Ten Years

This weekend is the tenth anniversary of when the first four sheep came to live here. Now there are twenty-six! Mostly I attribute this to the dedicated efforts of Duke, who is sire or grand-sire to a whopping 16 out of those 26 sheep. Nature gave him one job and no one can say he shirked his duty, but he’s much happier and less stressed since he was, ah, shall we say involuntarily retired from the lamb-siring business and is now safe to live with the girls full time.

To celebrate, I gave Nina her haircut this morning, for which she was not at all grateful. She wasn’t badly behaved except when I trimmed her hooves, but she did yell the entire time and that girl has the loudest voice of anyone in the flock. Having a sheep yelling at the top of her lungs right next to my head for an hour straight is not the most fun I’ve ever had, but I’ll take it over the sheep who spend the whole ordeal trying to knock me down or kick me in the face.

Once I’d finished, I let her go and she ran off, still yelling. The whole flock came running to check out her haircut, her mama and Jeb leading the charge. Liam was either too lazy or too suspicious of me with shears in my hand to come up, but he did hover in the background and yell back to her. His voice is very low and gravelly and my phone microphone won’t pick it up at that distance, but he was calling to her.

“Hey! Hey! Everybody give me sympathy, I’ve just been tortured! Hey!”

The whole group followed Nina over to Liam, before they all lost interest and went back to grazing.

“Come back here Nina, if that’s really who you are! We having finished sniffing you yet!”

The bottle babies of course couldn’t care less and just kept trying to steal the bottle of fly spray I had hooked to my belt while using the camera.

“Everything Mommy has must be for us, right?”

Angel is doing a good job of shedding her own fleece, but Mira is in line for a haircut this year. I meant to have the shearing done by now, but Jeb for whatever reason developed an infection in the stump of the horn he broke all the way back in 2019 this spring, and the necessary treatment of that has put me behind schedule. He’s mostly gone through the denial, anger, bargaining, and depression stages of grief about having medicine squirted on his head on a daily basis, and is now mostly settled on acceptance.

Everyone has settled down now and is camped in the shade to avoid the heat. Temperatures this high in the first week of June is probably not a good sign for the rest of the summer, but I’m trying not to think about it.