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181

Posted on 30 June 2017

Today my sheep were actively converting first-succesional forest back into grassland. The edge of one of the fields was starting to grow in with a thick stand of (I think) quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides), and I’ve been meaning to let the sheep have their way with it all season; I finally got the grazing sequence to align with that patch today.

The sheep were as enthusiastic about the aspen leaves as I’d hoped.

By this afternoon, they had mostly denuded the saplings. I’m hoping another couple of passes like this and the encroaching forest will rethink its advance on the pasture.

Categories: forest, grazing, pasture, sheep

Tagged: browsing, forest, grazing, pasture, Populus tremuloides, quaking aspen, saplings, sheep, succession

180

Posted on 29 June 2017

I’ve been thinking lately about the funny relationship between sheep and pasture. When I imagine symbiosis — literally “living together” — the image of the Egyptian plover and the Nile crocodile comes to mind: croc opens his mouth, plover eats the bits of meat stuck between the croc’s teeth; bird gets food, and croc gets free dental care. That the story is made up* doesn’t weaken the power of the archetype — two creatures in a mutually beneficial partnership.

With grazing, it’s clear how the sheep benefit — they derive sustenance from the plants they eat — but what about the pasture? The individual plants would arguably be better off without sheep consuming the products of their photosynthetic efforts. But the pasture as a whole would quickly revert to forest in a place like New Hampshire when tree seedlings grow and shade out understory plants like grasses. So at the ecosystem level, sheep and grasslands are crucial for each other’s existence, while the individual plants engage** in a kind of altruistic sacrifice — if their leaves weren’t consumed by herbivores, they and their ecosystem would cease to exist.

Things get even murkier on a farm, a manufactured ecosystem where the farmer is constantly putting his thumb on the scale of evolution, choosing the principal herbivores and some or all of the members of the plant community. But despite the farmer’s attempts at control, nature asserts itself in the pasture, and the wild organisms of a grassland establish themselves — bobolinks and grasshoppers and strawberries and all the rest.

As the new guy inserting himself into this complex dance, I’m trying to understand how my decisions are tipping the scales, which ways I’m nudging the ecosystem. My sheep have more catholic dietary preferences than the cattle that used to live here, and my intensive grazing management encourages them to be even less picky. In theory, this should increase the diversity of the plant community, since the sheep won’t have the opportunity to eat their favorite plants into oblivion. My biases also weight the outcomes. Every time I discover that my sheep have a taste for an “invasive” plant, I allow them to devour it more completely than I would a “desirable” plant. When I saw that some of the ewes were particularly fond of the leaves of oriental bittersweet vine (Celastrus orbiculatus), I felt a little thrill of glee, though I’m not sure I can make a compelling argument that bittersweet is “worse” than the popple tree (Populus tremuloides) it’s climbing on.

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* Herodotus made reference to this mutualistic relationship, but it’s never been documented in nature.

** I realize I’m veering into problematic territory by ascribing agency to plants, but language, shaped in our own image, feels like it’s fighting me here.

Categories: pasture, sheep

Tagged: ecology, evolution, grassland, hand-waving, invasive, mutualism, oriental bittersweet, pasture, sheep, symbiosis

179

Posted on 28 June 2017

I woke up to a cool, foggy morning after yesterday’s thunderstorms and hail.

Categories: fog, Sullivan NH, Summer

Tagged: cold, fog, foggy morning, hills, power lines, summer, sunlight, sunrise, valley

178

Posted on 27 June 2017

The farm is rather well-endowed with spiders, so I’ve been pretty attuned to suspended creatures lately. This morning, though, I was taken by surprise when the creature hanging by a thread was a gastropod rather than an arachnid.

I followed the thread (of slime?) up to the leaf from which it had launched.

I had no idea the world produced aerialist slugs, but the whole affair had an intentional feel to it. A quick visit to the Oracle of Mountain View revealed that this is indeed a thing, with some slugs using the hanging tension to express their reproductive organs. I think my fellow was just out for a solo joy ride, but he/she still upended my conception of earthbound slugs.

Categories: Found, Gastropoda, Seen

Tagged: gastropod, hanging, slime thread, slug, weird

177

Posted on 26 June 2017

This is the sheep riot I come home to if I underestimate the size of the flock’s grazing rotation for the day.

Sorry for the shaky video as I walk backwards with hungry sheep bearing down on me….

Categories: grazing, pasture, sheep

Tagged: bravo, grazing, hungry, lambs, pasture, riot, rotational grazing, sheep

176

Posted on 25 June 2017

Some posturing and head-butting continued after the rams moved out of the barn, but the three gentlemen finally seem to have made their peace with one another.

Categories: pasture, ram, sheep

Tagged: Border Cheviot, buddies, clover, Dorset, grazing, Katahdin, peace, rams

175

Posted on 24 June 2017

I think of my sheep as animals that I insert into a managed ecosystem, but of course the sheep become part of that ecosystem themselves. I found one of my lambs giving a ride to a nursery web spider (Pisuarina mira) that was carrying an egg sac.

The spider caught my eye as it’s better than 2 inches across. The female carries the egg sac in her jaws (sounds exhausting, but being neither female nor arachnid, I may not be qualified to judge) until the spiderlings are about to hatch, and then she builds them a web to hatch and start growing in. This species doesn’t make a web for catching prey, but instead stalks and overpowers its dinner. More tasty spider details here: http://www.spiders.us/species/pisaurina-mira/.

Categories: Arachnida, pasture, sheep

Tagged: lamb, macro, nursery web spider, Pisaurina mira, Spider

174

Posted on 23 June 2017

I’m probably anthropomorphizing again where I oughtn’t, but the shorn ewes looked particularly put-upon today.

Categories: shearing, sheep

Tagged: ewes, lambs, nursing, pasture, put-upon, recently shorn, shearing, sheep, shorn, twins

173

Posted on 22 June 2017

Shearing today went remarkably smoothly, though I suspect the shorn sheep might have a different interpretation.

We needed extra help at the beginning to convince the sheep to cooperate with the gathering and sorting process, and folks stayed on to watch the start of the shearing. We had sheep crowded into a pen just beyond the shearing floor so it was easy for Bruce to grab the next customer.

For me, the most remarkable part of the process (other than Bruce’s stamina, shearing 31 sheep in less than 3 hours) was seeing what my ewes look like under all that wool.

In these two images, Bruce is shearing the mother of lamb #701, who I recently wrote was getting nearly as big as her mother. Without her fleece, it’s not at all clear that the ewe is bigger than her lamb.

And as I imagined, we ended up with an impressive pile of fleeces by the end of the morning.

My next project is to figure out if anyone wants to buy the wool. Bruce was very pessimistic about the prospects, pointing out that the synthetic fiber industry had not only stolen the market for wool, but also the name, since most people no longer associate “fleece” with a shorn sheep. To be continued…

Categories: barn, shearing, sheep

Tagged: border collie, Bruce Clement, fleece, pasture, shearing, sheep, shorn, shrinking sheep, wool

172

Posted on 21 June 2017

I figured I’d eventually come around to shoveling shit — can’t really be a farmer without it. The shearer is coming tomorrow to relieve the flock of its wooly burden, and he needs a flat, clean place to work, so yesterday I cleaned out a section of the lambing barn for him.

I didn’t realize how deep the bedding had built up, but I managed to fill the tractor bucket seven times over.

I also got to make a significant contribution to the compost pile in one of the gardens.

Then today’s project was to set up the barnyard for sheep-sorting and bring the flock down from the pasture. While I shoveled shit alone, I was grateful to have help today from my shearer, Bruce Clement, and friend Wendy Pelletier in setting up the temporary handling system and moving the sheep.

Cleo and Bravo of course moved with their flock.