Sheep

Predators 9/Farm 1

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It has been one of those weeks, The Apprentice wanted to keep working all week. The fence building did not deter her. We have two leaky frost free faucets that need to be replaced. Unfortunately, to do that they have to be dug out. This is due to the reducers that had to be added to match the 2” pipe that is original to the farm. I placed some tools on the ground to outline a space and asked her to dig. She knocked out the first hole on day 1. Her only real obstacles were the dogs kept dropping the throw balls onto her head when the hole started to get deep. I imagine she threw the ball all day for both dogs. I am sure they loved it. I saw her on her way out and told her there was another faucet in the back yard that needed dug out but it was near a tree stump and would probably not be as easy. This did not seem to deter her and The Apprentice stated she would be back the next day.

Thursday morning, she texted me around 0930, a late start for sure. I am sure that first hole was causing some physical discomfort. I had messaged her first thing to check on a sheep carcass in the orchard. My mother-in-law had called me at work stating she thought there was a dead sheep in the orchard. The Apprentice confirmed there was indeed a dead ewe, #325, in the orchard with no intestines. I told her to just leave it. She tore into the back faucet with less enthusiasm and more problems. There were tree roots everywhere and she had to keep cutting through them. I knew this was going to be a problem. She had to leave around 1330 and said there was more to dig.

When Annmarie came home she called me at work to tell me there was a dead sheep in the orchard. I had forgotten to tell her. She had spotted it because there was a Golden Eagle feasting on the carcass! I asked if she had gotten a picture of the eagle, nope. We discussed my failure to keep her informed and that the sheep had to now be brought into the barn lot. This means running them through the front yard every night and letting them back out every morning. I opted to leave the carcass in the orchard as I was going to be around the farm all weekend and wanted a crack at the coyote doing this.

Friday morning when Mr Rainman and I went out to fix the gate into the tree orchard area, he hit it with the tractor earlier in the summer. We noticed that the carcass only had the head intact and three legs. One leg was missing and one was off in the pasture about 40 feet from the carcass. It had been stripped down. We found a dig out spot under the fence. This is where the predators have been crawling under the fence to get to the sheep. It was a fresh crawl spot and the dirt was still moist. We ended up planting a wooden post in the field and mounting the electronic eyes on all four sides of the post. They are solar powered with a battery that lasts all night. So they charge all day and then light up and flash at night. It is supposed to look like light reflecting off of eyes. This is supposed to scare the predators off. We got everything mounted but did not turn them on. I went back up to the machine shed and created a snare to place over the hole. We are going to leave the carcass in the orchard for one more night to see if something returns tonight. This meant that the four vultures that showed up today got to fill their bellies all day long. They were pretty satiated. I will move the carcass tomorrow if we don’t catch anything. If we do I will try the snare a second night. Who knows what will happen.

We carried a rifle all day while working on the fence and faucets and did not see a single coyote. It is so painful to have the thing on you most of the day. We finally just put it in the pickup so it was out of the way. We did get the frost free faucets changed out and they work and do not leak. The Apprentice can fill in the holes at a later date. We went up and pounded T posts in on two sides of field #1. The stupid flood buried the woven wire alongside the road in two different places. We will have to cut the wire and splice in new to sit above the dirt. Their is a large drop off so we had to pound the T-posts in by hand alongside the road.

We measured the fence line distance alongside the creek. Each roll of woven wire is 330’. So I decided that instead of trying to wire all the woven wire into one long contiguous piece of wire I would just install them in 312-320’ increments. We marked out a H brace every 312-320 feet. We can install one entire section of fence, tighten it up and then attach the new one and do it again. Their needs to be some H braces interspersed along a long fence anyways and this made perfect sense to me. We marked out all of the H braces and drilled the first holes with the 6” auger. The rain we had earlier in the week and the storm we had today made drilling into the soil very easy. We got 5/100” of rain today. I missed out on measuring the earlier rain storm due to a dead battery in our rain gauge, I fixed it on Wednesday.

I did try and call the animal auction yard today but no one answered and their voicemail was full. I will try an email this weekend. We have 55 lambs that need a new home with only five sold at this time.

Mowing lawn

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It’s hot in Eastern Oregon, this means everything that doesn’t have water on it all the time is dead, brown and ready to burn. Due to the coyote problem we are now feeding the sheep last years hay in the ram pasture so they cannot get out to be coyote food. We have been watering our front hillside to get the clover well established. It is loving the heat and the water. I decided it was time to let the sheep into the yard. Now after the earlier fiasco this summer with the puppy jumping the back yard fence to get in with the sheep we cannot use the back yard fence as containment anymore. So we are resigned to using the two overhead runs we have in the front yard. The runs work well but the dogs are used to tearing up the front yard and running all over usually. They don’t like the runs. Unfortunately, the sheep getting chased all over the front lawn is a bigger problem so the dogs get some run time.

The screwy part of this is that the puppy, Chance, has been doing great on the 30’ lead when working the animals. She listens, she stops, she goes left/right, rarely do you have to use the lead to stop her. She is just over 1 year old but doing very well. This lulled me into complacency. Friday I put both dogs in the back yard, opened the gate with them both laying down and then took chance by the collar while Mouse stayed down at the open gate. After Chance was on the run, I got Mouse, no problems. The sheep got to stay in all day and at dinner time I ran them out of the yard. They wanted back in at one point for an evening snack but I told them they would have to wait until the next day.

Saturday, I was feeling pretty confident. I let the sheep into the front yard and got the dogs into the back yard again. I opened the gate, both dogs were in a down position and I took Mouse first this time. I was almost to the run, 6 seconds, before Chance broke and took off after the sheep. Fifty sheep tearing up the yard is rough on standing structures, two sheep almost knocked themselves out by hitting the upright grape posts, one sheep slid across the bridge and pushed out the paneling to fall off the bridge, two smashed into the already sheep broken outside lamp. I could not call the puppy off. I was standing in front of the sheep trying to get her attention when she singled one out. She just kept after it. I finally tossed a very large branch at her along with an impressive amount of vocal discouragement. I missed her but the combination got her attention and she ran off to an empty hillside. Annmarie had heard me “discussing” the sheep issue with the dog and hollered out for her to lay down, she did. I calmed down and was able to tell her to stay and walked over to her and got her collar and walked her to the run. The hardest part is to praise her for listening. The sheep got to finish eating in peace. Last night I again used the lead and she pushed them out of the yard without incident.

Sunday morning I again let sheep into the yard and put the dogs on the run. I used a leash and took Chance first! Mouse tried to rush past me when I wasn’t looking but he will drop at command as long as he is not locked in on an animal. I got him on the run. Now here is the weird part if we leave the dogs loose they will harass the sheep incessantly. But if we put them on the run I cannot count on the dogs to keep the sheep away from my plants! The dogs will lay down, hold still and allow the sheep to come in and eat the yard around them. The dogs are not even suckering them in close. They will just lay there and let the sheep eat. It is so weird!! The puppy is on the right side of the picture and our older dog is on the far left side. Neither one is reaching for or harassing the sheep. The dogs obviously got the instructions for the leads memorized. I think, they think, they are still on a lead and are following our instructions.

Annmarie got our upstairs bathroom panels covered with cloth. She just needs to run a ribbon around the edges. We needed stronger magnets if we were going to run the fabric over the edges and over the magnets. She tried and it did not work. It looks good and the fabric was a gift from a friend who is no longer. We can look at it and remember her every day.

Predators 5 / Farm 1

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We have been leaving the dogs outside at night this summer. The puppy has been raising Cain some nights but the few times I have gone outside to look, I have not spotted anything. The side effect of the dogs being out is that the sheep from the upper and lower pasture come in next to our yard in the evenings so the puppy can watch and patrol the yard. We have not lost any sheep to a predator since we started doing this, stupidity yes but not a predator. You cannot fix stupid.

We picked some plums from our orchard today. Another side effect of the puppy patrolling the yard is the deer are not coming in near the house. Every piece of fruit in the orchard is untouched by four legged animals, this is amazing! A first for us since we started the orchard. I had thought up plans to raise the fence another four feet and just leaving the dogs out at night has fixed it. We don’t even have the dogs in the orchard. My fence raising plans are on hold now. Because we are storing our fruit ladder in the orchard now we can selectively pick the fruit as it ripens. This will stretch out our fruit supply. The ancient pear tree (120 years we think) is going to die. It survived splitting but now it is getting some brown all throughout its leaves. I may get lucky and get one of the shoots to survive. I had one that was about five years old and I thought it was going to be a replacement and it up and died on me. As an added bonus I spent 15 minutes tossing fallen apples from orchard over the fence for the animals. They are starting to realize that the fruit is falling so they come check the alleyway twice daily looking for sweet treats.

I was switching sprinklers on the front hillside this week and found a dead possum. This is the second possum that has been killed. It was just dead. It either fell out of the tree or the puppy broke its neck. She doesn’t maul them or anything, she just protects her yard. Mouse (older border collie) just hides under the bridge footing. He has dug a nice hole under there to hide and stay out of the heat.

Wednesday night the puppy, Chance, was just going to town and would not shut up. This woke me up and even without my hearing aids it was annoying enough to get me out of bed. It was pitch black outside and I needed to retrieve the pistol and flashlight from the car, so I just ran outside in my slippers in the buff, the uniform of all night time farm predator responses. I ran out to the car, grabbed the flashlight and started panning around the farm. I spotted both herds of sheep and the alpaca. There was a cat under the flatbed trailer but nothing requiring my attention. I went over to the side of the yard and spotted the chicken coop and yard to make sure nothing was trying to get at my chickens, nope. Just before going inside I decided to pan the flashlight over the back garden. I spotted four pair of eyes on the back hillside near the creek. I whipped open the gate and ran down the sidewalk toward the creek and spotted four raccoons! I opened fire with the 22 pistol. It does not take long to throw ten bullets downstream at four targets. I was hitting them, at least two for sure but they don’t go down easily. I ran out of lead. This has now required me to break out the second clip to carry out with me at night. I got up the next night due to Chance’s barking but there was nothing but skunk smell. Luckily, it did not get on the dogs. Annmarie doesn’t credit me for any predator control until there is a body. I tell her its not like fishing stories but somehow she doesn’t believe me. Running around naked in the summer is a lot more pleasant than the winter!

Predators spotted so far this year are raccoons, skunk, coyotes and possum. I have two raccoon traps at the mother in law’s house but so far they have not yielded anything. They are eating her cat food and she knows they are around. The coyote has not been spotted in over two weeks.

Sheep sorting again, ram time

Steve Hardin5 Comments

Yesterday was sheep sorting day. We have a bunch of skinny mommas and we need to wean off the lambs that are old enough, we need to worm everyone, create two herds (edible, keep) and turn the Ram loose in with the mommas (keep). This seems simple enough on the surface but nothing is ever simple when you are working with animals that have not been touched in three months. Most of the lambs have only been touched once in their entire life which makes them the most difficult group to handle. We started by having to dig trenches in the barn to be able to move the panels around and create chutes and three large pens in the barn. Once that was done I found the oral drenching tool and our wormer. I did not have enough oral drench so Annmarie volunteered to go to town and get more while we tagged and banded. I had about a 1/3 of a bottle so we could start while she was in transit. Mr Rainman and I then attempted to push the sheep into the barn. Nope, they would not go, no matter what we did, they kept breaking free of the pile and would not go into the chute into the barn.

Mr Rainman went and got Chance, border collie puppy, and he attempted to get her to move the sheep into the barn while she was on a lead. She would not really listen to him and since she is learning you have to be patient and strict at the same time. I took over and she was baling them up well but they would not go into the barn. She would be within four feet of them and they would not budge. One broke loose and she dived for it, I had a hold of the lead rope with just my hands, no gloves. I had to clamp down and grab rope to jerk her back for a correction. I ended up with a two inch rope burn on my middle finger! But I did get the puppy stopped and corrected. We had to go get Mouse also and squeeze the sheep from both sides and push them into the barn with the dogs. They just would not go on their own, and before that would work we had to open up the barn so they could just go through the door, once in the barn we pushed them to the far end so we could run them through the chute. We were still having trouble getting them into the chute so Mr Rainman started to just catch the little ones and then I could tag and band them. We had about ten lambs that needed tagged and banded still. On one of his snags he caught a pink tagged big lamb that was a ram! So it got banded, which was not easy as the testicles were so big I had to pop them through the bander opening one at a time. I have not made this mistake in years, so it was a great catch by Mr Rainman.

We used the oral drenched but the little clip that holds the bottle to the belt does not work so I tie it upside down under the belt with a piece of cord then it will work. It’s fairly redneck but it does the job and using the drencher hand pump is so much faster than having to measure out a syringe every time you need to dose a sheep. Once we had two groups of sheep we had to run them through the chute again to count them! Here are the final numbers: 46 ewes, 10 babies (too young to wean) , 1 ram in the first group and 40 lambs, 1 cull ewe, 13 eating size in second group for a total of 111 sheep. We are going to be taking the eating size ones to sale soon to see how they do. The ram is now in with the momma herd and we are keeping them in the orchard for now so he doesn’t have to chase them all over. We are bringing both groups into the barn lot every night to keep the predators at bay. One group in the front side and one group on the back side. They can see each other but not mix. There is an amazing amount of noise for the first few days once we separate off the lambs.

I hooked up the sickle mower onto the Kubota and tried to cut the orchard but the space is full of trees and metal rings around the trees. I did not even make it around the field once before I hit a cow panel and popped off a tooth from the bar. So I had to go put that sickle bar up and put the rake on the Kubota and set up the smaller sickle bar on the John Deere. We did not use it last year so I had to make some adjustments and get it all greased up. The Italians that designed it put one essential grease zirk where it is near impossible to access. It took me 30 minutes to get the thing into a spot where I could access it with a small grease gun and a 90 degree elbow. It is of course exactly where the bolt fails every time so it has to be done. I can pop the other mower apart and redo the rivets but that will take time. So it will be something I need to do after hay season. I had to pull the break away bar from the mower and beat on it with an eight pound sledge hammer to get it back into some semblance of shape and function. It’s not perfect but it is much improved. I am now ready to cut more hay today. The plan is to cut 1/3 of the leftover ground today and turn it on Tuesday. Then bale it on Wednesday. I will cut more hay on Tuesday, another 1/3. We have managed to bale 346/900 needed bales and 252/900 are in the barn. I was able to scavenge another 20 bales yesterday from the leftovers.

Predators 3/ Farm 0

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Well the predators are definitely bold! We lost one lamb in the orchard in late January and we lost two more lambs in the orchard last night! The lambs had not had rigor set in by the early morning and neither were torn up but one was missing its entire abdominal cavity contents. I noticed the magpies fighting out in the orchard on my way to work and messaged Mr Rainman to check when he came out. He is coming out a couple of days a week to help out.

Due to this calamity between the houses we are no longer letting the sheep stay in the orchard overnight. They are getting moved into the barn lot at night. We think its a coyote, both of our dogs sleep in kennels inside at night. We are going to look into some solar motion activated lights. I think there is a solar set of red eyes that you mount on the fence at predator eye height to scare them away. I will need to do more research on that item. The funny thing is I have not seen a coyote this year at all. Our 11 month lambs running around on the back hillside have all survived, only the lambs have been killed. We have woven wire fences already.

I am mowing the yard again with the sheep. It’s just easier and more environmentally friendly! Again, the sheep poop is very wet and slimy due to all of the green grass but they are working on the yard. They like the hillside better as the grass/clover on it is shorter. They like to eat the short grass first before eating the tall grass. It’s pretty weird.

The puppy Chance is doing well when we use her to work the sheep and cows on a lead. I had the sheep in the front yard so the dogs are in the backyard. Our side fence is low and temporary and Chance decided yesterday that jumping the fence and playing with the sheep was fun. It was fun for her but not the sheep. She totally went crazy, running around, running into the herd, biting everything she could touch. She would not listen and would not follow “down” command. There was zero off switch. I had to wait until she grabbed a sheep then grabbed her. She spent the rest of the day on the overhead run. No way to get loose and as long as the sheep stay away she cannot harm anything. We spent a lot of the day going into the “down” command with me across the yard or from the road. There will be a lot more training to teach her that she is to herd the sheep, not chase or bite them.