to cool off in,

or a field of lush grass to run in:

To get you oriented, the foothills in the background are in California (we are about 10 miles north of the border as the crow flies).

I will end the tour by showing you one more time why we love being around the diminutive Soay sheep.  No sooner had I put down my clipboard and picture list when Alizarin (”Lizzie”) came over to investigate.

Here’s hoping you are having a good summer.  If you have Soay sheep, we know you are enjoying this season!

For now …

 

Having now dithered for a full two weeks trying to figure out a way to introduce our lambs, I have given up on the notion of an orderly, grown-up recitation of the lambs as they arrive, complete with mini-pedigree and a clever phrase about each one.  My downfall was watching the little woolies cavorting about in the Maternity Ward.

Duh – how about sharing some of that fun instead of yammering about lineage?  You would prefer that?  So would I, at least until Steve finds out and makes me go back to serious heritage questions. 

For three years straight the lambs have shown us by example precisely when the lambs are ready for their first taste of freedom from tagging along after mama every waking moment.  Imitating the big girls, they jump into the portable hay wagon (a.k.a. garden cart) and play with the hay, pretending to eat with all the earnestness they can muster.  Sometimes the game ends when too many of them move to one end of the cart, upending it with a great flurry of mock-horrified lambs.  Here’s the squad crowding in, all of them only 3 or 4 days old.

Meanwhile, one would think that a day-old lamb would be content with her mother’s milk, but not our Borrowby.  Does she call to mind the old adage, ”the grass is always greener”?  I shudder to think what she’ll do when she gets old enough to go after real grass.   

I sense a theme developing.  Here is Bowie checking out the buffet line in our Shaul feeders.

Mind you, the lambs do not really eat solid food for some days yet, but by golly they are going to have their chewing and sniffing skills honed when the time comes.

Our first lambing year I was surprised to see the lambs engaging in what looked for all the world to be teething.  Hadn’t even thought about it, but no harm done.  Even if I had stocked up on those hard rubber gadgets human babies use when the Ryecrisp runs out, they would have gone to waste.  As Catalina demonstrates, the lambs much prefer the edges of the portable hay wagon.

Not all the lamb activities are food-oriented, although it seems that way most of the time.  Here is little Bisbee looking up at Llucy, pretty clearly thinking to herself, “you are an awfully big sheep.  Will I be that tall when I grow up?”

Someone asked us the other day if there is a measurable difference in the sizes of Soay.  Catalina again assists with a demonstration.  She is the biggest lamb we have ever had, weighing in at a hefty seven and a half pounds right after birth.  Contrast that with Arivaca, the smaller lamb in this picture, who weighed only five and a half pounds after his first feeding.  Even Arivaca is large compared to our average lamb weight, which is comfortably under five pounds.  And besides that, Arivaca is four days older than Catalina.  With the steep growth curve these lambs experience in their first three or four weeks, the difference in size is even more pronounced.   

There is always a game of King-of-the-Mountain going on in the Maternity Ward. Who knows which of the little ruffians are in this picture, but they are mighty grateful to Steve for arranging a “safe” place for them to test their climbing skills.  Of course, part of the game is to fall off and scramble back up for more.

In the midst of all this folderol, long-suffering Llucy was trying her darnedest to help get Sandpiper’s second twin, Cascabel, back to his mama.   Sandpiper had done a spectacular job of getting the two lambs out and cleaned off, but then Cascabel simply wandered away.  In this picture, Sandpiper is quite a ways off to the right with her first lamb, Calabasas.

Appearances to the contrary, we do try for a modicum of scruffy gentility here at Saltmarsh Ranch, including in the Maternity Ward.  Nothing captures this goal better than watching Amado and Arivaca out for an afternoon promenade with their mom, Willow. 

Are you persuaded that decorum reigns on a Soay farm?  Don’t be.  Tranquility, like fame, is fleeting.  Within minutes of a peaceful walk, all of the lambs are likely to congregate and take off like Kentucky Derby contestants.  As Steve put it when he saw the next picture, you cannot remain grouchy in a lamb pen.  Involuntary belly laughs are the order of the day.  Here is the first lap at Saltmarsh Downs.

Not surprisingly, as fast as the little juvenile delinquents organize a game, they collapse for brief naps.  I’ll close this post with an endearing little lamb asleep under the hay feeder.

May your lambing be this much fun and then some.

For now …

Just when we thought we could relax and wait for lambing to begin, Steve came back to the house looking agitated and clearly worried. He discovered one of our pregnant ewes, Venus, in dire straits in the Maternity Ward. Here’s his report:

 ”When I first saw Venus out of the corner of my eye, I thought one of our ewes had lost her mind, standing on three legs, holding her back right leg straight behind her and shaking it furiously. Not until she paused momentarily did I see that her leg was broken between the hock and the dewclaw. When she shook her leg, her foot twirled around at a 180-degree angle, rather like a swivel club. This was not right. What to do.”

Once Steve was able to enclose Venus in the shelter, we quickly assessed whether we should try to save her, realizing the odds were not great of managing to keep her safely pregnant long enough to deliver, yet keenly aware of the likely expense of treatment. We will never know for sure what path we would have taken had she been an ordinary ewe, but Venus is carrying a genetically valuable lamb so we elected to try to save her.

These are hard questions, somewhat to our surprise. Soay are utterly endearing and we love having them, but when you start talking about x-rays and casts and more than 10 or 15 minutes of a vet’s time, the expense can swamp the value of the animal and then some. If we had only a few Soay, we might seek intensive vet care for every problem, but with over 100 sheep, we really have to be somewhat businesslike about prioritizing when and how much to spend on husbandry.

Off to the vet went Steve with Venus in a dog crate, the Soay shepherd’s one-animal “trailer.” An x-ray revealed a clean transverse break in the middle of her metatarsal bone. Back he came with Venus in a full-leg cast, complete with an artificial “hoof” made by daubing some quick-hardening epoxy-like stuff on the tip of the cast, complete with the two points characteristic of a real hoof. So far so good. But immediately upon landing back in the Maternity Ward, Venus began to flail again and banged the cast against anything she could find. Steve fashioned a small enclosure, about 4 x 5 feet, within the shelter using bales of straw. He gave her a bucket of water, some hay, and left her to heal. Here is the first recovery room.

 

As near as we can tell, Venus interpreted the pain in her leg, and perhaps the weight of the cast as well, as a predator attack. From the outset, she had tried to shake off what had “grabbed” her. Whatever her nightmares were, she managed to work the cast off overnight and we found her the next morning still in her little recovery room, but with her leg once again unset. The cast was intact but thrown off to the side of the enclosure. Either she had shaken it off, or wedged it somehow, giving her purchase, and pulled it off. It was back to the vet for another cast, this one under “warranty,” thank goodness. The vet sawed the cast in half, re-cemented it, applied it somewhat tighter than before, and sent her home with pain medication but no sedative since she is pregnant.

Steve’s nothing if not a quick learner, so as we drove to the vet the second time, he talked through a better confinement arrangement. Clearly it needed to be much smaller, about the size of the dog crate or even narrower if possible, to prevent Venus from having any room to swing her leg and kick off the cast again. The dog crate had two drawbacks, instability and the air vents on the sides, which could catch the artificial “hoof” points. But Steve remembered a piece of our Shaul panel system we use only occasionally, 2-foot wide contraptions called “alley supports” that form each end of a makeshift “lane” for moving animals between pens. Why not make the sheep world’s shortest lane?

And that’s exactly what he did. Using two 5-foot panels and the two alley supports, he got the enclosure down to about 2 x 5 feet. A single straw bale tipped on end brought the length down to just over three feet. A single scrap of 4 x 4 inch “horse” panel cut to size formed the “gate.” Three scraps of plywood covered the three sides of Shaul panels so there would be no slots where the cast could catch. Here’s what the new outpatient facility looks like.

All that remained was to get Venus out of the truck, out of the crate, and into the recovery room. The whole barnyard was concerned. Here’s Isaac, our Anatolian shepherd puppy, following the gurney (a.k.a. garden cart with dog crate – nice fit, eh?) into the Maternity Ward.

 

Here’s Venus with her cast. Woebegone, isn’t she?

Here’s Venus in her little stall.

And finally, here’s Llucy, ever the faithful guardian llama, checking on Venus to make sure her pillows have been fluffed and her bedpan, uh, make that water bucket, is in place.

 

It’s 48 hours later and the evening lamb check, which of course now includes Venus, confirmed that she made it through another day without kicking off the cast. We are hopeful. Stay tuned.

For now . . .

Allow me a brief detour from the Lamb Kit to introduce Llucy, our guard llama. Steve took this picture last lambing season. I was watching a new lamb cavorting when without warning Llucy snuck up behind me, I felt warm damp air on my neck, just barely heard a soft shwoosy sound, and I was nose to nose with my friend.

I like retelling the story of Llucy’s arrival at Saltmarsh Ranch. For me, it says a lot about how Soay and their guardians worm their way into our hearts.

We had just gotten our first four Soay when a broadcast e-mail arrived from another Soay breeder looking for someone to take a whole flock (almost 20 as I recall) from a couple who had to find a new home for their Soay quickly for health reasons. There was only one condition: the Soay’s guardian llama Llucy was part of the package deal.

What did we know from llamas? We were a couple of greenhorns newly arrived from “back east” in Chicago who thought shepherding consisted of little more than acquiring a few sheep, a pre-battered stonewashed cap from LL Bean, and a set of Pan pipes, with perhaps a shepherd’s crook thrown in for good measure. In short, we were ignorantly giddy at the thought of jump-starting our Soay operation and a llama sounded like a good bonus for a Christmas card picture. We volunteered to take the whole lot of them, including Llucy, with not even a passing glance at the llama literature to see what we were getting ourselves in for.

The sheep arrived late at night in a huge trailer unlike anything we had ever seen. I do not remember whether there was a full moon but let’s say there was for the sake of atmosphere. Backing the trailer down our narrow lane and nestling it up against the gate to the nearest pasture to prevent escapes was quite a trick, but nothing compared to the bravura performance that followed. The driver cautioned us Llucy must come out first or there would be general confusion and panic in the sheep. Fine with us. Llucy came out first. And then began the procession, the remarkable sight of Llucy the second grade teacher, standing on duty at the gangplank, wearing sensible shoes, with her clipboard, on a field trip with her students, checking each Soay off the list with her nose as it came down the ramp. She took roll, and we know to a moral certainty that there would have been hell to pay for the driver if even one of the sheep had turned up missing.

Whatever the disadvantages of having llamas, with or without sheep to guard — and we are told there are such drawbacks — for Steve and me there was no question about the rightness of having Llucy. Any animal so committed to her charges would be a welcome member of our Saltmarsh Ranch menagerie. And so she has remained, faithful to her Soay and utterly endearing to us. May you also have the good fortune to find just the right guardians for your flock!

For now …