Sheep need a lot of looking after and one of the primary tasks is checking hooves and bottoms. Much like human fingernails and toenails, sheep’s hooves can grow and become uncomfortable. If not trimmed, infection can get in.
Dirty bottoms are a magnet for flies and the last thing you want is the blowfly laying eggs there. These eggs hatch into maggots which will eat the sheep alive. It’s called flystrike and it’s one of the reasons shearing is so important.
While we check our sheep 2 or 3 times a day, it also helps to take preventive measures and this means keeping the wool around the sheep’s bottom short and clean. It’s a process called dagging.
First step was to get the sheep together and penned up. We bring them down to the lambing shed. It means they have shelter from sun or rain or both, as often happens here. While I get busy setting up sheep hurdles, Nicole goes and fetches them. These days, they follow happily.
Once in the shed, we construct a small treatment pen. You can’t see it from the photo, but it has a sliding entrance. In practice, that’s a hurdle we can shift sideways to make an entrance.
It’s all pretty calm and most of the sheep just wander in to the treatment pen when called. A couple need bribing with some sheep nuts and one, Bluemli, takes a bit more persuading – she is very wary of pens. We leave Bluemli till last.
It all went very smoothly. I helped keep the sheep calm while Nicole lifted each leg and checked the hooves. Sheep don’t mind their front legs being lifted, but can get a bit twitchy about their back legs losing contact with the ground. I find that if I distract them with neck scratches and soft words, they usually stay pretty calm through the whole process. Each sheep has its own particular sweet spot for a scratch. Find that and it all goes smoothly.
Then it’s a quick bottom check. If the bottom is dirty, it gets a clean and trim. After that, out that sheep goes, the sliding hurdle moves across and the next sheep wanders in.
The ones already treated often hang around outside the pen seeking more tickles. That’s actually quite helpful as their proximity also has a calming effect on the sheep whose hooves are being inspected.
Bluemli, well she went from being a little wild eyed to settling, chewing the cud and then back to wild eyed when it was her turn. I grabbed a handful of sheep nuts, waved them in front of her nose and, to our astonishment, she trotted into the pen with me. Once in the pen, she was quite happy and let Nicole trim her hooves and check her bottom with no trouble at all.
This story is a bit late, I meant to post it last week but everything to do with shearing this year has been delayed so it’s no wonder my little blog story is too!
Each year we have our flock sheared. Our breed of sheep (Coloured Ryelands), are particularly woolly, they’re a “wool breed” which means they were bred back in the olden days, helped along by the monks of Herefordshire, to produce wool which was then used predominantly for making fine garments. Ryeland wool was shipped all over Europe and sold for high prices. Queen Victoria reputedly even had stockings made from Ryeland wool! It was very sought after and Ryeland sheep were kept very busy.
Sadly, nowadays there is very little demand for wool, least of all Ryeland wool ☹ It is a very sad fact because if you’ve ever stroked a Ryeland sheep you will see why their wool is so special. First of all, the Ryeland looks like a teddy bear, they are woolly all over, legs, tummies and faces. Their wool is very dense and springy and as it grows they start to look much tubbier than they actually are. Here is a picture of Yssi taken in early spring, she could easily be mistaken for a barrel!
Yssi looking rather barrel shaped
So back to shearing, in Scotland shearing traditionally takes place in June, about 6 weeks later than in England. This is because of the northern climate, the summer takes a bit longer to kick in up here. Sheep are shorn as soon as summer makes an entrance, it has to be “post frost” for obvious reasons, and also sheep are sheared traditionally on hot, sunny days as the wool needs to be dry before it can come off. As you can imagine, this can be a tricky to organise when you’re at the mercy of an Atlantic weather system in Bonny Scotland!
This year we contacted our shearer as we’ve always done, in May and he said he’d come in June and let us know the date nearer the time. So we carried on with life. May turned out to be one of the hottest on record and Adrian and I were tempted to bring shearing forward, but lambing still goes on in May and we didn’t want to disrupt Jim’s schedule. Shepherds have a packed calendar, particularly in the spring with lambing and shearing happening in close succession.
Now, we check on our sheep twice a day, but decided to step it up to three times in the run up to “the big still to be confirmed shearing day”. Hot weather brings out the flies, and mucky, woolly bottoms plus flies equals a potentially fatal condition; fly strike. Every few days we took some of the flock into a pen and dagged their bottoms. All the spring grass was having an effect, especially on the younger ones whose digestive systems were still “firming up” so there was plenty of dagging! We also ran our eyes over the flock and checked for any odd behaviour which might indicate a maggot problem. Even despite the dagging, maggots can be crafty and hide in nooks and crannies. A sheep who’s been “struck” by the blowfly will behave oddly, they will jump at their own shadows and try and run away from themselves. Sometimes their behaviour change is more subtle so you need to use your intuition as well. As we were soon to find out.
We also needed to check for any sheep getting stuck on their backs unable to right themselves, all that wool is very heavy after a year’s growth, and sometimes a sheep can roll over and get stuck like a beetle, unable to get up with the weight of their fleece, which can get even heavier if it gets wet. This happened to Yarr quite recently, click here to read about his pickle: So these checks were really important for the sheep’s welfare, and also for Adrian and I to be able to sleep at night, otherwise we’d worry non-stop.
May came and went and we were starting to feel run ragged, we’d added another job to our sheep tasks; mucking out the shelter. The sheep had taken to camping out in their “summer house” pretty much for most of the day. They really love their shelter, it provides shade and somewhere to get away from the flies, however on the flip side, it can get mucky very quickly. Unlike pigs, sheep do their business wherever they happen to be, so you could be going round with the pooper scooper and they’d be filling it up as fast as you’d be emptying it! We’d then sprinkle lemon scented wood shavings down which is great because the lemon scent keeps the flies away, and the shavings provide a lovely soft carpet for the sheep to relax on.
We got into the first week of June and by now texts were going back and forth between myself and Jim to get a shearing date in the diary. We would be done in between his bigger flocks, much like a small building job is fitted in around bigger building jobs. By now we’d already found Yarr stuck on his back, and two cases of flystrike. First Yssi, then Yogi. One morning I’d gone to muck out the shelter and do my checks when I noticed Yssi sitting a bit strangely, she was sitting up, almost like a dog, her bottom on the ground with her front legs straight out in front of her. I watched her get up and follow the rest of the flock out while I mucked out and she seemed fine but I thought I’d bring her into the pen anyway. I straddled her backwards and parted the wool on her backside, my heart sank, there were at least 3 or 4 clusters of tiny wriggling maggots, deep in her wool. I phoned Adrian who was in the kitchen making breakie, and asked him to bring shears, cotton wool and cider vinegar diluted in water. We don’t routinely spray our flock so had no chemicals to hand. I intended to pick the maggots out and clean her up with the vinegar solution. I would also shave her backside to give the maggots nowhere to hide.
Yogi
Yssi was a trouper, she let us do all this to her and we pretty much got rid of all the maggots. Just to be sure though we whizzed over and got some flystrike solution from the local agricultural store and gave her bottom another once over. While we were doing this, we noticed Yogi stamping her feet and looking a bit wild eyed. Oh oh, we both said, lucky we had our vet kit to hand, we brought Yogi in, lifted her tail, and sure enough there was a tiny patch of maggots there, wriggling around. They were clustered around a “problem area” on her bottom. A few weeks back I’d found a little patch of infected skin under some damp wool. I’d shaved it clean and her bottom had healed, however those blowflies had obviously found a tiny bit of skin which was still broken and decided to lay her eggs there. Great place for a fly, not so great for poor old Yogi!!
We upped our bottom patrol and started mucking out the shelter twice a day, morning and evening. The weather was still unbearably hot but now it was wet as well with summer storms and heavy downpours. Jim had intended to come twice but had to cancel due to the rain. Then he cancelled again because he slashed his arm open and had to be rushed to hospital to get stitched up. It’s a dangerous job shearing, especially when you’re tired from running from farm to farm between storm showers trying to fit everyone in.
At the end of June there was a week’s reprieve a dry spell once more and we had another date from Jim. At the allotted time of 5pm we brought the sheep down to the orchard near the house where there’s a power supply and another shelter for them to wait in until Jim arrived. We were ready and waiting. We waited, and waited, and waited.
At 7.30pm we could wait no more, I climbed a hill and texted Jim, I didn’t want to hassle him, but the sheep had been penned up a long time and needed to get out. We needed to know what time he would be coming. A reply came back, “sorry, two of the team have heat stroke, can’t come this evening”. Our hopes crashed, we were so upset, we felt sorry for Jim as he was having a hard time, but our flock desperately needed shearing, it was becoming a welfare issue. Their thick coats needed to come off, we couldn’t wait any longer!
At this point I hear you ask, why don’t you shear them yourselves? Well, that is a good question, and the answer is, we learnt to shear when we first got sheep, and we sheared our first flock (albeit only 3!) It took us a long time and the sheep came out looking rather oddly shaped! The trouble is, you need to put in lots of mileage to get good, and you need to be good to be able to shear, you can’t be “just OK”. If you’re not good, you can badly injure your sheep, or stress the animal by holding it in position for too long, they can die of stress quite easily. To cut a long story short, we don’t have enough sheep to practise on and just doing it once a year isn’t enough to get good at shearing. So having done the course and sheared our lot once, we made the decision to call in the experts.
The next day we sent out an SOS on twitter and rang everyone we knew who had sheep and got numbers of other shearers. We couldn’t afford to wait any longer, and much as we understood that we’d be done eventually, we didn’t want to wait any more. We also felt it would be better to have a small flock shearer, we love the way Jim shears, I called him Mr No Nicks, he’s a great shearer, but he’s a big flock boy, and we realised we needed someone who specialised in small flocks that could prioritise us and not fit us in around other bigger farms.
After some frantic phone calls, one or two had the same problem as Jim, they were working through backlogs due to the wet weather so couldn’t help us, we then somehow we ended up with three shearers!! Just like busses!
We settled on one recommended by smallholders in a village not far away and at long last, a new date was set, and this time, nothing went wrong, PHEW!!!
The new shearer, Guy, did a brilliant job along with his partner Dee who helped me collect the fleeces and allocate name tags to them to be later made into rugs and cushions.
We have already booked Guy for next year, we are so happy we found him and I think our flock are pretty happy too 😊
It’s been a while since I logged on but recently my pet human took a short video of me demonstrating my intelligence so I thought it would be a good time to tell you all about it.
You’re probably aware that us sheep are herd animals and like to do things as a group. If Seline heads off up the hill we’ll all follow her. If Sparkle gets spooked by a pheasant popping up out of a clump of sedge grass and flapping its wings, we’ll all get a bit spooked. That’s just how we are, its in our nature.
But I’m going to let you into secret, us sheep are not such simple souls as people like to think, in fact, we’re very clever! As well has having the herd instinct we also have the voice recognition instinct. Have you ever watched a group of lambs and their mums? Each mum has a special call for her lambs so each lamb knows exactly which mum to head over to for teat. (Sometimes a lamb might take liberties and sneak over to one of their aunties for teat but once they get butted away by a cross auntie they soon learn their lesson! But anyway, I digress.
Ever since I was born here at Auchenstroan, I’ve noticed our pet humans calling us using different sounds for each one of us, just like our mums. So over time we’ve learnt a whole different language, “human speak”, as well as our own “sheep speak”. And just like when we were lambs, we get a nice treat if we trot over to the humans when called, sheep nuts! 😊 😊 😊 Or, our second favourite thing, back scratches 😊 😊
In the video below you can see me demonstrating this. My pet human says my name, I hear her but can’t see her (admittedly I was quite interested in a particular blade of grass at that moment). But I couldn’t help myself, I found myself looking from left to right, and then I saw the human standing there with Witchy bleating by her side. I had a wee shake and then headed right over and got a back scratch for my efforts. Ta daa!
Despite living in what is generally considered to be a wet part of Britain, we do have prolonged dry spells. In fact, for the last 3 years, there have weeks of dry weather in the spring.
Since moving here, we have added two water tanks to gather water from hillside springs. But these springs dry up in the dry weather and if we’re not careful, we have to ferry water up from the river. This year, just before the dry spell hit, we got a new 550 litre trough installed adding extra capacity.
When they first saw it, the sheep were startled; they are not keen on new things appearing unexpectedly. But as the rain stopped and the sun came out, they have found it to be another useful drinking spot.
I think, over coming years, we might add further capacity till we have enough water to last for months rather than weeks.
One of the annual responsibilities we have as smallholders is to vaccinate the sheep. Each year, they get an injection of Heptavac. The interesting challenge is how best to do it without getting the sheep overexcited. We have, in the past, used sheep nuts to misidrect them while they are injected, but then the rest of the flock gather round barging each other trying to get in. Last year, in all the argy bargy, Ymogen suffered a broken jaw. This year, we were determined to avoid that kind of accident.
We also had to make sure the wiser of our sheep did not clock what was going on and keep well clear. Bluemli, particularly, can tell when we are up to something and will stay well clear of any pens.
We hatched our plans. First, all the sheep were gathered into the shed. This involved a little bribery in the form of sheep nuts. However, these were in a trough so they were all able to get some.
We built a small pen right outside the shed with a sliding door, well a sheep hurdle we could move out of the way, to let them in. They all lined up to see what we were up to (see picture). On opening the entrance, the first sheep obligingly stepped through. I held them tight while Nicole administered the injection. It went like clockwork. Each time we opened the pen, a sheep wandered in, got their injection and was ushered out into the paddock.
One or two sheep tried to play the bucking bronco card, but all in all it was very peaceful. So peaceful, in fact, that the vaccinated sheep gathered round to watch their colleagues getting injected.
All in all, it took about an hour do vaccinate our 19 sheep. We retired for a cuppa very pleased with ourselves.
Hiya!! Ymogen here, or Ymo as they sometimes call me. It has been a while but I’m still here, happy as ever. HOWEVER, the weather has been vile. What can I say? We seem to have had endless storms. A mixture of high winds, rain, sleet and snow has made it totally miserable out here. And when the wind finally stopped, we had snow, then rain, then snow, then rain, then snow, then rain. It just went on and on. It got pretty muddy in places, let me tell you.
Needless to say, none of us sheep were impressed. Thankfully, we have two good shelters. At the moment, our preferred shelter is what the humans call the lambing shed. It’s where I was born and it’s large and spacious. It also has the hay feeders nearby and a water trough inside the shelter. We have been crowding in there a lot of the time. When the weather has been ultra bad, we have not even dared ventured out to eat. Luckily, the female human, Nicole, has also been giving us personal hay in the shed.
It’s a relief to be out of the rain, but we do tend to get a bit bored being stuck in here, even if it is our own choice. I think I am the most put out, to be honest. I’m always up for heading out to the grassy fields. Much better out there than all the argy bargy round the feeders. I mean, me and Yndia, we’re quite small and petite really. Not to say that we won’t stand our ground, but it’s just all much more fun out in the fields. And even though the weather hase been vile, the grass has been growing yum yum.
Anyway, here’s a piccie of me just in case you’d forgotten what I look like.
It’s a long time since our flock were sheared, 7 months to be precise! Plenty of time for a sheep of a woolly persuasion to get a touch of the ‘woolly eyes’!!
This basically means it’s time for a wee face trim.
There’s more to this than just aesthetics, if the wool growth is such that the sheep can no longer see properly this is quite stressful for the animal. Sheep rely on good eyesight to keep watch for predators, especially to the sides and back whilst they’re grazing. If wool growth stops this they can become jumpy and nervous.
I really enjoy trimming sheep’s faces, it’s a satisfying job and over the years I’ve learned a few tricks to keep them calm and relaxed while I do it. I have to keep them still while I do the haircuts which is easier said than done and has taken many years of practise. The method which works for me is to pen each sheep up individually and then tie the animal to a hurdle using a halter and lead rope. Our flock is used to the halter and lead rope, I give them ‘halter training’ lessons from a young age and it’s really paid off when it comes to handling them.
So, with the sheep haltered and in position, I gently support their chin with one hand, (this stops them from moving forwards), and with the other hand I carefully snip away the wool from around their eyes. Then, while I have them penned up I also check their bottoms and hooves. It takes me about 20 minutes per sheep, I never rush this job because it’s a good time to bond with the sheep and it gives me the opportunity to spot anything which needs attention.
Yzzy
Today while I was working on Yzzy I noticed she was passing dung through both passages, front and back so to speak. This wasn’t too much of a surprise as when Yzzy was a lamb she was born with a condition fairly common in newborn lambs, no anus. The vet had had to come out and make an incision and within minutes she was fine. The incision was basically a new back passage and would mean Yzzy could grow up and lead a normal life, she just wouldn’t be allowed to have lambs.
But today it seemed she had created a new passage, one which shouldn’t be there. I mulled it over and pondered what to do. She didn’t seem to be in pain, we would have noticed if she was because sheep tend to go off on their own and hang their heads and look obviously depressed. She had displayed none of these behaviours. As with most things concerning animal health, its always a good idea to think things over carefully before intervening. When to intervene and whether to intervene are questions which continually run through our heads when faced with situations like this. My instinct told me not to intervene but to keep an eye on her. I spoke to Adrian over lunch and we thought we’d ring the vet just to double check. The vet agreed with us, to leave well alone, it was likely that more complications could occur through intervention so unless she was in pain, then the advice was to do nothing. So we’ll keep Yzzy on our radar and hope she stays happy and healthy. As they say, there is never a dull moment when keeping sheep although I would probably replace ‘dull moment’ with ‘ a moment without a worry’!
Hi, Selene here. As you might already know, Peaches, our leader for some years, passed away last month. Having felt that I have been deputy for a while, I thought it only natural that the mantle of flock leader should fall upon my shoulders. Well, it can’t be that difficult, I thought to myself. Peaches made it look easy.
However, I find myself facing a couple of challenges. The first is that I am never quite sure what to do each morning. It’s the middle of winter and the weather can be pretty harsh around here. We have shelters we can use and our favourite is down the hill near the humans’ house. There are feeders full of hay there too and the ground has a stony covering, so it’s a good place to hang out.
Up near the top of the fields
The problem is, after we’ve had breakfast, I’m sometimes not quite sure what to do next. Should we hang about round the hay and shelter? Or should we head up into the fields? The fields are good because they are quite dry. No matter how much it rains, there are areas that are dry and don’t get muddy. There’s also quite a lot of grass even though it’s January. Not like last year! Or was it the year before? Hmmm (or should I say meh). Anyway, we do like to head up to the top of the fields where we can chill out and chew the cud.
Sometimes, while I am pondering what to do, Ursi can get a bit impatient. Before I know it, we are butting heads and the problem of where to hang out is quickly forgotten. I am not sure whether Ursi, who’s quite a big girl, wants to take over or whether she’s bored. Either way, I have to win the headbutting contest. The problem is, Ursi just won’t give up. Sometimes, Yzzy tries to get between us, but Ursi will have none of it. A step back, lower the head and then biff.
I think the humans have spotted this because lately, they have been leading us up into the fields mid morning.
Anyway, this leadership lark is a bit trickier than I thought. Maybe it will get easier in the spring when we can sleep out more. I hope so.
The last few days have been cold and yesterday, we took advantage of the frozen ground to lay an area of hardcore around the sheep’s hay feeders. The frozen ground meant that the tractor did not do too much damage to the ground.
Before starting, we moved the sheep out into the fields to keep them out of the way. On finishing, we allowed the sheep back and it was then we noticed that there was something not quite right with Peaches. It was not entirely unexpected, Peaches’ condition had not been good for some time. She had, in the summer, been checked over by the vet but there was nothing obvious wrong. Peaches was the oldest of our sheep and was approaching her 9th birthday so we thought this lack of condition might be age related. We had been giving Peaches small supplements to ensure she was getting enough to eat, but her condition never really improved.
Peaches leading the sheep down the path to the hay
Yesterday, Peaches was separating herself from the flock. This is often a sign of a sheep that is unwell. We offered Peaches some chopped turnips and while she ate a little, she didn’t seem to be her usual self. We called the vet out to have a look. The vet found a little blood in Peaches’ poo and said that her stomach seemed a little bloated. However, there was no obvious sign of anything serious. Peaches was showing no sign of anemia meaning fluke and worms were discounted. The vet did hint that there might be something wrong internally such as a tumour, but that it was hard to tell.
The vet administered a few injections to help Peaches with any pain or infection and also to help get her digestion moving. Having been very tolerant of all the handling and needle pricks, once out of the treatment pen, Peaches was off like a shot up the hill. We continued to keep an eye out and she did seem to be eating hay from the feeders later in the day. However, she was still kind of keeping her distance from the flock.
Sadly, this morning, we found Peaches had passed away in the night. She had passed away in her sleep and lay, looking very peaceful, in one of the field shelters. Peaches was the flock’s matriarch and was a gentle leader. We shall all miss her.
Around late October, early November the grass pretty much stops growing and loses most of its nutritional value. For sheep, that means its time for hay. This year, the late autumn was pretty mild so the sheep chose to stay out for grass a bit later, well into November in fact.
Peaches leads the sheep down the path
Nevertheless, we got the hay feeders cleaned up and the hay ready. We’ve moved the feeders nearer the house this year. It means it’s all much closer to the hay store making things easier for us.
It also means the sheep have access to the lambing shed as a winter shelter. In fact, they now have two field shelters so they are spoilt for choice.
To get to the new hay station, the sheep would have had to cross a marshy area so in the summer I had built them a path (see sheep happy with new path). One morning, I went up to check on the sheep and they followed me back down (pictured right) and found the hay all laid out for them.
Some of them tucked right in while others still wandered off eating late autumn grass. Over the following days, the visits to the hay feeders have increased and so we see them down at the feeders about twice a day now.
The other great benefit is that we can see them from the kitchen window. We do like being able to see our sheep from the house.
First step was to get the sheep together and penned up. We bring them down to the lambing shed. It means they have shelter from sun or rain or both, as often happens here. While I get busy setting up sheep hurdles, Nicole goes and fetches them. These days, they follow happily.
The ones already treated often hang around outside the pen seeking more tickles. That’s actually quite helpful as their proximity also has a calming effect on the sheep whose hooves are being inspected.
