Spring 2022: an exceptionally cold season

Bleatings from the Woolly Patchwork Sheep Sanctuary

Welcome to the latest Bleatings!

As always a big welcome to all our new supporters who’ve joined us recently.

In the last newsletter, we were still in the grips of Winter. Now we’re nearly into the start of the Summer months! The end of Winter and start of Spring has been a busy time here at the Sanctuary. It was exceptionally cold here in March and April due to fierce icy winds and frost, so the main bunch of younger sheep were late going out 24/7 onto the grass. It was so cold the grass wasn’t growing anyway and the farm looked pretty barren.

The sheep clung onto the warmth and shelter of their shed at night. Fortunately due to it being mild up until last Christmas, there was plenty of haylage left for them to eat. They did all go out to grass eventually in the middle of April.

This is always a relief at the end of a long, hard Winter of daily cleaning out, bedding down, feeding etc. I’m always glad of a bit of respite from the daily grind.

The old girls stayed in at nights for a couple of weeks longer.

Ffion who is our eldest girl now stays in every night. She is very frail and totally blind. She manages well in the daylight, sensing objects in front of her and she has learnt to feel her way around and knows where she is. I’ve got matting down in front of the shed so she can feel that she’s at the doorway and I always make sure that feed, water and hay is in exactly the same place for her. She finds her way around the paddock and adjoining field by the lay of the land, knowing where she is in relation to gateways etc. She’s amazing the way she’s adapted to loosing her sight but having spent her whole life here I guess you could say she would pretty much know her way around blindfolded. She follows on with her companions, particularly Limpy who seems to have taken on the role of Ffion’s guide sheep.

Once it starts to go dark though, Ffion looses confidence and strangely doesn’t have a clue where she is. So I bring her in every night to her own well strawed pen, where she has water and a bucket of her favourite food and a rack of sweet smelling hay. She’s a
really slow eater due to her slight jaw deformity that she was born with, so by having her own space she can take all night to eat her feed if she so chooses.

Once all the flock are out at grass, the big shed muck out begins. This usually takes me a good week to get the sheds cleaned out and all the soiled bedding spread on the fields.

Once the main shed is clean and the floor has dried, I can get the race set up for dagging the sheep.

Dagging is shearing the wool of their tails along with any pooey or uriney bits at the rear end. If left, once the weather warms up, the damp mucky wool is a magnet for flies who lay eggs on the sheep and these then hatch into maggots, which can kill a sheep in 2 – 3 days. The maggots burrow into the skin and basically eat the sheep alive. An awful tormented death for an animal. Even if caught early, sheep can still die from the toxicity.

So it’s a major Spring job here, making sure everyone is spotlessly clean after the Winter. Aside from reducing the risk of fly strike, it makes shearing day so much easier as my shearer only has to shear bodies rather than fussing around doing tails and if the sheep are clean it makes for a happy shearer as dirty rear ends soon blunt their cutters. It also makes my job as the wool wrapper easier as I’m not having to remove mucky bits before I can roll the wool up to go into the wool sacks.

As well as dagging, all the sheep had a full pedicure and a worm dose.

Our next big job will of course be shearing. Hopefully, weather permitting this will be at the beginning of June.

April saw us having to say a very sad farewell to our beautiful Kelly.

Kelly was diagnosed with a thyroid tumour in June 2021 but sadly there was nothing that could be done from a veterinary point of view.

As she was so fit and well in herself, my vet and I decided the best course of action was to let her enjoy whatever life she had left, out in the field with her friends, just being a sheep.
I supported her health with homeopathic remedies prescribed by Katy at Allium Healing and Kelly continued to look well and enjoy herself.

I could see the tumour was spreading from the side of her neck, right around under her chin and on her final morning when I called her for breakfast, she refused it and was having difficulty swallowing and her breathing was very noisy. Sadly I knew is was now time to call a halt before she started to suffer and my lovely vet helped her peacefully on her way over the Rainbow Bridge later that morning. Such a beautiful girl, she is much missed but will never be forgotten.

We now have a little 2 berth caravan here at the Sanctuary! It’s sited in the corner of the paddock so if anyone fancies a night or two away to visit the sheep and sleep alongside the old girlies (they don’t snore) we are now able to accommodate you!!

Our first guests are arriving at the end of May for a couple of nights and i’m really looking forward to it.