BrownSheep- It's been a while

BUSY!
  • Internship is going well. It is all most over. Learned a lot and accomplished a lot.
  • New yak calf "Wendy Sue". Born on Memorial day. Up and running and being a brat.
  • Put down our old lab. She was 14 and I have lived more than 2/3 of my life with her. Sad to say good bye but she was suffering. Our vet made an exception to his no house call rule and came out.
  • Putting in serveral thousands dollars worth of new fence. The wonderful thing is I don't have to build it.
  • Dad got a new tractor
  • Turkey successfully hatched ten chicks. They are confined and I've only lost one.
  • Looking for a new yak bull ( color genetics). Found one that is a royal golden. HARD to find.
  • Apartment hunting.
I think that is all.
 
So....I've been pretty absent. In between being home, where I'm always busy, and being in between laptops I just haven't found the time!

We've had two more yak calves born. A heifer ( who is so fluffy I could die!) and a stoic little bull. The yaks have new fencing, which they still up root. A problem we are working on.

The sheep are being sheep and testing our every nerve. On a good day nobody gets out. On an average it just the usual 3-6 suspects. On a bad day it's the whole dang herd. Unfortunately, a lamb attempted to jump the fence in a place we had recently repaired and re-raised. She made a horrible mess of her leg. If it had been her lower leg I could maybe, just maybe, have seen splint it and leaving her to it, but , no, it was her femur and a compound fracture at that. Sent her to the butcher.... OF COURSE it was a nice looking ewe lamb with a name ( a little ironically it was Floppy). I did keep her hide which leads me to my next topic.

I have attempted my first try at tanning. I tanned this lamb and a ewe who bloated this springs pelts. I used a method which was found, of course, online. This was the quickest and easiest sounding method. Two things which were a must with school sneaking up on me. It included salt water, battery acid, and bran. I did the actual tanning yesterday and they are looking pretty good. At least the actual hid side is. They may or may not have been stolen by my dogs a couple of times. The wool is a bit of a mess. I'll try to post photos.

The turkeys are growing like weeds. I have one hen who should hatch another batch soon and Momma turkey has actually left to set on another nest. A buyer is coming buy this weekend to buy a couple. My assortment package from Porter's arrived the first week of July. I lost about 7 of them in the first 3 days but the falls more on me than anything else. I'm left with 4 Sweetgrass, 2 pencilled palms ( i think lavender, I have the list somewhere), 1 chocolate palm ( those numbers could be flip flopped -pretty identical right now), 4 chocolates, and 3 blacks. They are sweethearts and doing well.

I found a pretty fantastic apartment in a fantastic locale. I'm pretty tickled. My land lady even lowered the rent a smidgeon for me! Oddly my dad knows the land lord ( father/daughter pair) who is a retired lawyer. In any case I move in for good ( I've been renting,just have "moved" moved in) in two weeks for school.

Fair is next week. We don't have open livestock classes so I think I will just enter photography and floral.

Well that looks like too much so Iwill hold off.
 
Not a ton to report.
School has started so life is crazy again. We got our hay delivered. There was of course down pours around the time it was swathed. It made my dad laugh because they gave us the nice unrained on hay and gave the rained on stuff the other neighbor.

I sold the 9 turkey youngsters for a tidy $20 a piece. The sheep are doing OK. Our oldest ram must have had the stuffing knocked out of him because he has been limping around. I checked his hooves and they are all fine. He is pretty stiff but getting better. We had a wether drop dead last night. No clue as to why. Our guess is he got rammed judging on how his head was laying. There is also a chance of bloat since we did just start giving them some hay. We got bloat blocks just in case. My last but not likely guess is worms. We typically check fall and spring to see if anybody needs to be wormed. I'm moving my check up just incase

I've started volunteering at the zoo again. I've gotten to work around the zebras and warty pigs along with my other section. I have also signed up to be a humane society volunteer.
 
Your zoo gig sounds amazing! I'd love to able to be in your position where a zoo is that close.

You seem to have a lot of bloat issues, so I say to you, Good Luck!
 
The zoo is pretty great and I am super lucky it is close by. As for the bloat we haven't had too many issues just weird, odd ball, what in the heck happened issues. We've had a group of ewes bust in to a coop and eat 50-100 lbs of corn and then a group that bloated on cheat grass ( which is unheard of in our area). After going home this weekend I am 90% certain the weather got in between two of the rams when they were going at it. It's the start of breeding season for us and they are acting like idiots.
 
Ruby the yow (dzo) was as fat as can be. We were pretty certain she would end up as tri-tip since she never showed udder development. She is huge compared to the yaks and isn't afraid to throw her size around for food, or if the bulls have pissed her off. If she had horns she would rule the world.
Today my dad called asking what I think we should do about Ruby. He's been jokingly dropping butcher comments all summer. I've suggested we go find her a regular boyfriend. When he called I admitted we should butcher her since she hadn't calved at almost 3 years old, but I really didn't want to since she is such a character. She is the "guard" of the pasture and bellows at everything!

Ruby has finally come through and had a calf today. Pitch black and she is taking care of it. That's all I know since they just found it. More to come later.
 
Well, that calf appears to be a heifer. Ruby was being a good momma and wasn't too interested in letting us touch her. She would tolerate my dad standing near her but didn't want him to touch her. I suspect she only put up with that much because she was hungry. This calf is 3/4 yak and is almost if not a little bigger than our 2 month old yak heifer.

In other news I attended a herpetology lecture this weekend. This must be prefaced by saying I HATE snakes. They make me cry and run away screaming. The first thing they did in the class was let a 11.5 ft albino boa constrictor named James out. James was free to roam the class room for the entire day. He spent a good chunk of time under my chair. You would all be proud. I didn't cry and I didn't run. Although, I almost did when he expressed interest in checking out my lap. It was a fool proof way to keep an 8:30 Saturday morning class awake. I also saw Caymens, numerous smaller snakes, turtles, lizards, and pythons. On Sunday they just started handing out snakes as they presented them. I chose not to hold any although I did move a snake when it crawled behind on of the other students backs, which was more than enough for me. The also handed out a couple of ball pythons.

The class was great and really pushed not fearing snakes. About half of the class was in the same boat as me. They actually brought in a rattlesnake which they placed in a tube of some sort so we were able to view up close and touch. It didn't rattle at all which is pretty typical in the wild apparently. They stated that for every 1 rattle snake you see there are 10 more you don't. I guess dry bites are very typical as well. They said that a while back a teenager on a field trip found a rattle snake placed it in a paper bag, he got it out several times to show friends, and eventually got bit and even then it was a dry bite.

the best comparison I heard though was if you grabbed a wild squirrel or raccoon would they put up with what snakes will when you grab them? Not that I ever will but still
 
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