It’s been just two months since the adopted lambs arrived. It’s been a wonderful time of learning for all of us: the lambs, their babysitters (the named sheep), Pearl and me. It’s taken me back to my earliest days of shepherding, when NONE of the flock, bar my 6 pet lambs, wanted to know me, let alone follow me around!
In the 7 years since then, I’ve become so accustomed to the way my sheep behave that it’s been a bit of a shock to be confronted with 28 energetic little boys who don’t want to know me, let alone follow me anywhere. And I completely underestimated how long it would take for them even to bond with their babysitters, never mind bonding with me.
We’re now partway there—the bond with their babysitters is strong enough that I can be confident the lambs will go with the named sheep even through gates and across paddocks with lots of contours. For the first few weeks, I kept them in small, utterly flat paddocks so I could be sure they were all there. (I’m getting better at counting the lambs as they get to be more settled, so that helps my confidence, too.)
For the last couple of weeks, I’ve had them in a paddock out the back of the farm, called Eagle Tree, because back in the really bad dry cycle of 2006 to 2009 stockman Davey used to feed the eagles on an old log. Davey’s friend who hunted wallabies would often give Davey one for his dogs, but the dogs didn’t get a look-in during that time. Davey has always felt that eagles were his totem.
Eagle Tree adjoins The Gardens, a biodiversity strip that runs most of the length of the property along the western boundary. The southern section of The Gardens has some of the dense gorse that I’m slowly killing with botanical succession (see Enhancing Biodiversity: Taming Gorse), along with lots of gullies and hills where errant lambs might find themselves lost. On the positive side, it’s got the closest thing I have to a true native grassland ecosystem, so it’s chock-full of nutritional goodies.
Getting them out to Eagle Tree from the Road Paddock was a bit of an adventure—3 km or so of open country in which I REALLY didn’t want to lose anyone. Happily, Freddie followed me beautifully, the rest of the sheep and lambs followed him, and Pearl trotted along calmly at the back. We stopped for morning tea at the briar rose patch, and the lambs were just as enthusiastic as their babysitters, munching away with gusto on the bright orange rose hips.
Today I went out for a bonding session, leaving Pearl at home. Pearl does tend to make the lambs fidgety. I sat on the ground with the whole little flock, and the friendliest sheep came up to say hi. The lambs aren’t scared of me any more, they are very curious when I’m talking to the older sheep, but they still won’t let me touch them.
I tried a couple of times to get the flock to follow me, to no avail. So I set off to go back to the ute, and here came Freddie (and everyone else) with a hop, skip, jump and sprint, following me and overtaking me on our way. I used the momentum to take them well into The Gardens and left them feeding on a back with lots of natives along with a few briar roses. It was a lovely experience.