Views from a Shepherdess

 By Joyce Weaver

 As I was preparing to leave home to run an errand to the Post Office the other day my usual procedure is to scan the sheep pastures to make sure everything is OK with the flock — no newborns, predators, anything in the fields that shouldn’t be there, etc.

This time I about 40 of my sheep had escaped their pasture and were running in mass along the outside of their pasture fence in the neighbor’s newly tilled crop field. Lovely. Panic! A quick call to my neighbor and we sprung into action. He drove along the outside of the fence and I rode a tractor along the inside of the fence to try to find where they had gotten out. To my amazement by the time we got organized the sheep had decided it was too scary in the outside world and ran back through the hole in the fence to the safety of their familiar pasture. (That was a relief.) 

I call this group of sheep my “woods group.” There is a small 3-acre woods in one corner of that pasture. A large tree had fallen on the fence and raised part of the lower end of the fence up off the ground leaving a 3 foot gap which allowed the sheep to escape. As we were repairing the fence I noticed a large tree nearby that had been broken in two by the strong winds we experienced in the area recently. The break was about 20 feet or halfway up the tree which I found remarkable and the top half was leaning on another tree. It may have been the same strong wind coming from the east a few weeks ago which moved one of my round steel sheep shelters off its runners and over about 30 feet from its original location. 

The moral of this story is to suggest any readers who have livestock running in woods to be sure to check their fences occasionally to look for trees that may have fallen on the fences so your livestock won’t get out when you least expect it. 

In other news on the farm, my Nigerian Dwarf-Myotonic (fainting) goats are having babies now. The new babies are so small and cute—about the size of a kitten. More later. 

You can contact Joyce Weaver at lambjoyw@gmail.com