We live on an old sheep ranch. The going joke has always been that we can grow more wire than we can grain. Back in the day, if you didn't do the loose hay piles, then you had small square bales and they were tied with baling wire. Living on an old sheep ranch that at the least ran about 11,000 head it's inevitable that you will find wire where they fed, wire where they reused it for fencing, wire where some animal drug it for awhile and then left it behind. Of course, anytime that you could really use some to actually fix something it can not be found. Lon and I use to have close to 200 at the most. We said enough a few years ago and turned the sheep business over to our oldest boy, Bill. The story along with that goes something like this. Bill was named after Bill Loney, a local rancher down the valley. Bill died just this last year in May, but was someone that Lon really looked up to. Bill also gave Lon his first two sheep that started him into the sheep business. Well Bill Loney called up one day, shortly after our Bill was born, "I have some sheep for Bill I'll bring them out tomorrow". So Lon and I were thinking probably two sheep. Nope when he backed the trailer up and opened the door, here comes ten. Of course we told him he didn't have to do this, but there was no way he was going to take no as an answer. See in the midst of all this Lon and I had just switched over to cattle, so we had just like five head just because they wouldn't fit on the trailer. We thought we were pretty much rid of the pesky things, that is until Bill showed up. If you've ever been around sheep, they are basically born to die. If one crawls into somewhere were they shouldn't be, they all follow. For example, we had a big culvert that we were going to put in one summer. They thought it would be a good place to cool down, they all got stuck in it, overheated and died, we lost 6 head. Just because they couldn't figure out to back out of it. Lambs, oh they are so cute (and stupid)! In the picture above I don't know if you can tell, but they were running, bucking and playing. Long story short, Bill now has about 10 head that we are lambing now, and finally got sheared this weekend. They are suffolks/hampshire crosses and he uses them for 4-H. It's very hard to find guys that will shear anymore. It is back breaking work! I found a really good article from Kathy Voth, How and When to Shear Sheep. She suggests DIY. My reply to that is, hell no! I'll sell them before I have to shear them. This winter has been a duzzy so because of the weather we sheared later than we would have liked, but the wool insulates the sheep and if you take that away, they can get pretty darn cold. I'm hoping since we did this spring hits soon, because here in the next few days it will be calving season. I bet you can guess my next blog post!
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