Bella and Button

The crazy catch-up continues.

The same late night excursion that involved the dogs also involved 3 pregnant sheep. While on Ocala4sale.com looking for dogs, I happened to notice katahdin sheep for sale at a good price. I've been keeping an eye open for them closer to home to no avail. So being able to get sheep and dogs in one foul swoop, be it 6 hours round trip, we jumped at it.

We wanted 2 pregnant ewes and some friends also wanted us to bring home one for them as well. We found ourselves at a huge farm near Inverness where the owners of the sheep opened up a barn containing about 100 ewes and said to pick. We grabbed 3 that looked for sure to be pregnant. 2 looked bigger (assuming older and proven) and white and one was small, light brown, presumably younger. They were rather unhappy about moving but we did eventually get all three loaded into the back of my father-in-law's truck. Farmer Hub rigged up his orange construction fencing contraption and we went driving down the road rather paranoid that they were going to have some issue with our transportation method.

After picking up the dogs we headed for home and stopped by at our friends' house and dropped off all 3 sheep. Looking at them again, I think the farmer may have been culling them based on the state of their tail dock (they were recent acquisitions of his). 1 tail was quite short, another quite long and the little brown one not done at all. That's fine... they'll do fine for us. If we thought getting them into the truck was hard, getting them out was even harder. I ended up getting my shoes, socks and much of my shirt rather saturated in sheep pee. The sheep have been happily mowing our friend's pasture all week where, had we immediately brought them home, we would have been supplementing all their feed given that the pasture is quite brown right now. They also would have been in a tizzy getting used to the goats and dogs all at once. So glad we can bring them home later!

This past Friday morning, my friend calls excitedly saying there was a lamb born! I hurried over and found a sweet white ram born to the ewe they had claimed. They named him Valentino, which I find to be rather appropriate given that we hope they will keep him for us to breed our ewes with next time. Our sheep, whom we named Bella and Button, are still pregnant and looking large. Hopefully we'll have them home before they lamb, but if not, I know they'll still be in good hands.

But no getting attached to lambs... they will likely be named Chop, Roast, Samosa or something of the like. I may be able to attach a picture soon.