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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Loyal readers may recall an earlier time in my life as a Soay shepherd when I went through a frenzy of making feed bags for our four livestock guardian dogs and for Steve to hand out occasional treats to the ewes and lambs. Believe it or not, one of the bags already wore a hole […]
It’s Soay toy time at Saltmarsh Ranch. I just got a little bitty video camera and tried it out for the first time in the Maternity Ward. I thought it would be fun to show off our pregnant ewes who are about to have their first lambs (at least that’s the plan). These ewes were […]