Joys & Sorrows

why raise Soay sheep, fun stuff, occasional sad stuff

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 →

A good herding dog is a shepherd’s joy: Molly remembered

A good herding dog is a shepherd’s joy: Molly remembered

This is only my second eulogy in over a decade of blogging, thank goodness. Several years ago I wrote about my country veterinarian father. Doc Peterson was scary smart, hard-working, loyal, committed to safeguarding the livestock under his care, and definitely not the urban sort. Our first and only border collie, Molly, could be described […]

Read More →

Read More →

Livestock Guardian Dogs For Your Flock: A Pictorial Primer

Livestock Guardian Dogs For Your Flock: A Pictorial Primer

I leave my Soay flock to their own devices today in order to talk about an essential part of any heritage sheep operation – predator control. For today’s essay, livestock guardian dogs, or LGDs. In the last 14 years, we have acquired nine LGDs: two mixed Maremma/Anatolian/Great Pyrenees and then a wonderful succession of seven […]

Read More →

Read More →

Vespers on a Soay sheep farm: sweet music to our ears

Vespers on a Soay sheep farm: sweet music to our ears

Our indispensable livestock guardian dogs are an endless source of delight and amazement, and never more so than in the late afternoon when they provide a brief recital that echoes across our Little Applegate River Valley. It is so lovely and so sweet we have dubbed it “Vespers.” Let me explain. We have six Anatolian […]

Read More →

Read More →

Lamb Camp Day 1: Campers arrive and so do their first lambs

Lamb Camp Day 1: Campers arrive and so do their first lambs

Our friend Ida had so much fun visiting us during lambing in 2013 that she applied to return this year. In my last post, I tried to set the stage for Lamb Camp 2015 by sharing the backstory of Ida’s first visit. By the time Ida and daughter Whitney and niece Audrey arrived on April […]

Read More →

Read More →

Soay lamb gender split, 2015 edition

Soay lamb gender split, 2015 edition

Regular readers will remember that I went through lambing last year in self-absorbed agony, tracking the percentage of ewe versus ram lambs on a daily basis, reporting weekly here, and generally fussing over something entirely out of my control. Talk about unproductive fretting! Did I learn my lesson? Nope. But this year the results started […]

Read More →

Read More →

Top