Well, yesterday was the big day. After working hard to complete the fencing and sheep barn in the morning we ended with a pen with working area 32 x 16 feet minus the 8 x 12 sheep barn in one corner. Wall are made of 4' high, 12.5ga no-climb horse fence sandwiched between 2 x 4's to provide the required stiffness. I think we still need to reinforce the 32' length in the middle with a t-rail as it is a bit wobbly, but it should be find for now.
In the afternoon my good friend Randy and I went to pick the sheep up. We had quite the afternoon there rounding them up, selecting which ones we were going to take and then learning how to trim their feet by cutting off the tips of the hooves and then removing the rim from around them. It is quite the job when you have never done it before and left me quite tired.
We ended up getting 5 purebred Newfoundland ewes and 1 purebred Newfoundland ram. Newfoundland sheep are a rare breed in Canada and now we are helping to keep the breed alive with our small operation. The girl in the first picture is Wendy, my favourite and the ram in the picture above is Rogue who is a few years old now. As we have no experience with sheep we will start here and see where we go with our breeding program in the future, although we have no plans to change anytime soon.
We didn't get them home until dark as the afternoon adventure took longer then expected, but they seemed alright and we gave them a bit of hay to settle them in. We had my niece over for night last night(as seen above) and she absolutely loves the sheep and even got to feed one of them this morning when they had settled down a bit.
The ducks are also still doing well and we have learned that they do in fact love pumpkins as they will eat out the soft insides of the pumpkins if we break them open for them. The sheep will also be getting some pumpkins as well as we learned from their previous owner that they enjoy them quite a bit.
Kes was not really interested in the sheep last night, but it was quite dark. However this morning was very different. She was very excited to see them and was whining because she could not get into the pen. I can see that she has some herding instincts, but these will need to be worked on and controlled and hopefully she will start to calm down a little as she got really excited and ran around the pen barking which made it hard to keep the sheep calm. I was trying to drive them into one corner so I could catch one for my niece to pet, but she would run to the same corner and chase them away. I figure I can practice on her and when we get a young herding dog some day we will have a bit of experience.
We will have more later, but for now everything seems to be doing well. We are all very excited!
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