Is it just me, or was everybody pulling faces at me this morning?

Peregrine

Orion

Emu (tongue out), with Demi and Swallow (minding their own business)

Swift turns around from the salt lick to give me a moue of disapproval.

Lyra, one of our nearly-year-old Border Leicester ewes, is one of my favorite sheep.

However, she hasn’t always been.

She came to the farm last April with her brother Orion and Ursa Minor, a black Angora doeling, as bottle babies. Because the three of them were two months stronger and bigger than the Cormo lambs who we were also bottle feeding, they bullied them a bit– pushing them away from the bottles, stomping on my feet with their razor-sharp hooves, and generally acting like pushy older siblings.

I used to think of them, at their 4-times-daily feedings, as little woolly sharks. I’d sneak up into the run-in by the barn so that I could feed the weaker Cormo lambs undetected (and unmolested) by the Border Leicester lambs. Once the little lambs had had their bottles, then I’d walk out into the pasture, in view of the Border Leicesters, who were grazing. At first sight of me, they’d baa their heads off and gallop over for a meal.

It was very gratifying.

Once weaned, and with the addition of 3 more Border Leicester ewes to the Colored Flock, she settled in perfectly well.

Despite her black fleece, she never suffered unduly from the heat– although her fleece was bleached to quite a light brown at the tips!

We were so shocked to see how dark the colored flock actually was once we sheared them all, this past October:

Our friend Anna, having gone to shearing school this past spring, sheared Lyra all by herself. I’m excited to say that I get to go to shearing school this coming March! I can’t wait!

We decided to breed Lyra this fall, along with the rest of the Colored Flock (see the green mark on her back end?). They thrived so wonderfully well this past year that we have lots of faith in their ability to mother healthy offspring without suffering too much strain. Not only will their lambs, being Cormo x Border Leicester crosses, benefit from hybrid vigor, but, as I understand it, the genetics of colored fleeces works in such a way that we’re in for some surprise-colored lambs this spring.

Will they be dark, like their mothers, or white, like their father? Just one more thing to be excited about!

Wren

Brooks

Lyra

Finch

Carina

Milkshakes and Mrs. Doubtfire, with Braeburn, Adelaide, & Sophie. They’re probably plotting a followup adventure to their escape into the woods yesterday.

It was misty, foggy, rainy, and even a little bit icy this morning. Although the weather had me thinking that coffee, a warm fire, and tasty breakfast were all that was in order, I decided to go out and pay the boys (and Feenat) a little extra visit. Despite the depressing weather the boys could have not been more excited to see me show up with some extra treats.

Obviously you can tell that they must have been sleeping in the yurt (a good option this time of year).

Even Big E broke into a full on run to come see what was going on.

Feenat and Callum were happily racing along.

Callum pulled ahead at the last second.

Feenat didn’t mind coming in second because she still got her fair share of tasty treats.

Callum looks so much like his mother in his face.

Meanwhile Emu decided he needed a little extra attention

What a little smirk.

Showing off his moves.

Alabama and Cosmo were more than happy to stand back and wait for treats to be brought to them

During my entire time outside, Jerry decided to stay about this close to my face, and sneak up to try and grab a couple extra treats while I was not looking. After a high energy time with the boys, I am inspired to try and shake off this lousy weather and have a happy and productive day.

 This post is devoted to Kestrel, the Inscrutable Lamb.

Kestrel and Emu

In shepherding, there is the concept of the moneymaker: the sheep who doesn’t need you, with whom you barely interact, who costs you no extra time, resources, or heartache. This sheep is so solidly dependable, so doggedly healthy, so constant, that you forget he’s there. He’s the polar opposite of the undersized underdog, the charming little lamb who, bottle fed, fights off one ailment after another, and, in so doing, wins your heart. There is no sweet anecdote about the moneymaker– no story about our relationship to one another, no one little quirky behavior, no dramatic and eventful birth.

Despite seeing him at least twice a day for every day of his entire life, I still don’t have something nice and pat and engaging to say about Kestrel. Since the entire point of this Sheep of the Week series– heck, the entire point of the whole farm– is to help our readers and shareholders have as close a relationship as possible to our sheep, there isn’t much to recommend such an inscrutable lamb.

Baby Kestrel with Mama Liberty

I bring this up to illustrate two points: A) With an eye solely towards wool production, a big, healthy wether is spot-on perfect– Kestrel has a larger body, which means more fleece, and doesn’t have to put any energy towards reproduction, which means a more consistently nice fleece. So, although there may not always be a darling story for Sheep of the Week with lots of cute lamby photos to illustrate it, a sheep like Kestrel is pulling more than his weight, wool-wise, on this farm. He acts how a sheep is supposed to act. He is what a sheep is supposed to be.

The other point is: B) Sometimes a sheep is unknowable, and that’s okay. You don’t have to have a relationship with, or a story about, every single one. We spend hours out in the pasture, trying to get to know and understand them. Then we come inside, and try to share with others what we’ve observed. In the end, though, a sheep can resist all attempts at anthropomorphisation, maintain his privacy and circumspection, and remain an entirely mysterious domestic creature. I love him all the more for it.

I didn’t think such a big ‘ole bruiser of a lamb would be teaching me a lesson in simplicity and acceptance, but, so he has, and this is it:

A sheep is not always going to be your friend– a sheep is simply itself, which is itself a hard thing to know.

And that’s this week’s Sheep of the Week.

NEXT WEEK on SotW, (of course, now that I’ve somberly undermined the whole premise of “get to know a sheep!”): Who’d you like to hear more about? I remember someone asking about Miss Martha, and someone else asking who would win “most hilarious”– do you all have any other requests?

BAAAAA! Good Morning!

Today, you’re getting two for the price of one!

Say hello to the glamorous and beautiful Willoughby and Bennett!

These ladies are two of the most unusual sheep on the farm. They, along with their half-brother Alabama, are Southdown / Cormo crosses. Their mama, Daisy, was a Babydoll Southdown and one of Susan’s very first sheep. Their father, Aldo, was fine Cormo ram and a transient romancer, just passing through for the few months of breeding season.

This is what you’re thinking, and it sounds like the beginning of a bad joke: What do you get when you cross a Southdown and a Cormo?

Answer: We’re callin’ ‘em MO-DOWNS.

You can tell from their looks that they’re different from the Cormo lambs. Their noses are stubbier, plus, brown. Their bodies are thicker, and more compact. They even– you can tell this the most in the picture above– look different from each other. They’re also constitutionally sturdier– blessed with heaping doses of hybrid vigor.

The story of our girls begins with Alabama, Daisy’s first lamb, who’s a fantastic guy with a fantastic fleece. He’s so wonderful, in fact, that we wanted to continue the Mo-Down experiment.

So, in the spring of 2010, Willoughby and Bennett were born, as is often the case with younger siblings.

Basically, the idea behind the Mo-Downs is this:

The fleece on the Southdowns is characterized by its density and springiness, while the fleece on the Cormos is characterized by its fineness. The Mo-Downs, then, will ideally have a lot of very fine and springy fleece.

So far, we just have Alabama, Willoughby, and Bennett, who don’t have fleeces as fine as the Cormos. So when we shear in the spring, we set their fleeces aside for our own handspinning fun Very Important Research.

However, as of this writing, both of our girls are back in the breeding pasture with Solomon. Their offspring will be 1/4 Southdown and 3/4 Cormo, and (we hope) will have fleeces both finer and denser than their parents’. I know I’m looking forward to at least two Mo-Mo-Down lambs this spring.

The other thing about these girls is that– as our shepherding campers learned last week– they’re wild. This is for a couple of reasons.

First of all, like their mom, they’re easy keepers– they easily put on weight (ie, strength)– and money makers– they’re the sheep you never get to know or touch, because they never ever have a problem.

Also, they’re yearlings. They’re Single Ladies, lambs at heart, and therefore pretty skittish. Most non-bottle-baby yearlings don’t start to like humans until after they’ve lambed for the first time. I think motherhood calms them down.

For now, though, they’re really just as happy to not have anything to do with us. After all, they are pretty special ladies.

 We woke up this morning to a beautiful sight.

Solomon, our rental ram, is wearing a marking harness harness so that we’ll know when he, um, gets the job done with the ladies.

Seeing a couple of green backsides is a relief, because it means that breeding season has officially begun.

Our Cormo yearlings will be lambing for the first time in the Spring, along with the colored this-year’s-lambs.

Meanwhile, in the other pasture, Ernie still hasn’t gotten the memo that he doesn’t have what it takes to breed the ladies. He’s in the pasture with all the gals we aren’t breeding this year and it’s like watching the Benny Hill Show over there.

Poor guy. He’s like the old Grandpa wearing a toupee, trying to pick up college girls at a nightclub.

But don’t tell him. It’s nice to see him happy.

If I told you what all I did this weekend, you wouldn’t believe me.

Just for an idea of the is-this-real-life flavor of the past few days, though, I’ll tell you that, yesterday, Amy and I drove up to Manassas, met Solomon, and walked him up a luggage ramp into the back of her Suburban. Instead of standing in a Goat Tote in the back of a pickup, or rattling around in a horse trailer, Solomon rode in utter style: a plywood ‘stall’, hay, water, and air conditioning.

Solomon’s just here for a month or two. He’s the talent. He’s got a job to do here. He’s our RAM.

He came with a pedigree that traces him back to one of the first Cormos imported to the US from Tasmania, the lab results from getting his fleece tested (avg = 21.6 microns), and a letter certifying as to his Cormo-ness (seriously!).

All the lambs who’ll be born this spring– just in time for Shepherding Camp 102– will be his children. We haven’t put any of our ewes in with him yet, because we want him to get used to the farm, but also because we want the ladies to be as ready for him as possible (this is also the idea behind a teaser ram). Our Shepherding Camp 101 students– Who arrive tomorrow! Hi, guys!– will be helping us get the girls we want to breed into the breeding pasture.

I tried to take pictures in the dusk last night as Amy and Zac led him into the boys’ pasture, and you can see how interested all the ewes are in him. They immediately started hanging out along the fence, mooning.

He’s wearing a raddling harness, also called a breeding harness, or a marking harness, that holds a green crayon at the center of his chest, between his front legs. It’ll leave a mark on any animal he tries to breed, so, soon, we’ll be able to go out in the mornings and say, “You got bred, and you got bred, and you got bred!”

There’s a lot of interest.

He’s also wearing a jacket, to keep hay out of his fleece. Here’s a peek at what it looks like underneath:

LUSCIOUS.

We are so happy to have him here. Everyone, say hi to our rented ram Solomon, and his not-quite 700 wives and 300 concubines!

NEXT WEEK on SotW: Who would you like to hear more about? Let me know!

I thought you all would like to meet Catalina. She’s very amiable and sweet, an attentive mama, and an all-around lovely ewe with a good sense of humor. Definitely one of my favorites.

She came to Juniper Moon Farm in the winter of 2009, together with a bunch of other ewes, all of whom were named after islands. Since she was from California, she was named after the island right outside L.A.

If you’ve read the blog for a long time, you probably know her best as the mother of Rushworth (aka Tiny Lamb), who was born during the lambing season before last (spring 2010), but only lived for a little while.

However, this year, her baby is Finch– this photo of them is from the noisy week we weaned the lambs. I’m happy to report that he’s doing just fine. I’m also happy to report– in the interest of telling you all about Catalina, of course– that during the delivery, Susan had her whole arm up inside Catalina (that is what it means to love your flock!).

The one thing she absolutely cannot stand is the heat, since she’s one of our bigger girls. This past summer, she was constantly on our watch list for heat exhaustion, so Zac and I got to spend a lot of quality time getting to know her (that is to say, “putting icepacks under her armpits.” She was nice about it, though.). On one of the worst days, the lanolin on her head actually melted out of her fleece and pooled above her eyebrow (the melting point of lanolin, wikipedia tells us, is 100F). When it dried, it dried black– and so Catalina spent the rest of the summer looking like she’d spent the night previous at Sheep Fight Club.

And the last thing about Catalina is that she’s really easily identifiable. When her fleece is long, like it was when I met her, she has a wide, thick shock of bangs that covers the front of her face (for a long time, I thought of her as “the one with bangs”). When it’s less close to spring shearing, though, you can still pick her out pretty well, thanks to her big yellow frisbee of an eartag (she came that way).So, when you all come out to our shearing party this coming Saturday, you’ll be able to pick her out from the crowd and say hello!

NEXT WEEK on SotW: Meet Piper!

Feenat’s our sheep of the week! We love her!

The story of how she came to live on the farm is a fantastic one, and it says a lot about her. Erin tells it best:

“Feenat was a triplet lamb born in the spring of 2009 on the farm of our friend Glenn Jackson on Martha’s Vineyard. Her dam rejected her, and Glenn’s is the kind of farm where everyone has to fend for themselves – no bottle babies! She started eating hay at only a few days old. Glenn brought her to his stall at the MV Agricultural Fair that August, and ended up giving her to Susie (You’ll have to ask her how that happened, I was at the NY farm at the time. I think it was something along the lines of “Glenn, I can’t believe you’re going to eat that adorable little lamb. She’s too small to even be worth butchering!” Glenn raises animals to feed his family.)”

So the little lamb came home to be Erin’s. She named her Feenat (rhymes with Peanut), which, fittingly, means “woodland creature,” or “deer” in Irish. She was the tiniest little sheep– “a bowling ball with legs,” Susan always says– both because she was born teeny, but also because she’d never ever had milk.

Coming in to the flock as a motherless lamb is probably about as awful as moving to a new high school as a freshman, in the middle of the school year– you don’t know anyone else, or look like anyone else, or know the daily routine, and no one tells you what to do or where to go. You just have to figure it out. Just like the Border Leicester lambs had a hard time fitting in in the beginning, Feenat also kept to herself at first. She fits in great, now, but she’s maintained her independence– although that may be because of her breed (Icelandics are very smart and independent).

The thing is, she’s not a purebred Icelandic– Erin will say, when you ask her, “She’s a Martha’s Vineyard Mutt.” Our guess is that she’s maybe about half Icelandic. That’s not at all a bad thing, though. Hybrid vigor is very much a good thing, and it’s very obvious that she’s got it– she’s strong, healthy, and tough!

On the other, purebred, hand (and this is the part of Sheep of the Week where we dig up embarrassing photos of old boyfriends), Feenat’s old sweetheart, Ceo, was a gorgeous purebred Icelandic. And by “sweetheart,” I mean, “Feenat didn’t want to have anything to do with him.” But this is a photo of the two of them in their honeymoon suite, down at the bottom of the back pasture.

Somehow, though, something went right. Over last winter, she grew, and she grew, until she was as big as a house (not quite so much the little fuzzball with knobbly knees). This is about when I met her.

And then, one day last spring, I was out in the pasture doing morning feeding, and noticed that there were two baby Feenats out in the pasture. She was an excellent mother– her lambs were some of the sturdiest, healthiest, and fattest (so much so that they had this sort of waddle-like sashay going on for a while!)– which really impressed us, since she’d never had a mother take care of her. We’d been afraid she maybe wouldn’t know what to do. Wrong!

These days, Fee-Fee’s doing wonderfully. She’s still one the loudest ewes (a trait that she’s passed down!), and is most always waiting by the fence when we come to feed. Sometimes, though, if the sheep are grazing over the hill, out of eye- and earshot, you’ll surprise the flock, and have to call them over. As they all run over to the trough, Feenat especially will make the rarest and most beautiful expression of ovine joy– she leaps straight upwards, and, airborne, wiggles and twists her body around until she lands on the ground. It’s amazing to see. One day, I will be able to get a picture.

NEXT WEEK on SotW: a lamb you don’t know yet!

NEXT NEXT WEEK on SotW: who else would you like to hear about? Let us know!