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Tag Archives: LaClede

North to better pastures

ready to leave LaClede

Our decision to move most of the ewes north was not an easy one. We have never not kept them (relatively) close to home on desert sagebrush steppe grazing permits. Last February, our sheep were trapped by bad weather and roads. When this winter started early and hard, we bought extra feed and hauled it to them daily, hoping for a thaw. We did not have back-to-back blizzards like last February, but it has just kept snowing and getting colder. Eamon found sugar beets which had frozen in the ground in the Big Horn Basin. After lots of phone calls and planning, we started loading ewes, and rams, on trucks and moving them to beet fields and crop aftermath in the north part of the state. Most of them had never seen a truck.

morning wagons

Meghan bringing them up

loading

Guillermo

northward bound

Pat and Pepe at Cyclone Rim

unloading the trucks in the dark

the next day

where’s the beets?

the first day of the rest of the winter

 

 
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Posted by on January 16, 2020 in Animals, Dogs, Family, Folks, Peruvian sheepherders, Sheep

 

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Triangulation

Ewes at Laclede

 

Ewes and rams still standing in a triangle,
Too much snow to go out to graze.
Cake this morning, but not moving
out to that brushy hill not so far away.
Tomorrow—cake, then hay,
then out to that hillside with dry grass,
low brush. Food and shelter.
Time to move from the triangle,
spread like stars seeking space.
 
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Posted by on December 26, 2019 in Animals, Nature and Wildlife, Poetry, Sheep

 

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