Last Friday I drove out to Boone, Iowa, to meet my shearer at his place and have him shear both Sophie and Indira.  As I mentioned in last week's post, neither had been sheared for quite some time, so they had a lot of fleece covering - it was very hard to find the sheep under all that wool!

I had transported them in the back of our pickup truck, and had brought a ramp with side-walls so that they could get into and out of the truck on their own....  Well, that's not completely accurate.  Sophie had so much wool on her that she would get stuck between the side-walls of the ramp.  To get her down to the ground, we had to push her from behind as she clambered and pulled herself along.

Sophie was the first one sheared on Friday afternoon, and as Mason ran the clippers over her tender pink skin, it became more and more obvious that Sophie was very thin under all of that wool.  As the last of the wool fell from her body, she had trouble getting her legs underneath herself and getting into a standing position - her balance now was so very different than it had been just a few minutes before!

Indira came next - so eager to get out of the truck that she jumped off the ramp and began to run across the yard, looking for freedom!  Quick on his feet, Mason soon had a good hold of her and brought her back to the shearing floor in the front yard underneath a big ash tree.  It wasn't long before she, too, began to lose all that wool that had grown since birth.  In Indira's case, we had a different sort of surprise....  She too was very thin, but she also had a very big, round belly...it sure looked like she was bred!  After talking to her previous owner, it turns out that her Romeldale/CVM ram had jumped the fence in either May or June, and obviously found Indira to his liking!

So, both of these girls are now much smaller than they were when we got them - no problem getting up or down the ramp to the pickup anymore!  They are both still in quarantine in the barn while bloodwork, genetic testing, and fiber testing are underway.  They have been cleared of internal parasites (as of their test on Saturday), and we are now working on putting some meat on those bones - especially for Indira, who should drop her lambs sometime in October or November.  Sophie has been re-named in line with our system of naming our sheep based on their year of birth - in our records, she appears as Fiona/Sophie, but for our purposes, we will call her Fiona to help us remember that she was born in 2006.  Both Indira and Fiona are slowly settling in and getting to know us and our routines.  And, I have to admit, I love the idea of fall lambs!

An interesting drama has been playing itself out on our farm over the past few days.  A good friend of mine has decided to sell off her entire flock of sheep, and I made the decision to buy two of them - both of them coming through our farm in the past.  I have already written about Indira (last Friday's post), who was one of our lambs last year - the other one is a white Romeldale ewe named Sophie, who I actually brought to Iowa in a group purchase of a flock in Ohio several years ago.  I bought about fifteen sheep at that time, and sold off one ram lamb and two adult white ewes - Sophie included - and kept the rest for my flock.  This friend has been dabbling in sheep for a number of years, and her personal situation is such now that all of them must go, so I bought both Indira and Sophie for my own flock.

The problem is that although my friend has been caring for her sheep as far as feed and water, she has had little time for some of the other things that sheep need - namely shearing, trimming hooves, and those "personal hygiene" things that shepherds have to take care of.  Both Sophie and Indira need a bit of attention - to say the least.

Neither of these two ewes has been sheared since January 2009 - well over 1 1/2 years.  Both are Romeldale/CVMs, so their yearly staple length (the length of the fleece they carry at the end of the year at shearing) is typically four or five inches.  When you part their fleece, you see that it is more like eight to ten inches long!  That's incredible for this breed!  And imagine the weight that they carry!

           
The problem with fleece that long is that it is very hot for them over the summer, plus the fleece begins to felt, making it unusable.  We won't know how badly it is felted until we get it sheared and get a good look at it off of the sheep.  We also won't know what kind of condition the sheep are in - thin, fat, or just right - until that fleece comes off: it is so long and dense that it is very hard to gauge how big the body is underneath it.  In fact, Indira has never been sheared - she was a lamb last year, and if she had stayed on our farm she would have been sheared in January 2010.  At the other farm, that didn't happen.

So, I have made arrangements to take these two ewes to our shearer in Boone this Friday afternoon so that he can shear them and trim their hooves.  I have already dewormed them, and so can do our first fecal sample on Saturday to see if they are free of parasites.  Once their fecal comes back clear, and they are sheared, coated, and have their hooves trimmed, they can go out with our flock to graze.  Imagine how they will feel having left nearly thirty pounds (each, and maybe more!) of their fleece behind them on Friday!  It will certainly be a freeing moment....

Because we participate in the Voluntary Scrapie Eradication Program in the State of Iowa, we must be inspected once each year by our state veterinarian.  It used to be that we had our inspection sometime in the mid-winter, but because it was always so difficult for her to get here on snowy and icy roads, our state vet, Dr. Sharon Fairchild, once mentioned that it might be a good idea to change our inspection date to a warmer month.  We changed our inspection month several years ago to the month of August, so now we usually have to deal with incredible heat instead of incredible cold!  She usually has no trouble getting here, though.

This year, we had initially scheduled my inspection for last week, but since my trip with mom up to the Mayo Clinic ran well past mid-week, we ended up rescheduling to this morning at ten.  In order for our inspection to move along smoothly and for us to spend the minimum amount of time in the heat, I take one of the dogs out about an hour before she comes to bring all of the sheep in from the pastures and put them in the paddocks up near the barn.  At nine this morning, Coda and I were out there moving the sheep!

Getting them in was really no big deal.  I did notice, as the rams and ram lambs came trotting into the upper paddock, that one of them looked a bit anemic - most likely due to internal parasites, so I decided to deworm the boys while I waited for Dr. Fairchild.  The plan, once she arrived, was to continue to use Coda to crowd the sheep into a small area and then identify each sheep on her list by finding that sheep in the crowd.  Since Coda is more efficient at this work than Chance is yet, I decided to use Coda until the vet left, then switch to Chance to return the two groups to their pastures.

As expected, the inspection took only about half an hour, and once Dr. Fairchild drove off, I switched dogs and began to try to coax the rams and ram lambs out of their paddock.  This should be a simple thing to do, but because Coda has taught them fairly well that if they move out of the corner, he will chase them, they no longer like to move out of any corner - including the shelter.  Unfortunately, Chance has the same bad trait that we just dropped from Coda's routine, so when I finally coaxed the rams out into the West Pasture, Chance chased after them until the rams were back in the shelter.  What a pain!

I continued trying to work with Chance, but eventually I knew it wouldn't work - as he continued to chase the rams back into the shelter I realized that if it were up to him, we'd likely still be out there this evening!  I took him into the house and brought out Coda, who was now cooled off and refreshed.  It still took me another hour to convince the rams that they could come back out without fear of the dog, but eventually they did come out, and Coda and I walked them back to the South Pasture where Chachi was waiting for them.  At least that part of the task was done!

Next, I had to put the girls back into the Rock Pasture.  There was just one problem, which I had noticed this morning, when I moved all the sheep up near the barn: some of the ram lambs had figured out how to get to the ewes.  Because we are coming into breeding season, the rams are much more determined to get to the ewe flock, so we reinforced two of the fences between the rams and ewes with temporary net fencing when we moved the sheep last.  At the time I thought that would be enough, but when I found these ram lambs so close to the ewes, I decided that before I put the ewes back into the Rock Pasture, I would have to line the third side of their pasture with more electric mesh fencing - just to make sure that the rams stayed away.

Once the fencing was in place, Coda and I came back in for another quick drink and cooling off.  Even though today is much cooler than it has been, when you are hiking back and forth across multiple pastures, you warm up very quickly.  Before long we were back outside, moving the ewes and ewe lambs.  They didn't require much convincing - once I opened the paddock gate, the bulk of the flock ran for the Rock Pasture.  There were a few that trailed behind, choosing to walk rather than run, and then there was January, this year's bottle lamb, who walked at my side in spite of the fact that Coda was on my other side.  We walked this way all the way to the Rock Pasture gate where I said a quick good-bye to January, rubbing her face and under her chin, and watched her rejoin her flock-mates.

This "quick job" that I thought would take no more than an hour or two this morning ended up taking from nine this morning until two this afternoon!  By the time Coda and I came in at two, we were both hot and tired to the bone!  Unfortunately, I still have corn to freeze and plum jam to cook down - but all of that can wait until I finish this blog.  But seeing I'm at the end, I guess it's time for the corn....

Summer on our farm is generally a leisurely time: we move the sheep to new pasture periodically, but other than moving sheep and filling water tanks, there isn't much else that the sheep need.  My summers are usually filled with keeping up with the fruit in season, making jellies, jams, sauces, and such, and traveling to visit sheep festivals and family.

Because I love talking sheep, and most people don't know a thing about them, sheep festivals are one of my favorite places to be.  Once you get into either fiber or sheep, you come to realize that there are sheep or fiber festivals in a lot of places over the spring, summer and early fall - something I guess I never realized when we were sheepless!  Although the festival in Maryland in May is one of the largest in the country, one of my favorite is the Wisconsin festival in September.

In addition to lots of vendors, classes for fiber artists, and a great fleece show and sale, the thing I like best about the Wisconsin festival is that it also has sessions for producers with lots of information to help us do better what it is we do!  I've attended sessions there about parasite management, pasture management, growing a better wool clip, guardian animals, and lots of other interesting topics.  It seems that there is nothing about sheep that they aren't willing to delve into!

In past years, we've also attended festivals in Minnesota in May, Colorado in June, and Oregon in late June - all of which were definitely worth the trip.  The problem lately has been that with gas prices and the economy what they are, we have had to trim down our travelling budget and keep our trips closer to home.  In the past couple of years, we've limited our trips to the Iowa Sheep and Wool Festival, the Iowa State Fair, and the Wisconsin Sheep and Wool Festival (above).

This year, however, I convinced Rick to let me use some of his frequent flyer miles to get me out to the West Coast in September to meet in person my online friends at Tawanda Farms, and then make the trip to the Puyallup Fair in Washington with them.  I'm especially eager to hear the talk there about recessive color inheritance in the Romney breed - something I have been working on developing in our flock for the past six years or so.  It's really encouraging that so many other flocks are realizing the advantages of recessively colored sheep, too!

So, for me, this late summer and fall will be filled with travel - I am currently writing from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where I have brought my mother for testing in hopes that they can help her feel a bit better.  In just under a week, Rick and I will make the trek to the Iowa State Fair to compete in the fleece competition.  Shortly after the competition, I will load up the truck to deliver a ram lamb to the Michigan Fiber Festival (another new sheep festival for me!), and spend the weekend absorbing all that they have going there.

I get back only to leave again to visit our son, Justin, in Raleigh, NC. for a weekend and then travel with Rick to Washington, D.C., for his work.  I love going with him on business because there are no interruptions while I work on paperwork at the hotel.  I don't have the time to make this trip often, but I try to go along at least a couple of times each summer.  After this trip, we get a brief respite from travel over the Labor Day weekend, and then I make the trip to the Wisconsin festival in mid-September, followed by my trip to the West Coast. 

It's a crazy schedule, but all of it fun, and nothing that I would want to eliminate!  For most of my trips, Rick will be home to cover things there, so I need not worry about the sheep, llamas, or the dogs.  I'm really looking forward to each and every trip, even though I know I will be exhausted by the time I am done.  After all, nearly every trip has to do with my favorite subject - sheep!