Soay Sheep

Small Sheep for Small Acreage

Rural lifestyle amidst amenable creatures Many of us who have chosen to live in a rural setting with a few acres of green pastures, some trees, clean air, perhaps an outbuilding or two, tranquility and so on made our choice in part because we wanted to be able to keep animals of one sort or another, or will come around to the notion sooner or later. Odds are you already have thought about Soay sheep, or you would not be here reading these words. You are on Read more … ► the right track. These small, gentle, easily kept wooly companions can enrich your life and improve your land.

Frequently Asked Questions

Finally it has dawned on us to add a FAQ list to this site. Check it out via the nearby link. We hope to add new entries as FAQ …► they come up in phone calls and emails, so new entries should be timely and seasonal. We started with a handful of lambing-related questions, since 'tis the season.

Choosing your Soay Sheep

read more ►Thinking about getting a flock of Soay, but feeling a bit bewildered? Here is a guide to the common types of Soay sheep flocks we and other breeders have put together to meet our varying goals.

Soay Sheep Husbandry

Husbandry Pages ► We continue to add pages on how we keep our Soay sheep. We write them as we go forward on the Soay Calendar, scrambling to get our thoughts together enough in advance so that you may may find them useful as the seasons progress.

Keeping Sheep as a Lifestyle

Our city friends ask us all the time, “Why on earth do you live way out in the country and burden yourselves with a big flock of Soay sheep?” The answers could fill a book, but we think the following thoughts put to paper thirty years ago by a In the words of Mme Benoit …► renowned Canadian food writer, editor, chef, and shepherd capture the essence of the matter better than we can express it anew.

First Lambs of 2012

Lilly J, the mother of our first lambs this year, is a first-timer. Not knowing too much what she was doing, she lost track of her firstborn, a ram lamb who appears on the left in this photo. It seems that he wandered off while Lilly J was busy delivering his twin sister. In the course of his travels, he came upon Galice, an older ewe who, even though she would not deliver up her own lambs for another twelve days, was happy to adopt the little fellow, lick him off, and steer him back to her enormous bag.

In the excitement of the first lambing, we were fooled, too. We jugged the ewe lamb with Lilly J, and the little ram with his foster auntie, Galice, who was behaving for all the world like a dutiful, attentive mother. So two single lambs, we thought, though we figured that Galice would soon produce another one, since she was still quite wide. Returning to the jugs after three hours, we found the little guy bawling and carrying on, even though he had been all cleaned up by Galice, and with her encouragement, appeared to be happily nursing. Worried about his complaints, we checked his temperature and found it to be unusually low. We checked further, and noticed that Galice, despite the hugeness of her bag, had no milk. And no second lamb. Not good. We checked even further, and -- oops -- Galice's rear showed no sign of birthing. Only then did the light dawn.

We put the mismothered lamb in with Lilly J, hoping for the best. Lilly J was ambivalent toward the little guy. While she didn't out-and-out reject him, she didn't encourage him, either. When we held mother still, the little guy would duck right in and nurse furiously. It took about a week of regular intervention at mealtime until she came around and accepted him completely. Though we almost had a bottle baby on our hands, mother and both lambs are now doing fine as a family of three.

Historic Ranch, Historic Sheep

The old Saltmarsh Ranch is nestled at two thousand feet among the northern foothills of the Siskiyou Mountains in southwestern Oregon, astride the Little Applegate River. Arthur B. Saltmarsh, the original homesteader who settled in the 1880's, built the barn and several other outbuildings still in use. He and his heirs lived here for almost a century.

Soay sheep have a much longer history. They are descendants of a feral population of primitive sheep living for at least hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years in complete isolation on the island of Soay in the St. Kilda archipelago located off the northwestern coast of Scotland in the North Atlantic Ocean, some 4581 miles from here.

Today's Soay sheep at Saltmarsh Ranch provide us with many satisfactions, foremost among them the rare opportunity to help preserve an endangered variety of attractive small sheep.

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