This week it was time to separate sheep into breeding groups. After much debate and deliberation I ended up using five rams this year. I don’t NEED five rams for the number of ewes I have but it’s always fun to find out how each ram will match with the flock…and there is also a bit of “not putting all one’s eggs in one basket”.
There are a lot of criteria in selecting a ram to buy or a ram lamb to keep in the flock.
Fleece is the most important characteristic for me. If I don’t like a ram’s fleece then I don’t want to use him no matter how great he looks otherwise. I want to stay within the Jacob breed standards but consider fleece weight, fiber diameter (determines if a fleece is soft or scratchy), crimp, and freckling. One problem with making decisions about young rams is that you’re better off waiting until 18 months to fully evaluate fleeces. That is a long time to hang onto a ram and then decide he stays or goes. With my small acreage I just can’t hang onto several rams to evaluate a year later. I need to make my best guess at about six months old.
Here is an example of a ram lamb from this year who lucked out. I love his fleece but he is freckled. He’s castrated and is the donkey companion for now.
Horns. You can have the best ram from all the other standpoints, but if the horns grow into the face he will have to go. Here is a blog post with examples of two-horn rams.
Color. The Jacob Breed Standard states that registered sheep must have 15-85% color. That’s a broad range, but not all sheep fit that category.
Jerry is a 5-year-old wether who won the sheep-lottery by having a beautiful fleece, but with too much color to be kept as a breeding ram. He was castrated as a lamb and was kept to be a buddy to any sheep who had to be separated from the flock. He lives permanently with Faulkner, the BFL ram. Also note how narrow his horns are. If he had not been castrated those horns would have grown tight onto his neck or face.
There is more, but this was going to be a post about the rams I am using this year, not a how-to-choose-your-flock-sire post. However other traits to consider are personality (yes, really), conformation, size, birth weight, gain, and is he a single/twin/triplet.
I hadn’t planned on keeping Meridian Joker, but as I looked at lamb weights over the last few months he stood out as one of the heavier ones. I sell at least half the lambs for butcher and the sooner they can be sold the better. So rate of gain is important. His horns don’t have a huge spread, but hopefully they will be all right as he grows.
By the way all the rams in these photos are wearing marking harnesses with red crayons. That’s what all the color is.
Starthist Dragon is on loan from a friend. When I evaluated his lamb fleece a couple of years ago I was impressed and Trish remembered that so offered him for the season.
Bide a wee Buster came here from Oregon last June. He was so small I had my doubts about him being up for the task this month, but I should have had faith.
Meridian Catalyst is a ram who was born at the 2015 State Fair Nursery. He is a lilac ram with nice fleece and markings. That’s him in the middle of the ewes on the second day of breeding season.
Faulker is ram #5. He is a Bluefaced Leicester (BFL) and sires the black (brown) lambs. He is the big guy in the center of the photos. His lambs are larger than the 100% Jacob lambs and are mostly sold for meat although they have very pretty fleeces and also wind up in some spinners’ flocks.
Faulkner enjoying some time with the ladies.
Isabelle, marked by Joker.
Skye is in Catalyst’s group.
Jillian is with Faulkner.
Joker looks a little disheveled after a few days.
Buster has his work cut out for him to reach those big ewes…
…and needed a nap after the first morning out.
For any of you who pay attention to this stuff and may be wondering about the other Jacob ram I bought this summer…I discovered a few weeks ago that he must have been injured by another ram and his horn had changed position so that it was growing right up against his jaw. I found that the point of attachment was movable (I don’t know if went all the way to the skull which means that it would have been fractured). I tried to give his face a little more space by using wire and duct tape but that didn’t work. This is not a sustainable situation so he is no longer with us.
One lamb.
Two lambs.
Three lambs. All were up and nursing quickly. Good job, Ears!
…I knew that, however unlikely, a lamb could get stuck between it and the wall. 
Sure enough, that happened while I was still sitting there.
How about this foal that was just 12 hours old?
He was born down the road at my friend’s house. We have to wait 5 months for lambs to be born. This foal was due on January 29 (11 months) and was just born today on February 22! That is almost a year of gestation for the mare.
Mae from the front.
Mae from the rear.
Shelby from the side.
Shelby from the rear.
Esmerelda, front.
Esmerelda, rear.
Athena from the front.
Athena from the rear.
Marilyn is due 2/26. 
Here she is from the rear. She was shorn in November. I sure like the recently shorn views better for this.
Noel is due 2/27.
Fran is due 2/28.
Fran from the rear.
Spring isn’t due until March 5 but she always looks so big I thought I’d just give you a view.
Who is this? Trick question. That is Delight who is nursing twins.
And here is Dazzle with her single. You can sure see the difference in body condition of ewes that are nursing month old lambs.
Last week as it was drying out I put the flock on the pasture and then turned the new lambs out with them.
One thing I watch for when putting lambs in the pasture for the first time is that they don’t get tangled up in the electric fence. 
I’m glad to see when they touch the fence because I know that they will have learned to avoid it.
This looks worse than it was. The whole incident was very brief and then…
…the nearby lamb was off and running.
Bertha, one of the yearlings thought this looked like a good game…
…so she kept up the chase.
Eventually this lamb found his mom who hadn’t been particularly concerned about him.
In the meantime the other two lambs stuck near their mom. I’m going to use colored tags again this year to give me more information about the lambs at a glance, mostly about sires. However, these first three have an unknown sire and the ram lambs (gorgeous as they are) have been banded. That’s what the red tags mean–wether.
He put in extra posts that we happened to have around and welded rebar between the posts on the two sets of fences to help make things sturdier. We hoped that it would make the whole thing more secure.
Fence posts look good. 
The wire, not so much. He was completely stuck in the welded wire and the high tensile wire. This is Alex, by the way, whose horn I just trimmed in the last post.
That 2-horn ram (15022) in the middle is a good sized lilac ram and we all had our eyes on him from the beginning. Unfortunately I think that his horn set is also narrow. This is another one that could benefit from time to find out how the horns actually do grow out.
When I walked out there I saw that one electric fence wire was spiraled across the pen and Ringo wouldn’t cross it. I had been fixing the fence a couple times per week, tightening the wires, or replacing insulators, and once in awhile fixing a break. 
That evening I found this–Foley with wires wrapped all around his horns and his feet. It was worse than it looks in the photo. I had to cut the wraps of wire off of him. I knew that I had to do something better. The goal of this electric wire is to keep the sheep away from the field fence on the south side and the welded wire panels on the north side, both of which the rams can easily destroy. It works well for the ewes and it works for the rams to the extent that they don’t try to eat something on the other side or put their heads through the fence. But it is obvious that the charge is not felt through the horns. The rams actually spend time trying to scratch on the insulators and bash the tree that holds some of the fence. Then their horns catch on the wire and I think they like to fight with the wire just because it’s there.
Meridian Jacobs' Blog 