It occurred to me that not everyone knows how to catch (and immobilise) a sheep. Here’s a tutorial, just in case you are ever confronted with a rogue sheep careening through an agricultural show.
Catching a healthy sheep in the paddock is an art form, and one neither I nor any of my dogs have mastered. About the only time you really need to catch a sheep is if they have been struck by fly.
I know I’m not alone in my benign neglect of routine maintenance, but that’s not much solace when it starts coming home to roost. My last few months have been so full of delayed maintenance I’ve reluctantly come to the conclusion that life is 95% maintenance and only 5% exciting new projects. Unfortunately, by attempting for years to live life as though it were the other way around, not only have I neglected maintenance shockingly, I’ve simultaneously created a whole lot more maintenance to ignore. Sigh.
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!
Since I began “active shepherding” in 2014 as a way to help my flock find the biodiversity they need to stay healthy, I’ve gone through several cycles. The first was simply figuring out how SLOWLY they need to travel in order to eat on the move. The lesson for me and my dogs was to enter into what I call “sheep time”—actually a feeling of timelessness. Getting there took me the best part of a year.
For the first time in months, this morning I put my backpack on and went to shepherd my sheep. And this afternoon, I’m writing the first Come Shepherding post in just over a year! Several things have conspired to create this lapse. The pandemic didn’t help, but the first real change came in May of last year, when I decided to try an experiment (there’s a surprise) and test whether my sheep are truly locally adapted.
I had a great plan for today, but the sheep forestalled me by doing it on their own yesterday: grazing the steep hill facing north toward the farmhouse. They spent the morning there, contentedly grazing the burned area from stem to stern, and even more importantly, from top to bottom. All I can say is downhill in this case was also upwind. Wind won, this time.
Well, though on Saturday I promised you a circuit in a new area, I lied. Not lied, exactly, just didn't think it all the way through. I'm betting the sheep will still be on the eastern end of the White Gum Grazing Area and therefore close to the Lucerne Reserve. Might as well have another bite at beating the bugs to the lucerne crop!
It continues terribly dry, though a bit of rain is forecast for Thursday, so I decided to do my full-day shepherd a day early and keep Thursday for a (hopefully!) rainy day of finishing my quarterly taxes. The bugs are gaining on the sheep in the lucerne (for those who missed earlier posts on this, I have aphids/mites turning my beautiful stand of lush green lucerne (alfalfa) into yellow standing hay).
I've been out with a nasty tummy bug since Friday, so no shepherding this weekend. I'm preparing to totter around the Racecourse GA (Grazing Area) with the flock this morning, hopefully all will be ok. We are now desperately short of rain, again. Essentially no rain for the past 7 weeks. So I am trying to spin out the grazing in the Racecourse GA as long as I possibly can, before putting the flock back on the White Gum Grazing Area.
The Lucerne Reserve is an area encompassing about 50 acres of monoculture lucerne, with grass and weeds, and an upper area of predominantly native pasture. Most of the fences shown on the map are no longer there-I took them down last year to allow free access from the sheltered hill area (native) to the lush feed of the lucerne flat. My plan is to give the flock the morning in the lucerne, then head up the hill into the native pasture for the afternoon.
The plan is to work the flock around all the lower edges of the paddocks that make up the Racecourse Grazing Area. Sheep prefer high ground-a predator thing, I'm convinced: much easier to spot the lions in the long grass if you hold the high ground. Of course, there's not much long grass to hide in these days...
