priscilla

Welcome to The Chronicles. I hope you will enjoy my posts about the joys of raising the oldest breed of sheep in the world -- the always intriguing, easy-to-raise Soay sheep. With few exceptions, posts contain what I hope is useful information interspersed with a bit of whimsy. Feel free to comment on anything you find here. If you want to send me a private message, that's okay, too. Send your note to the address on the "contact us" page of our main website (***saltmarshranch-dot-com). Meanwhile, enjoy The Soay Sheep Chronicles! Priscilla

Author's Website

What’s it all about, Alfie? Remembering our gentle giant

What’s it all about, Alfie? Remembering our gentle giant

We were minding our own business in May 2012 when the breeder of our LGDs called, asking us to buy a six-week old male puppy who had tested as bold, fearless, stubborn and unusually assertive. The breeder thought the puppy needed experienced Anatolian owners to manage his outsized personality in what would become his outsized […]

Read More →

Read More →

How often do Soay ewes produce twins?  Some thoughts and some data

How often do Soay ewes produce twins? Some thoughts and some data

For those of you interested in twinning rates, we have some data, but first a couple of comments and several caveats. We do not have any way to analyze the effect of nutrition on whether a ewe has twins. The commercial breeders use a system called “flushing” to get their ewes to twin. It involves […]

Read More →

Read More →

Sheet music now available for “The Lost Songs of St. Kilda” and more

Sheet music now available for “The Lost Songs of St. Kilda” and more

Good news for fans of the music on this wonderful CD based on traditional melodies from the ancestral homeland of Soay sheep. I have transcribed Trevor Morrison’s arrangements as well as a newly discovered ninth song. Here’s how you can purchase the sheet music, Memories of St. Kilda, and play the evocative melodies yourself: If […]

Read More →

Read More →

The Soay lamb gender lottery revisited

The Soay lamb gender lottery revisited

It’s been five years since I agonized over, and then wrote about, the nail-biting wait each spring to see whether our pregnant ewes offer up an acceptable percentage of ewe lambs. By now even the charts in the old post are unreadable, for which I apologize. Rather than trying to figure out how the 2020 […]

Read More →

Read More →

Update on pasture food preferences of Soay sheep

Update on pasture food preferences of Soay sheep

Much has been written about the grasses and other edibles Soay sheep lived on during their thousands of years on the tiny islands of the St. Kilda archipelago and how that compares to their relatively posh existence these days on the grass pastures here in North America. There also are plenty of articles about what […]

Read More →

Read More →

How to safely unload your new Soay sheep into their pasture

How to safely unload your new Soay sheep into their pasture

Believe it or not, one of the most common roadblocks to a new Soay owner getting off to a good start is the inability to get the new flock safely off the transport truck and into the pasture. Last weekend we encountered the closest thing to a perfect setup we have ever encountered when delivering […]

Read More →

Read More →

Top