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.
It's been a month in the Basin Grazing Area, so time to make a move. There was a domino effect, starting a couple of weeks ago when my fencing contractors demolished the old fence along the highway in the rams' paddock. I shifted the rams onto the Racecourse, into the triangular paddock I call the "Stud Paddock"--a legacy of the years I bred my own rams from a small flock of high quality ewes known as studs (yes, it confused me at first, too--how can girls be studs??)
Quite a contrast to yesterday: we transited nearly the full length of the Basin Grazing Area, and the wind was howling again, out of the west. Yesterday, late in the day, the wind veered northerly long enough to draw the flock out of the Back Gully Reserve and into the Grass Gully, where we picked them up this morning.
A delightful day, with sunshine, light winds and tractable sheep. We did only a relatively short distance but the sheep were grazing most of the time. The NE side of the gully is a bit hard for the sheep to find: they have to make their way through fairly dense cutting sags (lomandra longifolia) and gorse to get well down into the better forage.
Cold sunshine and blustery winds made for an exciting short circuit this morning. The sheep were in the Back Gully, near the tree reserve, when we found them, and from there it's just a short hop into the Back Gully Reserve. The Reserve is a rocky, mostly native area, though with lots of gorse in parts. It has good shelter from the westerlies, and lots of forage diversity.
My computer suffered a nasty power surge last week, and has been limping along since, but only just barely. Today I sent it off for repair, leaving me with only my iPad to pretend to be a real computer. I started working on computers in the mid-1970s, and bought my first PC when they came out in the early 80s. Since then, I've never been without a PC or Mac, so little wonder I'm feeling withdrawal symptoms!
An astonishing proportion of the property, even at elevation, is under an inch or so of water. I can report the sheep have gotten much better (or more resigned) to walking on water than they were before the big rains. On the other hand, my hiking boots have developed a leak, so I'm less happy about it. Today's circuit was not a deliberate attempt to sample all the wettest bits, but we seemed to hit more than our share. The forecast for tomorrow, my usual full-day for shepherding, is showers, windy and cold, so I took advantage of today's beautiful weather to do the circuit.
Between the wild wintery weather and my somewhat dodgy ankle, I haven't been up to see the sheep for a week. It's so wet I nearly bogged the Polaris, so I've given up driving it for the time being. However, today augers well, so I'm heading up on foot for a half-day visit. I really have no idea where the flock will be, but given the persistent sou'west and westerlies of the past few days, and knowing their preference for the gully in the middle of the Basin Grazing Area, I'm expecting to find them there.
After the fog lifted this morning, the dogs and I took a run with the Polaris up the hill. It's still very soggy and muddy, and I nearly got the Polaris bogged in an innocent-looking, but nefarious, stretch. One lovely benefit of the run, though, was seeing the flock putting themselves back into Waterfall Gully, grazing into an easterly breeze.
We'll try to go down Brian's Track (named after Brian Fish, who discovered the old track when he was bulldozing gorse for me several years ago), and down the old highway. Assuming the flock is where I'm expecting them, at the southwest end of the White Gum Grazing Area. There are several pockets of long grass in among the gorse cover that I'd like to let the flock graze.
Sunshine makes all the difference. Today's forecast was much the same as last Monday's, but this was a much more pleasant circuit. As you might guess from my roundabout track to the sheep this morning, I had a lovely idea for a completely different circuit than the one we did. The sheep foiled me by placing themselves nearly at the gate into the highway reserve, so off we went, to repeat last week's trek.
Another 1 and ½ inches of rain this week has left us all quite soggy, until last night, that is, when a -4C (25F) frost put an ice coating on all that wet ground. The sun is shining, but the thermometer has not yet thawed past freezing and there is a nasty "lazy" wind blowing (too lazy to go around you, so it goes right through!).
Don't get too excited about the word "droving": the old highway boundary is only about a kilometre long. Nevertheless, it felt like a most adventuresome day, as we had to traverse several tricky spots to get to our destination. I found the flock at the top of the hill, in their usual favourite spot.
It wasn't a proper shepherding day today, though I did do the first part on foot. It's time to move from the Racecourse Grazing Area up the hill to the White Gum Grazing Area, so we did a sort of "farewell" graze in the Racecourse on the way. The sheep were happy enough to follow me out of the first paddock, but refused the water jump twice before Albert, bless him, led them across to me.
Ok, someone in the flock is sneaking around on Facebook. They spent the entire day yesterday in the Stud Paddock, which is where I was planning to take them today. (I mentioned this at the end of my post on Monday.) Though the idea of telepathy has also crossed my mind, the explanation is probably as simple, and encouraging as this: I'm apparently anticipating what the sheep need and want, and they in turn are getting better at moving through the landscape to find it on their own.
Ok, this is one of the many cultural challenges I didn't even know I was facing when I moved to Australia: first, having a Queen at all; second, not being a republic (really??), and third, the liberties that are taken with the Queen's Birthday holiday, which is on a different day in almost every state, none of which correspond to her real birthday on April 21.
