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 …

No, I am not referring to your trusty Kohler or Toto.  Flushing is shepherd lingo for increasing a ewe’s nutrition in the weeks leading up to breeding in order to trick the ewe into releasing a larger number of eggs.  Most of the sheep literature we have read, and a number of Soay breeders we know, report higher multiple birth rates if flushing is part of the pre-breeding regime.  The concept is straightforward:  ewes ovulate more readily and release more eggs if their bodies sense that times are good, that food is plentiful, and so it seems a good opportunity to raise a larger litter.  As I understand it, commercial breeders use flushing routinely.  They must have a high ratio of multiple births to make sheep-raising financially viable.

 

Here is how it works from the shepherd’s standpoint.  Two weeks before you put your breeding groups together, start feeding your breeding ewes a little something extra along with their normal diet of grass or hay.  We use a product called “ewe/lamb ration” from our favorite feed store.  It is 14 % crude protein.  COB (corn, oats, barley) or other pelleted feed with 9 % crude protein is another alternative.  If you don’t mind the hassle of soaking beet pulp pellets (also 9% crude protein) every day, you can use that as well.

 

The goal is a gradual and modest increase in the ewes’ “nutritional plane” — to boost them slightly from where they start.  If they are already fat, flushing probably will not help and it might be counterproductive, because really fat ewes are reported to have lower fertility rates.  But if your ewes, like ours, are starting to complain about the quality of the late-summer grass in your fields, or you are down to the last few sorry bales of last year’s hay, the increased nutrition should have the desired effect. 

 

We start with 2 ounces per ewe per day and gradually increase that amount to 4 ounces by the end of the first week.  You do not want to change your ewes’ diet abruptly for at least two reasons:  their rumens need to adjust to the change in composition of the material to be digested, and apparently if the new stuff passes unprocessed into the intestines, the ewe is at risk for scours.  In other words, ramp up rather than change abruptly.   

How do these numbers play out?  Here are a few examples:

# ewes     Days 1&2      3&4              5&6            7                   8-14

1                      2 oz       2.5 oz           3 oz             3.5 oz            4 oz

4                      8 oz       10 oz            12 oz           14 oz             1 lb 

8                      1 lb        1 lb 4 oz       1 lb 8 oz      1 lb 12 oz       2 lb   

Stay at the increased level for a second week (days 8-14), then put your your ram(s) with your ewe(s) for breeding.  On the day you begin breeding, start tapering off the goodies gradually until you quit supplementing them at all after two more weeks.  In other words, four weeks total of supplementation, gradually up, gradually down. 

 

For the same reasons flushing is designed to increase the number of ova released, it also encourages the ewes to start ovulating a little sooner, which may put them in sync, and that in turn may concentrate your lambing so it does not drag on for weeks.

 

Most books recommend a second trick to get your ewes ready for action, i.e., getting them to cycle well.  If your pasture situation and prevailing winds allow it, place your ewes near or at least downwind from the rams.  The smell of the rams (and believe me, they smell at this time of year) helps trigger cycling, as does the shortening of the days.  If you can put your ewes in a location adjacent to your rams – a stout fence and a view block separating them – all the better.  That way, the rams also can smell the ewes and get charged up.  But – and this is crucial, you must have sturdy fence and you really should use view blocks.

 

Will you agree with me that these pictures of some of our 2008 twins provide yet another reason to flush your ewes — the sheer pleasure of looking at the little ones together?

 

If you flush your ewes, you’d best get your lamb kit ready because before you know it, lambs will begin arriving two by two to entertain you. 

For now …