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.
White frost start
Fleeces being judged at the Campbell Town Show
Another white frost today. I wish I were going shepherding, as it promises to be as nice as yesterday. Instead, I'm heading up to Campbell Town in my role of second assistant wool steward to help tally scores and arrange fleeces. The C'Town Show is the longest continually running agricultural show in the southern hemisphere, and is great fun. The Show runs tomorrow and Saturday, and is well worth a visit.
More of the Show
My lovely friend Sue judging the jams
The sheep section filling up...
I love a white frost. It transforms everyday small beauties into things magical. A fence line becomes the frame for a tapestry of abandoned cobwebs. Old Man Willow no longer looks sad, but rather regal in his hoarfrost coat. To add to the frosty beauty of the morning, my pair of swans (well, I like to think they are the ones who've nested on Swan Lake before) were visiting Old Man Willow's water hole.
A long, cold day. The sun only came out briefly about 2 pm, and there was a chilly southwesterly wind all day. As usual, it was ok when I was moving, but really, really cold when I stopped. I had my bivouac bag with me, but the sheep didn't choose to have a mid-day rest. At one point, I thought they were settling, and I starting looking for a sheltered, level spot to put my bivvy bag.
I haven't seen the flock move into the Lucerne Reserve on their own, so I'm assuming I'll find them somewhere in the middle of the Basin. The forecast wind is westerly, so depending on how miserable it is I may or may not have trouble moving them down the hill into Old Cabin. If that all goes well, I'll take them on our usual circuit around the perimeter of the paddock, and from there into the Lucerne Reserve.
The morning started with a gorgeous sunrise, and a -2C (28F) frost--our first proper frost of winter. Although it's only forecast to be 10C (42F) with sunshine and light winds I'm hoping for a lovely morning circuit. However, more rough weather is on the way, interfering with my shepherding schedule, so I've decided to move the flock to the northeastern end of the Basin Grazing Area today.
I love my full-day circuits. I think it's because the length of time, with only the animals and the landscape around me, lets me enter a different part of myself. It's restful and timeless, in the sense of no deadlines other than organic ones, like hunger or fatigue. I hear and see so much: birdsong, wind in the she-oaks, the sound of an eagle's wings as he lands in a tree near me, the chatter of a fairy wren family, the sound of sheep eating.
I cheated and looked to see where the sheep were yesterday evening when I ran the dogs, so I'm assuming I know where they'll be this morning. There's lots more forage in the Back Gully Reserve, so we'll take another trip there today, unless the flock completely fools me and ends up on the northeastern end of the Grazing Area, in which case we'll go for the Lucerne Reserve.
I'm expecting to find the flock about where they were on Monday, and then with the northwest wind to graze them into the Back Gully Reserve, one of the biodiverse areas. There's quite a lot of gorse in the gully itself, and so far the sheep haven't shown their usual winter interest in gorse as a forage.
Whenever I tell someone I have a waterfall on my place, they look at me quizzically or pityingly, as though I've completely lost the plot during this extended dry time, and am seeing mirages. But I really, really do have a waterfall, with about a 15 foot drop, in my steepest gully of all. Ok, not all the time.
It's as though winter has decided to make up in a week the lost time in March and April, when it was so warm and mild. We had yet another ½ inch of rain overnight, following an inch on Monday night, both with blustery westerly gales. Last night as I drove back from choir practice about 10:30, it was sleeting horizontally, and the temperature outside my kitchen window was hovering at freezing.
I'm wimping out from shepherding today-forecast is for significant rain. Here's a photo from Saturday's shepherding-one I took with my real camera and its real telephoto lens. My only unhappiness with Instagram is that I have no way to zoom in on the images I want to send you! This was coming up through that rough gully. Notice the nice bite full of long grass in the lead sheep's mouth. By the way, I often see this older ewe up front, so maybe Horatio has some competition for Prime Minister.
There's lots of good forage still in the Highway Reserve, so my plan for today is to head back there and try to work some of the less-grazed corners. I have no idea where the sheep will be, so have done an "eeny-meeny" guess. We'll see! Light northerly winds may help us to do a full length transit. I've appended two of my favourite photos of Elf and friends Clara and Vicki.
Assuming the NW winds are keeping the sheep towards the western end of the property, I'm planning to take them on a repeat of yesterday, into the Highway Reserve from the southwest end. This time I'll see if I can get them to graze down the hill to the west, before heading north into the tricky gully at the bottom.
After our wild weather (and nearly an inch of rain, calloo, callay!) I thought today I might just take the flock through the middle section of White Gum Grazing Area, the paddock I call White Gum Wood. We'll concentrate on the downhill side of the paddock, and time permitting, may poke our noses into the southwestern end of the Highway Reserve.
The good news is we had 14 mm (just over ½ inch) of rain over the weekend, in a series of wild storms and gale force winds. The ground is covered with tiny moths flying below the radar--their first chance for the right hatching conditions all year, I suspect. Today the forecast is for 50 kph winds, so I think I will let the wet sheep hang out wherever they darn please, and give myself a break from trying to convince them they WANT to go into (or even with) that wind. I skipped Saturday's half day as well, mostly because I was still worn out from Thursday's marathon. You see how easy it is to slide into laziness and complacency with this shepherding business? Good thing I have all of you to keep me honest! I really will do a circuit on Wednesday--probably back to the Highway Reserve for half a day, to let them enjoy this:
My somewhat radical plan for today is to go back to the Lucerne Reserve for the morning, then take the flock into Old Cabin, which is actually part of the Basin Grazing Area for the afternoon, then out via Waterfall Gully Reserve and back to the White Gum Grazing Area. The plan is radical in that I don't normally graze into a different Grazing Area.
