The Soay Sheep Chronicles

There’s no need to mark your calendar to remind yourself that it’s breeding season for your Soay sheep – the rams will let you know by their appearance and their behavior.  As usual, a few pictures tell the story best.

Eight days ago we taped the horns of rams going to new homes this fall, including four adult rams headed for farms in the midwest. At the time, I thought Steve was being a bit fussy by insisting we tape both horns.   Belts and suspenders, he called it, just in case one horn’s tape came off.  Sure enough, he was right.  Here are the four rams waiting in the loading lane for Ron Keener to show up.  As you can see, after just a week of bashing each other for primacy in the bull pen, the only tape left is on the back sides of their horns, and most of that tape is coming loose as well. Talk about battering rams!

Soay rams in rut make short work of horn tape

Looking at these fellows, the two white/blue taped rams bound for Missouri and the two white/yellow taped rams headed for South Dakota, I also was reminded of how much the rams’ appearance changes during rut. The horns firm up at the base where they are attached to the head, giving the ram more strength to bash his pasture mates for primacy. The rams’ operative breeding parts increase substantially in size – I won’t show that picture here just now. But one sign of rut is easy to show in pictures.  Many rams grow a larger and longer mane, presumably to make them more attractive to the ewes, and their necks thicken up, also for strength to duke it out with the other rams. Here is a picture of our 2008 ram Beckfoot taken just two months ago on July 13th. He has a little beard, but I wouldn’t call it a full mane, would you?

Beckfoot at ease in July, pre-rut

Now look at this picture taken on September 16th. Although the light was different each day, the differences in Beckfoot’s mane and the thickness of his neck are easy to spot.

Beckfoot in rut: thick mane, thick neck

Is this fellow ready to breed? He’s headed up to Washington next week where we know he will find good-looking Soay ewes to keep him busy.

And just in case you think I was making it up about the rams bashing off each other’s horn tape, look at how pristine Beckfoot’s yellow and blue tape was just a week ago. Whew!

For now …

When you raise small livestock as appealing and mellow as Soay sheep, you tend to forget that even smaller animals live right alongside them.  The other day I was rummaging through our electronic photo “scrapbooks” looking for pictures of one of our rams who is going to a new home in the next few weeks when what should jump off the page but this:

Catching a ride on a Soay ram's horn

At the time I took this picture last September, I completely missed the butterfly. No clue what kind it is. Because I was concentrating on the ram and didn’t even notice his pasture companion, I did not get a nicely focused shot of the little aviator. Here’s the best I can do:

The hitchhiker

Note to anyone concerned about whether Soay sheep are more “skittish” or flighty than commercial sheep.  Any animal, especially a ram, that will stand still this close for its picture and not even disturb its passenger is calm enough for me!

As small as the butterfly is, it is not the smallest creature I’ve seen sharing space with our small sheep. About the same time last fall that I unknowingly took the butterfly’s picture, I got a call one day from Shawn, who was moving a water tank down in the rams’ pasture.  He announced that the tank had morphed into an aquatic maternity ward.  As loyal readers will recall, we already have a dandy maternity ward for our ewes, complete with jugs and a nursery where the youngest lambs can start socializing in a protected setting, but I don’t think even our spacious birthing quarters could have contained this little guy:

Big hand, wee frog

Just in case you think that’s a piece of bark next to Shawn’s callouses,

rrrrrrrbbbbbttt!

Perhaps this fellow, when he grew up, was one of the Three [Dozen] Tenors who serenaded us all spring as they courted the lady frogs in the area. Makes me kind of wistful for their younger days, when they were content to sit on Shawn’s hand and watch the sheep munching away.

Happy summer!

For now …