Stripes paint baby calves,
spring light sliding through wood slates
promising sunshine.
Category Archives: Animals
Zebra baby calves
Spring Fever
spring snow on round bales
bovine shadows
It’s springtime and the livin’ is crazy. After hunkering down for the winter months, we are moving livestock from winter pasture to spring pasture. We are lambing, calving and trying to get all of our livestock charges to where they need to be for the change of seasons. We trucked the yearling ewes, and a few older ewes, from their wintering grounds at Powder Wash to the Badwater pasture. We are seeing the Akaushi cross calves on the ground, after last year’s decision to try these Wagu-type bulls on our Angus heifers. The calves sure are pretty and we’re excited to see what they look like as they grow up.
Akaushi babies at Powder Flat
Pepe, at dawn, ready to load the yearlings
ready for the trucks
guard dog, on the job
guard dog on the truck
Meghan, supervising
yearlings unloaded at Badwater
Alejandro, with his bellwether, Panchito
Bringing the bucks home
Leo getting the bucks ready to load
In mid-December, we haul bucks out to the Red Desert so they may romance the ewes, thus guaranteeing lambs in May and June. “December rams bring May lambs” as the old saying goes.
Now it’s time to bring the rams home so that they may resume their bachelor lives, and create challenges until next December.
Here we are loading rams on the top of the aptly named Cyclone Rim. We are on the Rim seeking snow drifts for water for the sheep. The bucks are still in their working clothes (red powder) which will come off when they are shorn in a month or so.
Welcome home, bucks!
Leo with the bucks
down the chute to the trailer
Pepe, Leo and Seamus
Leo’s camp on Cyclone Rim
Cattle and sheep and dogs, oh my!
Ladder Ranch crew–Rhen, Eamon, Edgar, Leo, Pat
Rhen on the chute after guiding his Dad who was backing up the truck.
Sometimes we have multi-species days. Pat, Eamon, Rhen and Sharon headed to Powder Flat to load heifers on trucks so we could move them to spring country north of Dixon. We are full-on lambing at the Powder Flat headquarters, so there was plenty going on there already.
heifers heading for the truck
Eamon on Aspen, ready to trail up the road
meanwhile back at Powder Flat. . .
guardian dog puppy in training
burning old straw by the lambing shed
Leo and Rhen feeding a bum lamb
Ladder branding iron
Early Lambing at Powder Flat
Hampshire ewe with comfy lamb
Each March, we lamb our purebred ewes, Hampshire and Rambouillet, in the sheds at Powder Flat. We raise our rams for the commercial range ewes from these two farm flocks. Luckily, we have a good crew and the early weather has been mild.
Pat and Edgar with pen for outdoor dining
guard dog hard at work in a circle of ewes
guard dogs on the job
Hampshire ewe and twins
bum lambs in warm straw
Leo feeding the bum lambs
Meanwhile, Maria is hanging out with the bucks
Dry winter
on the feed line
Black cows wintering
near Laramie, munching hay–
waiting for snowfall
January on the Red Desert
ewes at Chain Lakes
The past two winters have been hard winters by anyone’s standards. Conditions were especially harsh on the Red Desert north of Wamsutter, where we winter our sheep. In 2018-2019, the ewes and bucks were snowed in on the Cyclone Rim allotment for weeks, and we couldn’t even get to the Chain Lakes allotment. In 2019-2020, the winter started early, so we found frozen sugar beets in the northern part of Wyoming and trucked the sheep to farms.
Now we are in drought. We have received around 65 percent of normal moisture so far this winter. An easy winter is easier on both livestock and herders, and on us as we drive back and forth to the sheep camps. The sheep depend upon snow for water for most of the winter. We’ve had several days of wind and thaw, which takes the snow and leaves bare sage and steppe. We now wait for a good winter storm, which we hope will bring much-needed moisture. Winter snow brings us spring grass.
Enough snow. Not too much. Not too little.
Joel with guard dog puppy.
Sentinel ewes
Pat and Pepe at Cyclone Rim base camp
Pancho and Lefty
Alejandro with Pancho, the pet sheep and Lefty, the puppy
Here’s Alejandro at his winter camp near Powder Wash. Pancho is a bum lamb who is well on his way to becoming the new bellwether. He has big hooves to fill to replace Dunkin. We’ll just have to name the puppy Lefty.
The horses are wintering well
Alejandro with his Border collie puppies
Ladder Ranch
