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Tag Archives: sheep

Docking 2020

Bringing up the ewes and lambs

Lambing is closely followed by docking the new lambs. This means literally docking the tails, to protect against flystrike, earmarking and paint branding to indicate ownership, castrating to make management easier and to create better meat quality, vaccinating to protect health, and a look at each and every lamb for problems to address. It makes for long days, but also adds camaraderie and teamwork to our hard-working crew! A good lunch is sure to appear. No one has trouble sleeping at the end of the day

docking crew at Cherry Grove

end of the line, Dinkum Docker, Maeve branding

Pepe and Renee tailing and branding

Pepe, Renee, Siobhan

dances in dust

Eamon tossing lamb

Juan catching lamb

Siobhan and Bubba, docking

ewes and lambs, mothering up

Babies in May

19 May

1 Comment

Posted by Ladder Ranch on May 19, 2020 in Animals, Cattle, Dogs, Horses, Sheep

Tags: calves, colt, cows, lamb, mare, puppies, sheep, spring

Border collies on the job

07 May

bringing ewes up for shearing

Daughter and mother,
my right-hand canine duo—
Cora and Sadie.

1 Comment

Posted by Ladder Ranch on May 7, 2020 in Animals, Dogs, Poetry, Sheep

Tags: Border collies, Cottonwood, shearing, sheep

Shearing, interrupted

03 May

Anthony bringing up the wooley ewes

Shearing the sheep is a challenge every year. We are dependent, foremost, upon the arrival of the shearing crew. These skilled and essential crews are more difficult to find every year. For the crew bosses, it is harder each year to put together skilled shearers and to put together sheep to shear. We are dependent upon the weather, which is capricious. This year, now, our excellent shearing crew has started a few days late, due to weather. On Friday, we were able to get in a good days’ shearing. Yesterday it rained all day. Rain is usually good—much better than drought—but wet sheep can’t be shorn. Today, we started again, and managed to get through 50 head. A brief but fierce storm came through, and stopped us. So tomorrow, we try again. We have a lot of ewes who need shorn before lambing starts May 10^th or so.

Ciro shearing

the first shorn ewe

wooley ewes, shorn ewes

shorn ewes

Oscar and the crew

free at last!

water

storm clouds

2 Comments

Posted by Ladder Ranch on May 3, 2020 in Animals, Events, Folks, Peruvian sheepherders, Sheep

Tags: Powder Flat, shearing, sheep

An existential question regarding Siobhan

13 Apr

Is Siobhan dressed for Coronavirus?

. . .or trailing yearling ewes up the highway on a cold April day?

2 Comments

Posted by Ladder Ranch on April 13, 2020 in Animals, Family, Folks, Horses, Sheep

Tags: sheep, Siobhan, trailing

There’s no place like home

16 Mar

Home at last!

We brought the ewe lambs (coming yearlings) home this week from their winter quarters on the frozen beet fields of Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin. You can see their dirty faces from rooting sugar beets out of the ground. The white-faced Rambouillets look like smut-faced cross-breds with the dirt on their noses. We unloaded them at the Chivington Place, where the snow has finally melted enough to bring them home and allow them to graze. We hope to bring the rest of our ewes back to our country soon. We are still waiting for snow to melt on their BLM grazing allotments.

Off the truck and onto the Chivington Place

unloading

Looking for grass, not beets

Jesus keeping the lambs together

Jesus and the lambs

1 Comment

Posted by Ladder Ranch on March 16, 2020 in Animals, Dogs, Folks, Horses, Peruvian sheepherders, Sheep

Tags: Chivington Place, ewe lambs, Jesus, sheep, trucks

Tempus Fugit

07 Mar

Today, we are “springing forward” in time. The transitions back and forth between Standard Time and Daylight Savings Time are always jolting. I think it’s harder than one hour jet lag because the environmental clues of sunshine and shadows don’t change. We are close to the Equinox, when daylight and nighttime hours are approximately equal. This change is subtle but real. It reflects the wheeling of the earth, sun and stars. The measurement of time is a human construct, to give us a path to capturing the vast reality of our journey through the universe. The ancients built pyramids and Stonehenge to chart this course.

We are finally, I hope, making the transition from Winter to False (or Almost) Spring. A few days ago, we woke up to zero degrees, again. For the last two or three days, daytime temperatures have been above freezing–even as high as a balmy 40 degrees! We are moving from snow everywhere to snow most everywhere, interspersed with mud. We have lots of little lambs on the ground at Powder Flat. Most of the ewes are still in the Big Horn Basin, but we are seeing the light at the end of the snow tunnel and hope to bring them home soon. Most of the cows are in Nebraska and Laramie, but we are waiting for the day when conditions improve so they can come home too. The young bulls are hanging out at Powder Flat with the early lambers. Roma poet Virgil: “fugit inreparabile tempus”, which means “it escapes, irretrievable time”.

Home ranch on March 6th

Driveway

new lamb at Powder Flat

Young bulls looking forward to green grass

What–we’re losing an hour of sleep!

Life in the North

16 Feb

ewes in the Bighorn Basin

Faithful blog readers know that due to extreme winter conditions in the Red Desert, our usual wintering ground, we have trucked most of our ewes north to the sugar beet fields in Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin. The Bighorn Basin is several hundred miles to the north of us, almost to the Montana border, but is also several thousand feet lower, and less snowy. We have some ewes who experienced “early conception,” probably due to a rogue buck lamb who escaped docking. At Powder Flat, we are set up for shed lambing (usually in March) and have a great crew. Pat and I went up to visit the ewes and herders, and to collect the pregnant ewes and bring them home to lamb. The Bighorn Basin is also experiencing an unusually snowy winter, though for them it is several inches of snow, not several feet. We have a good crew there too–Pepe, Modesto, Alejandro and Joel. It’s a long ways from home, but has feed available for the ewes.

ewes near Burlington

Border collie on the job

Tres Amigos

pregnant ewes ready to load

Modesto and Pepe

Home at last

Dogs give a welcome home

2 Comments

Posted by Ladder Ranch on February 16, 2020 in Animals, Dogs, Family, Folks, Peruvian sheepherders, Sheep

Tags: Bighorn Basin, Border collies, livestock guardian dogs, Modesto, Pat, Pepe, sheep, winter

The ones who stayed behind (click on the link)

17 Jan

IMG_0806

North to better pastures

16 Jan

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.