Posts tagged “Border Cheviot”

341

Posted on 8 December 2017

When the rams first joined their group of ewes, there was some frantic reproductive behavior, but now things have settled down a bit. The current pattern is that a ram will find a girlfriend for the day, and they pal around together, sometimes with blissful smiles. Here’s the 1½-year-old border cheviot with a first-time breeder:

They were off in the tree line while the rest of the group — former girlfriends, judging by the green butts — was hanging around the bale feeder.

And in the other cheviot group, the 8-month-old ram lamb had paired up with the oldest ewe in the flock.

I’m tempted to make a snarky comment about some prominent men (and the women around them) being better off had they been born sheep, but I shan’t.

Categories: breeding, ewe, ram

Tagged: Border Cheviot, breeding, ewe, fugitive loyalty, girlfriend, north country cheviot, ram, smug

339

Posted on 5 December 2017

Angus, the big katahdin ram, was pretty worked up on the day of the breeding sort. He took a hard shot at Cass as she was starting to move them to the handling system (She yelped, but then inflicted at least as much damage to Angus with her teeth as he had with his skull. That convinced him to defer to her once again.), and Bill was on edge lest Angus knock one of us over the fence. I imagine that all the cheviot-sired lambs, just across the fence from the rams, were ovulating in earnest and his hormones were raging. The good news is that he’s now channeling all that testosterone into more productive activities.

As of this morning, he had bred five of the eight ewes he’s responsible for, and he seems very pleased with his new family status. My 1½ year old border cheviot ram wasn’t acting out to the same extent, but he’s also been busy: 14 of his 27 ewes were marked this morning. The two younger fellows, the dorset and north country cheviot rams, are lagging behind, having bred well fewer than half of their respective harems; I’m hoping they become a bit more efficient, but I’m afraid they’ve missed their opportunity with some of the ewes. The fact that the two older rams have bred so many suggests that more than half of the ewes were cycling in synchrony, so the youngsters won’t get another crack before I combine the ewes with all the rams for cleanup duty during the second ovulation cycle.

Over the course of the year, I’ve often fought with my anthropomorphic tendencies, e.g. here and here. Usually this takes the form of imputing human characteristics onto my animals, but the breeding dynamics suggest that the anthropomorphic arrow may have two heads. I would love to take the rams’ performance as evidence that older men are inherently superior to younger ones, but I can’t imagine anyone taking me seriously. Oh well.

Categories: breeding, ewe, ram

Tagged: Angus, anthropomorphism, Border Cheviot, breeding, cycling, Dorset, efficiency, ewes, harem, Katahdin, marking harness, north country cheviot, older men, ovulation, rams, red butts

336

Posted on 2 December 2017

Bill came over today to help me sort my flock into breeding groups. We brought the lambs and the main flock into the handling system and started by sorting out everyone who wasn’t going to participate — wethers,* ewe lambs, and ewes who were too small to breed — and sent them out to the back field. We sorted the remaining flock, 61 ewes, into groups for each of the four rams, and sent them to separate enclosures so that the rams would stay with the ewes we’d chosen for them. Here are the four groups, and some of the logic behind them:

The katadhins are the easiest and most obvious breeding group: 8 katahdin ewes and one giant black katahdin ram. I didn’t want to cross the hair sheep with a wool breed this year, since the offspring lose the ability to shed their winter coat but don’t produce any useful wool. I’m curious to see if Angus the ram can add some size to the lambs. If his offspring don’t grow well, I might declare my katahdin experiment a failure.
The dorsets are also pretty obvious: I have 8 dorset-border leicester crosses, and I’m breeding them to the fancy dorset ram I bought early this summer. He was advertised as carrying great maternal traits (prolific milk production, especially) as well as decent size. He’s refused to grow since I got him, so hopefully the other genetics aren’t a bust as well. He seemed a bit overmatched by the ewes today.
The remaining 47 ewes are all part of the cheviot group. I used a border cheviot ram last year to sire my May lambs, and I liked everything about his offspring except their size — none of his lambs are really big enough to sell for meat right now. North Country cheviots are reputed to have all the good characteristics of border cheviots (easy lambing, vigorous lambs, hardiness and thrift, and a fair bit of attitude) along with bigger, more muscled bodies, so I got a North Country ram lamb recently. Since he’s only 7 months old, I limited him to 18 ewes: the 6 North Country ewes from Peter Helmetag, 7 of the 16 North Country mixes from Barbara Leverett, plus the 5 romneys. I included the romneys in this group for some of the same reasons I’m breeding Angus to the katahdins, to gain size in the lambs of a notoriously slow-growing breed.**
After I chose 18 ewes for the North Country ram lamb (next year he should be able to handle 30-50 ewes), the remaining 27 went with the border cheviot ram I used last year. He’s now about 1½ years old, so he should be able to handle the bigger group. I gave him the remaining 9 North Country ewe from Barbara Leverett, all of the romney-cheviot crosses, all of the cheviot-dorper crosses, plus the 2 February ewe lambs. I’m very interested in finding out if there will be a noticeable difference in size between the lambs sired by the North Country versus the Border cheviot.

One of the tricks to the breeding game is to use a marker on the ram so it’s possible to tell which ewes have been bred. The traditional tool is something called raddle, a colored powder that you mix with oil and rub on the ram’s brisket. When he mounts a ewe, he leaves some of his color on her backside, proof of intent but not necessarily success.

I’m using different colors for different rams at the moment.

After 17 days, during which time the ewes should all have ovulated once, I’ll mix up the groups, letting all the rams consort with all the ewes. If a ewe ends up with a second color, it means that the first ram didn’t do his job, since she’s still ovulating.*** My preference is to have all my lambs in as short a time window as possible, so I hope all four rams do their jobs during the first ovulation cycle, but late lambs are better than open ewes.****

* Wethers are castrated male sheep.

** North Country cheviots are generally bigger than romneys (150-170lb ewes vs 110-130lbs), but crossing 2 pure breeds also creates something called hybrid vigor, so I’m hoping for faster-growing and bigger lambs than the North Country contribution alone would account for.

*** A ewe will only allow a ram to mount when she’s ovulating, so a ewe who is marked by a second ram has ovulated again, and therefore was not impregnated by the first ram.

**** An open ewe is one who is not pregnant.

Categories: breeding, ewe, ram

Tagged: Border Cheviot, breeding, Dorset, ewes, heterosis, hybrid vigor, Katahdin, kilts, marking harness, North Country checiot, raddle powder, rams, sorting, zippers

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

144

Posted on 24 May 2017

After the recent days’ drama, today I’ll again take refuge in cute lamb photos. This is the last pair of twins born this season, with mom in the background.

Categories: Hollow Oak Farm, lambing, pasture, sheep

Tagged: Barb Eriksson, Bea, blach and white, Border Cheviot, dorper, ewe, Hollow Oak Farm, lambs, north country cheviot, twins

140

Posted on 20 May 2017

Today the last of the pregnant ewes gave birth to twins. It seemed fitting that my first and last lambs were black.

Now that lambing is over for 2017 (barring mystical events), here’s a first pass at documenting what happened.

Of my 27 adult ewes and one ewe lamb, 24 gave birth; 4 ewes didn’t get pregnant for some reason.
36 lambs were born between 3 February and 20 May, and 30 are still alive.
There were 2 sets of triplets, 8 sets of twins, and 14 singles, a “lambing rate” of 150% (where 100% is all singles and 200% is all twins). Many shepherds try for a lambing rate of 185%, hoping for as many twins as possible with few or no triplets (who are more likely to die of something or other).
Of the lambs who died, 2 were eaten by Bravo, 1 died after a complicated labor and C-section, 2 died of hypothermia in a May snowstorm, and one died from a combination of cold and maternal abandonment
My lambing mortality rate was a bit under 17%, while the national average is about 15%. I think 4 of the deaths (the Bravo victims and the hypothermic twins) were ultimately attributable to my inexperience and bad decisions, so if I were an optimal shepherd, my mortality rate might have been as low as 6%.
The 6 winter lambs were sired by a Texel ram. Of the 8 lambs whose sex I could identify, 4 were female and 4 were male.
The spring lambs, sired by my border cheviot ram, were 18 females and 6 males. I’m not sure that either group is large enough to draw any statistically meaningful conclusions, but one tempting explanation is that the ram influences the sex ratio of the offspring. I’m very curious if this is borne out with the cheviot’s offspring next year.

Categories: Hollow Oak Farm, lambing, sheep

Tagged: black lamb, Border Cheviot, dorper, ewes, Hollow Oak Farm, lambs, last lambs, newborn, north country cheviot, statistics, twins

123

Posted on 3 May 2017

This morning brought twins from one of the katahdin ewes, again with no drama. I won’t tempt fate by drawing any conclusions from 2 out of 14 pregnant ewes, but I’m very relieved at the way spring lambing is starting.

And Monday’s ewe and lamb decided to pose…

Categories: Hollow Oak Farm, lambing, pasture, sheep

Tagged: Border Cheviot, ewe, Hollow Oak Farm, Katahdin, lamb, pasture, pasture lambing, Romney, spring, twins

121

Posted on 1 May 2017

My plan all along has been to develop a flock that can lamb on pasture with little or no help from me. Aside from the naturalistic appeal of sheep giving birth outdoors, Bill Fosher has convinced me that it’s the most efficient way to raise sheep: no need for a huge barn to house winter lambing, and no need for a huge labor force to tend to all the sheep indoors. And if the timing is right, lambs will get all their sustenance from mother’s milk and fresh-grazed pasture plants — no hay or grain.

Everything that’s happened on the farm so far has felt like a warm-up exercise, but today the real show started. I put a ram in with my flock on 8 December last year, and with an average gestation period of 147 days, I was expecting lambs to start coming some time this week. This morning (day 144) I noticed one of the ewes off by herself and figured she was probably thinking about lambing some time soon, but when I walked around her, I saw that she was cradling a lamb against her body, out of sight of the rest of the flock.

When I got a little closer, the new born ewe lamb popped up on her feet, and by evening was running fast enough that I almost couldn’t catch her.

My border cheviot ram, known for producing small, vigorous lambs, had done his job, and the mother was doing hers, fussing attentively over her little one. Now I need the grass to do its part. For pasture lambing to work well, the sheep need enough room to find a private spot to give birth; if the sheep are crowded, then lamb and ewe might not have a chance to bond with one another before another ewe tries to steal the lamb. With indoor lambing, the ewe and lambs go into a jug for a few days until the bonding happens, but on pasture, the ewes need to sort it out for themselves. The sacrificial area of the pasture where the pregnant ewes are hanging out is really too small for adequate privacy, but I’ve been hoping that the grass in the rest of the paddock would be ready by the time the lambs started dropping. I’ll see what happens tomorrow morning… if the newborns start coming at a steady clip, I’ll have to let the sheep into the bigger area whether grass is ready or not.

In honor of my first farm-sired and pasture-born lamb, Bill sent me some verse:

“Let them prosper, the dams and their sucklings.
Let nothing inhibit their heedless growing.
Let them raise up on sturdy pasterns
and trot out in light summer rain
onto the long lazy unfenced fields
of heaven.”

— Maxine Kumin, from Praise Be.

Categories: Hollow Oak Farm, lambing, pasture, sheep

Tagged: Bill Fosher, Border Cheviot, ewe lamb, first, Hollow Oak Farm, Kate Collins, Maxine Kumin, pasture lambing, Romney, sheep

66

Posted on 7 March 2017

I’m trying to outrun my cluelessness, but it seems to be winning. As fast as I’m learning new things on the farm, the leading edge of things I don’t know/wish I’d known/don’t realize I don’t know is receding even faster. I’ve been getting a lesson in ram relations over the last few days, hopefully averting disaster, but the unknown unknowns check in with me most nights at 3am.

My ram, a border cheviot lamb, arrived at the farm very skittish, and the first couple of times I needed to move him or change the color in his marking harness were really a struggle as he was very hard to approach. I’ve been housing him in the barn with the lambing ewes (to keep him from breeding the older ewe lambs before they’re big enough), so he and I have had more opportunities to interact at close range. His skittishness persisted at first, but he’s becoming much more comfortable in my presence. He started soliciting nose-scritches from me, and I congratulated myself on the progress I was making with him.

But when I mentioned my sheep taming skills to some more experienced shepherd friends, they were universally alarmed. Excessive familiarity in a ram, they warned, is the precursor to aggression; and whatever you do, they said, don’t touch him on top of his head — it will encourage butting behavior. And sure enough, his gentle solicitations for affection are getting more assertive, and he tends to put the top of his head against my leg if I’m not paying him enough attention. He hasn’t gotten a running start at me yet, but I now make sure not to turn my back on him when I’m in the barn.

Categories: barn, Hollow Oak Farm, sheep

Tagged: aggression, barn, Border Cheviot, cluelessness, Hollow Oak Farm, ram, sheep

Travels with Musti

Dogs, nature, photography, and the meaning of life, with apologies to J.S.

Posts tagged “Border Cheviot”

341

Posted on 8 December 2017

339

Posted on 5 December 2017

336

Posted on 2 December 2017

176

Posted on 25 June 2017

144

Posted on 24 May 2017

140

Posted on 20 May 2017

123

Posted on 3 May 2017

121

Posted on 1 May 2017

66

Posted on 7 March 2017