January 2011

Above, frost on the fields this morning, the owl I had to search for in the neighbor's trees, today's sunrise looking west, and last night at sunset looking east.

So much for resolutions for the New Year to maintain this blog! Six degrees this morning but sunny and frost everywhere. My hands got cold breaking ice on water tanks, which takes a bit of effort with thick ice on 20 tanks and tubs. Looks like it will be a beautiful day though cool.

Sold the Katahdin ram Christmas Eve and I am supposed to pick up some free ewes this afternoon. I have avoided wool sheep for years because of the difficulty getting them shorn, but now that we have the Scotties, we have to find a shearer anyway and might as well accumulate some wool sheep. At this point I have some kind, quiet, older ewes, some light almost panicky lambs, some slightly reluctant older wethers, the Scotties who run or face off, and a few sheep that haven't been worked much. My goal is to keep a variety of sheep to work a variety of dogs on.

Our club is discussing where we'll have the Karen Child clinic planned in March, and I'm hoping we'll get to host it here at the farm. Don't quite have the arena and round pen up yet, but we could probably get it finished by March.

I've just barely started Nan and Biddy. Nan is very driven, very fast, and circles sheep going 9-0. She will stop and change directions, though, so I think she's going to be quite biddable. Biddy is an anxious pup and has been working the other dogs for a while, so she has been hesitant to attempt to work the sheep. Her third brief introduction to sheep last week, she began to balance on the sheep from the other side of the pasture as we moved the sheep back and forth ourselves. She gradually came closer and I could see that her eye had turned on for sheep, but she was a bit shy about really trying to stop or turn the sheep. Just seeing her balance and watch the sheep seemed enough for the moment, so we let the sheep out of the pasture to run back to their pen on their own, not having one of the trained sheep dogs handy. Biddy ran after the sheep out of the gate and overtook and stopped them! Her instinct kicked in and told her it was wrong for sheep to be out of control and she needed to control them if there weren't any other dogs around. (We tried moving the sheep with a trained dog and she just went off and refused to engage.)