It’s easy to complain about the limited daylight at this time of year, and I do my share, but there’s something magical about watching night turn into day while I’m taking care of the sheep.
Of course I could do the same thing in the summer, but I’d have to be out at 4am. The northern seasons grade virtue on a curve.
Tagged: bale feeder, dawn, lambs, livestock guardian dogs, orange light, playing, sheep, sunrise
I’ve become sufficiently complacent about Bravo and Cleo’s livestock guarding abilities that I imagine all the sheep predators have left Sullivan (or at least our parts of it). So I was surprised this morning when we arrived at the Woodbury place, and Cass and Luc immediately went into their predator-tracking mode, carefully and deliberately following scent trails in the grass. I hadn’t seen this behavior in a while, so I didn’t entirely trust my interpretation, but as we got close to the flock, there was a sign that even I could pick up —
fresh canid scat on a prominent spot in the middle of the pasture. I’ve often seen coyote scat on top of a rock in the middle of a trail, placed for maximum territorial announcement; this was in the right place, but seemed a little small for coyote, so I assume a fox was visiting the flock last night. This is the same rock where sheep had trampled sensitive fern two days earlier, and still very close to the flock.
I’m assuming that a fox would have a hard time killing any of my sheep at this point (expect perhaps the tiny triplet lamb that refuses to grow), but foxes can certainly take newborn lambs. I’m thinking that the big white dogs made quite a ruckus last night, so it’s surprising that the fox got as close as it did.
Cass and Luc were disappointed to be late to the party, but ready to take on any future threats.
Tagged: border collies, bravo, Cass, Cleo, fox, glacial erratic, livestock guardian dogs, Luc, pasture, predator, scat, scent trail, sheep
A little over 100 years after its first formulations, quantum mechanics is getting trendy, popping up in social science and the arts. The gratuitous references and gobbledegook that result make me very grouchy, but perhaps I need to fight fire with fire. This, therefore, is the inaugural post in my new series Quantum Mechanics and the Modern Shepherd.
One formulation of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle asserts that the act of making a measurement inevitably changes the thing being measured. Werner Heisenberg was describing the characteristics of fundamental particles like electrons, but his principle is equally applicable to livestock guardian dogs.
Bravo and Cleo are typically wrestling whenever I see them, but Chip and Kathy Woodbury, whose house overlooks our current pasture, have told me that this behavior vanishes as soon as I’m gone — the big fluffy dogs immediately go back to watchful guarding. The shepherd, by observing his dogs, fundamentally changes their behavior, and therefore can never gain firsthand knowledge of his guardians. In future experiments, I will determine whether sheep are fundamentally unknowable as well.
I thought I was going to do quick morning chores today and then head in to Boston to participate in my other life, but I got to Eric and Deb’s place and found Bravo frantically rubbing his face in the dirt. He and Cleo had confronted a porcupine some time over night and neither were very happy. Cleo, the gentler soul, let me both photograph her and stayed calm while I pulled out her quills.
Moments after I had pulled the last one, she returned to her posing rock.
Bravo was not so phlegmatic about his predicament. I managed to pull a couple of quills, but he would thrash about for five minutes after each removal; he was much more thoroughly decorated than Cleo, and at the rate of one quill every five minutes, I figured we’d be at it for 14 hours. With the help of my friend and frequent rescuer Wendy Pelletier, we loaded him into her car* and drove 30 minutes to the veterinary clinic. Through the magic of modern sedation, the vet was able to get him sorted in just a few minutes, and by this evening, he was seemingly back to normal.
I’m still unsure how a porcupine got into the sheep enclosure in the first place, since (now that my ground wire is connected) I’ve got better than 4000 volts on the fence. I can only imagine that he climbed one of the trees overhanging the field and dropped in for a visit, though I’m not sure what the appeal might have been. I’m also unsure how he got out, as there were no trees to facilitate his escape; perhaps with two guardian dogs paying attention to him, the fence voltage seemed like less of a concern. I half expected to find a porcupine carcass in the field, but I only saw some suggestive bits in the area where the encounter must have occurred.
Now I’m wondering what lessons might have been learned. I’d like to believe that this family of porcupines might have developed a strong negative association with sheep. I’m less hopeful that Bravo and Cleo will choose a different path if they encounter another walking pincushion.
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*I know I said that Bravo doesn’t ride inside, but these seemed like extenuating circumstances. To keep him from causing any more havoc on the way to the vet, I rode in back with him, hanging on to his leash and trying not to get stuck by any of his quills.
Tagged: bloody nose, bravo, Cleo, electonet, idiots, livestock guardian dogs, pasture, porcupine, quills, sheep
When I first contemplated getting a livestock guardian dog for my flock, I was worried that my quiet rural life would be shattered by incessant barking. Bill and others assured me that LGDs bark more when they’re in a new setting, but once they get a sense of the normal disturbances — squirrels, neighbors, passing cars, odd gusts of wind — they quickly file those as background and only respond to new stimuli. Folks said I’d soon recognize my guardians’ repertoire of barks and know when something was really threatening the flock.
So this morning, when Bravo started barking like there was an imminent danger, I was pretty confused. It was daylight, all the sheep were accounted for, the border collies weren’t behaving any more stupidly than usual, no bears in sight, and yet Bravo was barking like the sky was falling. And then I found the source of his alarm:
In his defense, a mylar balloon with just a bit of helium left in it behaves like some weird terrestrial jellyfish, hovering just over the gound and moving unpredictably. I brought it over to show him it wasn’t a threat, but he wasn’t yet prepared to believe me.
Tagged: barking, border collies, bravo, helium, livestock guardian dogs, maremma, Mylar balloon, pasture, sheep, threat, weird
All three competing for my attention. The ewe lamb is particularly persistent.
Tagged: 702, attention, bravo, Cleo, competition, ewe lamb, Great Pyrenees, livestock guardian dogs, maremma, pasture
It was a risk to bring Cleo to the farm — I didn’t know how she’d do with Bravo, with the border collies, with the sheep, with me, with living outside full time. I had a feeling that it would work out eventually, but I’ve been shocked at how many things have come together in a short time. She and Bravo clicked right away, but she was still pretty reserved with him at first. Now she takes the lead on their post-prandial romps every evening.
I was worried that she might get protective of the sheep when the border collies were moving the flock, since she’s never worked with herding dogs, but she’s been completely relaxed during our twice-daily moves to new pasture. But perhaps the biggest change has been in the way the sheep relate to their canine protectors. My sheep had never been around a guardian dog before Bravo arrived, and they were understandably wary of him at first. While things had certainly improved, I still saw the sheep get tense when Bravo moved around them. Since Cleo’s arrival, that tension has disappeared. I’m not sure if she has calmed Bravo down, or calmed the sheep down, or if her presence somehow fixes an imbalance — single male dog is scary but male-female pair is not? — but the sheep now intermingle and brush shoulders with the dogs with absolute ease. Whatever the case, I’m grateful that she joined the team.
Tagged: bravo, Cleo, completion, farm, Great Pyrenees, livestock guardian dogs, maremma, pasture, relaxed, sheep
My daily rhythms with the sheep are now all about grazing rotations — how big an area to give them, how often to move the fence, worrying whether I’m doing it right. The big picture is that sheep consume pasture most efficiently if they’re a little crowded and hungry, so they’re less likely to be picky and instead eat a bit from all of the available plants. Pasture is most productive if it’s grazed uniformly for a short time (ideally before it goes to seed) and then left to recover. The grass is also happier if the sheep don’t eat too much — 6-8″ of remaining leaf height allows it to continue to photosynthesize efficiently and grow back quickly.
My flock of 65 sheep is constant*, but the quality of pasture varies across the farm — some areas support much more plant density than others. So every time I set up a grazing area, I’m trying to figure out how much sheep food it contains and how long the sheep should stay so that they eat just enough but not too much. My goal is to move them twice a day, the sweet spot between efficient grazing and shepherd insanity, according to Bill Fosher. I’m starting to get better at all the necessary guesstimates, but I still sometimes let the sheep overgraze (too much time for the available forage, so they chew the plants down too far for quick pasture recovery) or undergraze (too much area for the number of sheep, so that they start to eat selectively, overgrazing their favorites and ignoring the plants they like less, the all ice cream and no broccoli approach).
This morning, I erred a bit on the side of overgrazing, leaving the sheep a few hours longer in their overnight section than I should have. Aside from a few mature grass stems that they disdain, they had eaten everything down to about 4 inches.
They get very antsy as they sense that I’m about to let them move to the new section. I have the electricity turned off to the fence at this point so I can open a section without getting zapped, and I’m afraid that the sheep are starting to figure out when the fence is electrified and not. I worry that one day they’ll just push their way to freedom if I don’t move them quickly enough. Bravo and Cleo were leading the charge this afternoon.
And once the sheep are in the new grass, all the tension disappears.
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*While the number of sheep is constant, their consumption of forage really isn’t. As the lambs grow, their rumens start to develop and they start eating grass in addition to milk. And the ewes’ lactation volume changes as the lambs grow (peaking around 45-60 days after birth), so their nutritional needs change accordingly. All the variables are in flux.
This is what 65 sheep look like rushing onto new pasture. The ragged ones are Katahdins that haven’t fully shed out their winter coats. The lamb and ewe at the end are consistent stragglers.
Tagged: border collies, electronet, ewes, lambs, livestock guardian dogs, new grass, parade, pasture, sheep, temporary fencing
