Black Sheep Gathering 2016

Black Sheep Gathering in Eugene, Oregon is an event I always look forward to. I don't go as a vendor so it's not work. It's more like a road trip with sheep. Usually friends and Farm Club members (who are friends too) carpool but this year we were all on different schedules and instead we met up once we were in Oregon.

Loaded and ready to go. I took ten sheep, five of which were going to a new home. Fortunately only two were yearlings and the rest were lambs or I wouldn't have had room. That was Thursday. It was a long day because I just couldn't seem to stay awake for the drive. I left the house at 6:30 a.m. but stopped at several rest stops to take short naps and finally pulled into the fairgrounds about 4:30.

Black Sheep Gathering opened Friday morning with too many choices. What is a fiber fanatic to do? Watch the wool show? Watch the sheep show? Go to class? Shop?

Several friends participated in the Sheep-to-Shawl competition on Friday in which teams have five hours to prep fiber, spin yarn, and weave a shawl.

They spent many hours prior to the event dyeing and spinning the warp yarn, warping the loom, and sampling...

...to determine how they would use this beautiful fiber to spin the weft yarn.

Weaver, Gynna, wove a beautiful shawl (but I didn't get a photo when it was finished).

Walking back to the barn to get ready for the Jacob sheep show I saw...

...this Shetland ram displaying his ribbon.

Time to take the sheep to the show ring. 

Even though we had spent time working with the sheep they were not always cooperative. That is ram lambs, Marv and Meyer.

A friend who lives in Davis helped me show. That's the judge inspecting Meyer's fleece.

Checking Marv's fleece.

This is Lauren, one of the yearling ewes. I hadn't planned to sell her but she stayed in Oregon as a trade for another yearling. (That will be another story.)

Meridian Marv (Meridian Rotor x Meridian Marilyn) won Champion Jacob Ram...

...and yearling, Meridian Honey (Meridian Alex x Meridian Hot Lips), was Champion Jacob Ewe.

It's fun to win ribbons and trophies, but there were only two of us exhibiting sheep and I was the lucky one this year. In other years they have won the ribbons. The other breeder has beautiful sheep too and I  brought three of them home with me.

This is one of them and she will be introduced formally in another post.

Faces in the Barn

We're up to 66 lambs now. Here are some of them.

Lambs!

If you read the last post you know there is a contest about who will lamb first. No one is a winner yet because the choices didn't include the ewe who did actually lamb first. (Don't worry, the contest was just for the ewes in that blog post--we'll still have a winner.) I came home from town today to find Ears, a BFL-x ewe, just about ready to deliver. I didn't have a breeding date for her so no lambing date either.One lamb.Two lambs.Three lambs. All were up and nursing quickly. Good job, Ears!

I always look at the sheep surroundings for potential hazards. My feeders are chained to the fence or wall so they can't fall on a sheep. If I use baling twine to tie something (rarely because I have plenty of 2' lengths of chain with clips)...but if I do use baling twine I make sure that there is no loop in which a sheep could get a head or horn stuck. If I leave a ewe to lamb in the larger lambing area I make sure the gate is shut with an extra chain because I know a lamb can squeeze through the space between the gate and the wall. So I was sitting in the straw watching the first lamb move around and I planned to move this extra panel before I went to the house because......I knew that, however unlikely, a lamb could get stuck between it and the wall.  Sure enough, that happened while I was still sitting there.

So what could be cuter than a baby lamb? (Or at least As Cute?)How about this foal that was just 12 hours old?He was born down the road at my friend's house. We have to wait 5 months for lambs to be born. This foal was due on January 29 (11 months) and was just born today on February 22! That is almost a year of gestation for the mare.

Guess the Next Lambs

Da da da da da da daa. Dut, da da da da da da...While I'm typing this I'm hearing in my head  a well-known Game Show tune that goes with it. However, this game won't be quite like that one. I have a list of due dates based on observed breeding dates. I photographed most of the top contenders. My list shows the following ewes for February 25.Mae from the front.Mae from the rear.Shelby from the side.Shelby from the rear.Esmerelda, front.Esmerelda, rear.Athena from the front.Athena from the rear.Marilyn is due 2/26. Here she is from the rear. She was shorn in November. I sure like the recently shorn views better for this.Noel is due 2/27.Fran is due 2/28.Fran from the rear.Spring isn't due until March 5 but she always looks so big I thought I'd just give you a view.Who is this? Trick question. That is Delight who is nursing twins.And here is Dazzle with her single. You can sure see the difference in body condition of ewes that are nursing month old lambs.

There a few other ewes on the list for the first couple of days, but I didn't get photos of them. Maybe if I didn't pick them out of the bunch for photos then they really aren't ready. In any case we'll just go with the sheep that are shown here for the prize. Yes, there will be a prize. I'm thinking about that right now. Something easy to mail. How about a pair of socks (sorry, only medium left) or a t-shirt. Your choice.

You can guess here in the comments or on Facebook. Share this post with your friends. Whoever is the first to name the first of these ewes to lamb is the winner. We should know in a few days.

Dut, da da da, da da da...

Update: I didn't think this through very well. The first person with the right sheep will still get the prize, but to add incentive to continue voting I'll put all the names of all the people who choose that sheep in a random drawing for something else.

Meeting the Flock

There were unplanned lambs born January 23. I have kept those three lambs with their dams separate from the rest of the flock while it was raining and the sheep were in the barn area. Last week as it was drying out I put the flock on the pasture and then turned the new lambs out with them.One thing I watch for when putting lambs in the pasture for the first time is that they don't get tangled up in the electric fence. I'm glad to see when they touch the fence because I know that they will have learned to avoid it.This looks worse than it was. The whole incident was very brief and then......the nearby lamb was off and running.Bertha, one of the yearlings thought this looked like a good game......so she kept up the chase.

Eventually this lamb found his mom who hadn't been particularly concerned about him.

In the meantime the other two lambs stuck near their mom. I'm going to use colored tags again this year to give me more information about the lambs at a glance, mostly about sires. However, these first three have an unknown sire and the ram lambs (gorgeous as they are) have been banded. That's what the red tags mean--wether.

Itchy

In the last post I shared photos of sheep that were overdue for shearing. I'm pleased to say that most of the fleeces looked great when they came off today. There will be other blog posts, but this is a quick one with photos of shorn sheep with something in common.