The Soay Sheep Chronicles

The first in a three-part series

Part II: more new colors in our 2009 AI lambs, posted March 12, 2011

Part III: more new colors in our 2010 lambs, posted March 14, 2011

In the last three years, the color palette of British Soay sheep in the United States and Canada has expanded dramatically.  Looking back, it is apparent that much of the variety of color and pattern seen in the ancestral Soay of St. Kilda was not represented in the six Soay sheep that emigrated to Quebec in 1990.  It was not until artificial insemination (AI) began in 2008 on our farm and on Kathie Miller’s farm that at least some of these “missing” genes came to be represented in the full Soay sheep in North America.

Genetic diversity in action: our 2010 British Soay lambs

The growing range and nuance in fleece color mark an intriguing new chapter in the life story of these sheep.  There is no better way to “talk” about the new colors than through pictures.  But first … a bit of historical and genetic context.

From 1990, when the first Soay lambs (Nougat and Carob) were born on George Berci’s farm near Montreal, until 2008, all the descendants of the original six founders looked pretty much alike:  brown fleece, white belly, sometimes a triangular white eye marking, sometimes darker legs, and occasionally a tan or white-spotted animal.  This homogeneity is not surprising, since five of the six founders– Maple, Butternut, Lily, Walnut, and Augustus — derived from a single flock in England and were substantially interrelated. Within that flock, where cousins bred to cousins, nieces to uncles, and so forth, there developed strong family resemblances, as illustrated by this early picture of the Berci flock, including some of the founders:

Berci flock in early 1990s

Without the introduction of any additional genetic input for about two decades, this homogeneous look would persist as descendants of the original flock expanded in number and spread geographically across the U.S. and back into Canada.  There were no self-colored animals, either black (dark phase) or chocolate (light phase).  Shades of gray seldom if ever appeared.

All of that changed when Gaerllwyd Norris and Gaerllwyd Mustard rode into town in little plastic tubes.

Portable Mustard (top) & Norris (lower)

The tubes contained semen donated by Christine Williams in Wales.  The relevant parts of the donor rams’ job resumes are as follows:

Mustard, whose RBST registration number S10149 can be seen on the right-hand end of the upper set of straws, is a light phase ram of the “wild” or “mouflon” pattern (white or light tan belly and eye markings, light eyelid rims, light lips).  His pedigree tells us that he carries the gene for self-coloration.  Depending on who the mothers are, Mustard can sire brown, tan, chocolate, or black lambs — either in person or long-distance.

Norris, RBST number S10979 on his straws, is a brown-fleeced wild pattern ram.  But we know from his pedigree that he carries the gene for light phase and may also carry the gene for self-coloration, so he also can sire both light and dark phase lambs, and possibly self-colored ones as well.  The genetic potential of Mustard and Norris is no accident; they were selected by Christine and Kathie for the AI project with diversity foremost in mind.

March 28, 2008, our first day of AI lambing, began with the arrival of plain brown mouflon triplets (Norris x Galice), all three in under ten minutes.  We were speechless but elated.  The AI project had worked!  In fairly quick succession we welcomed a pair of twins, light phase as expected since both parents (Mustard x Gala) are light phase, and then the color fun started in earnest.  Josephine, inseminated by Norris, dropped a black ewe, Vieva, the likes of which we had never seen.  Although Vieva looked black when she came out (sopping wet lambs often look darker until their moms get them cleaned off), on close examination we saw that she was not quite the same jet black common in many mammals (Icelandic sheep, border collies, many other mammalian species).  Instead, from the start she was more of a uniform very dark charcoal color, with her belly gradually lightening and lighter hairs appearing around her back end.  But no way was Vieva the typical mouflon pattern.  Here she is at birth and as she grew:

Vieva, age 1 day, Norris daughter

Vieva, age 7 weeks

Vieva, age 2 years, with sunbleached fleece

Another one of our first crop of AI lambs — Curtis out of Norris x Louisiana — also displayed the new uniform charcoal color and pattern, but not so dramatically as Vieva. As he matured, Curtis developed more eye margin contrast, and an impish white spot around his mouth, not reverting entirely to the more traditional British coloration, but not fully self-colored black, either.  Look at the contrast between Curtis and his plain brown twin Melvin, and then the contrast between Emmett, whose coloring could not be more typical, and his pasture buddy Curtis:

Melvin & Curtis (r), age 12 days, Norris sons

Curtis, age 2

Emmett (Mustard son) & Curtis (Norris son), age 1 yr

Nice pictures, but what does all this mean and why does it matter?

The increased variety of colors and patterns in our British Soay is a visual treat and always intriguing to my resident geneticist.  Even more important is the message this additional phenotypic variability sends about the significance of the AI project.  The new colors and patterns are just the tip of the genetic iceberg.  They are the only part of the infusion of new genetics we can see, but Mustard and Norris have introduced a great many other new genes.  We probably will never know the full extent or identity of all this new genetic material, or precisely what roles each new gene plays in the health and vigor of our flock. What we do know is that the enhanced genetic diversity resulting from the addition of Mustard and Norris to the list of founders increases the extent to which the North American flock reflects the sheep of St. Kilda.  It also re-affirms the need to support efforts to preserve and conserve this genetic heritage through careful conservation breeding.

As you can imagine, we finished our 2008 lambing season in a state of high excitement.  Little did we appreciate what lay ahead.  The second round of AI lambs in 2009 brought more surprises and even more color variety.  I’ll brag on that batch of lambs in my next post.

For now …

Answer?  Yes.

End of post?  Not quite.

In the world of pedigrees and registrations, identification is everything.  Paperwork listing a Soay sheep’s name and parentage is a great start and required for registration, but in the final analysis, ear tags (or tatoos or imbedded chips) are the only way to positively identify an animal, by linking its tag number to its paperwork.  If an owner has only one or two sheep, or only raises Soay for meat, ear tags are less important and many people would say unnecessary.  But the value of a Soay sheep to be registered or sold as breeding stock comes largely from its authenticity — is it really a Soay sheep? — and pedigree.  Without some form of positive identification, that value pretty much goes out the window.  Using tags even with a very small flock is good practice so the procedures are routine as the flock grows.

Here are a few hypothetical examples of why we believe ear tags are an essential component of accurate and ethical breeding and sales.

Mary’s mix-up. Mary buys four Soay adult ewes from Jim.   Three of them are brown with nice horns; the fourth is scurred with a white spot on the top of her head.   The paperwork consists of a bill of sale listing the four ewes’ names, birth dates, and parents.  The ewes do not have ear tags.  Although Mary has no prior experience with sheep or with fleece colors, she’s confident she will be able to tell her ewes apart after she leaves Jim’s farm.  Within a couple of weeks, she gets swamped at work and asks her teenage kids to do chores for her.  About a month later when her work schedule eases, she heads back out to check on the ewes.  To her dismay, the three brown ones look just alike and worse yet, she cannot remember which one had the white spot on her head.  Oh yes, and Jim has been transferred overseas and doesn’t do email, so even if he could describe enough distinctive traits to help her figure out who’s who, he is unavailable.

Tim’s lost tape. Tim is excited when his first three Soay ewes present him with two singles and a pair of twins, all rams (well okay, he is disappointed about no ewes, but it’s just an example), all brown.  For the first three or four weeks, the lambs stick close to their own mothers and since Tim has spent a lot of time walking amongst his ewes, he is confident about which lamb is which.  Then the lambs become less dependent on their moms and wander off during the day to explore the pastures.  Still no problem, they come back to nurse when their moms call.  Tim weans the lambs at about 12 weeks, but he has decided not to bother with baby ear tags and he has not had time to figure out how the scrapie identification program works.  No problem; he simply tapes his ram lambs’ horns in different colors until he has time to get adult scrapie tags.  The ram lambs look quite smart and rakish in their tape, and after a day of bawling for their  mothers, they settle in to enjoy the freedom to munch around in the pastures without having to come home to mother for supper. All goes as planned and in fact, the weaned ram lambs get along so well that Tim doesn’t have to do much with them for a few weeks other than be sure they have enough water and their mineral feeder is full.  But Tim’s heart sank when he came out one Saturday morning and found that the ram lambs had figured out make-believe headbutting and the color-coded tape for three of the boys was strewn about the pasture.  One ram could still be identified from the list of ewes and the color of tape on his horn.  The other three were no longer identifiable.

Jill’s juggling act. Jill prides herself on the uniform look of her flock.  For several years she has bred her American Soay for polling and for light brown fleece.  She chooses to let her ewes lamb in the field, more like what took place on St. Kilda for generations.  She  read online that all she needs is a pair of binoculars (boy, do I wish I had been the first one to think of that line!).  Although she elected not to disturb the natural scene in the field by going out and putting baby ear tags in each lamb’s ear, she is not worried about a lamb mix-up because the mothers have ID tags in their left ears.  These assumptions and adages are usually true, and lambing generally works out this way.  But then one morning Jill put down her binoculars and went out to have a closer look — she heard more than the normal amount of animal noise overnight.  To her consternation, two ewes (either in the field or perhaps they came into the barn for shelter) were spooked by something and caught their ears in a fence or on a door or a latch or a mineral feeder and their ear tags tore off.  Not only can Jill no longer tell the ewes apart, but now their lambs are also without identification.

None of these three examples matches precisely the circumstances we’ve heard about, but each is close enough for discomfort.  Far too often we have commiserated with buyers who realized too late that the paperwork they were given does not match the tags on their new Soay sheep and perhaps does not match the animal’s physical appearance (color, spotting), or worse yet, the sheep have no tags at all or have lost them.  Sellers are almost always available and cooperative to resolve the confusion in these cases, but sad to say it occasionally happens that a seller is not willing to help the buyer once the sheep have left the seller’s farm, or the seller simply disappears when his or her flock has been sold to unsuspecting buyers.

Stuff happens.  Those of us who breed British Soay need to be able to report accurately on the identity and parentage of our lambs in order to participate fairly in the RBST registration process.  All of us who sell Soay sheep — British or American — need to be able to look our buyers in the eye and tell them with confidence which animal is which.  Ear tags, and especially the use of both baby and adult tags, provide such assurance.  If the adult tag is lost, for example (and the official scrapie tags do break apart on occasion), the remaining baby tag provides a road map so the adult tag can be replaced.

One way to get tags for your adult Soay sheep is to participate in one of the US (or Canadian) scrapie programs.  The USDA provides free adult ear tags, and participating in either government’s program will allow you and your buyers to legitimately ship interstate.  The USDA tags come with your farm’s premises ID number  — an abbreviation for your state followed by a 3- or 4-digit number (ours is OR119).  A second number located on the other side of the tag is the unique number for each sheep (001, 002, 003, and so forth).

Here’s our ewe Wendron with her scrapie tag — OR119 057.

OR119-057 Saltmarsh Wendron

And here’s a closeup of her tag, to give you an idea of how the numbering is placed on this round scrapie tag:

Closeup of Wendron's USDA scrapie tag

Sheep sold to Canadian buyers must have USDA tags.  Veterinarians signing interstate transportation papers need to list the animals by name and identification number, and we cannot imagine an interstate transporter accepting sheep without ear tags or tatoos.  The last thing you want to have happen is to get part way home with your new Soay sheep and be turned back at the border of your home state because you lack proper documentation for your new animals.

If for some reason you choose not to participate in either the “voluntary” or “mandatory” scrapie program, you can get adult-size tags from your local feed store and put your own tag numbers on with the marking pen that should come with the tags.  Any kind of numbered tag is better than none!

Using adult tags solves most identity problems, unless one of two things happens:  lambs get mixed up before their ears are big enough to hold the heavier adult tags, or the adult animal loses its tag.  Between the number of instances in which our own sheep lost their adult ear tags, and the experiences we know about from other owners, we became convinced early on to use baby ear tags and also to leave them in the lambs’ ears even after they get their permanent adult tags at about 12 weeks.  The baby ear tags are a failsafe measure, to be sure we know which lamb is which so we can register them.  Using the little tags protects us from the awkward situation of realizing we can no longer identify a poor little sheep whose identification has gone astray.

Lamb tags small enough for Soay sheep are not commonly sold in the U.S., but fortunately there is at least one good source that is easy to find and use.  I’ll talk about it in my next post.

For now …