Black Sheep Gathering in Eugene, Oregon is an event I always look forward to. I don’t go as a vendor so it’s not work. It’s more like a road trip with sheep. Usually friends and Farm Club members (who are friends too) carpool but this year we were all on different schedules and instead we met up once we were in Oregon.
Loaded and ready to go. I took ten sheep, five of which were going to a new home. Fortunately only two were yearlings and the rest were lambs or I wouldn’t have had room. That was Thursday. It was a long day because I just couldn’t seem to stay awake for the drive. I left the house at 6:30 a.m. but stopped at several rest stops to take short naps and finally pulled into the fairgrounds about 4:30.
Black Sheep Gathering opened Friday morning with too many choices. What is a fiber fanatic to do? Watch the wool show? Watch the sheep show? Go to class? Shop?
Several friends participated in the Sheep-to-Shawl competition on Friday in which teams have five hours to prep fiber, spin yarn, and weave a shawl.
They spent many hours prior to the event dyeing and spinning the warp yarn, warping the loom, and sampling…
…to determine how they would use this beautiful fiber to spin the weft yarn.
Weaver, Gynna, wove a beautiful shawl (but I didn’t get a photo when it was finished).
Walking back to the barn to get ready for the Jacob sheep show I saw…
…this Shetland ram displaying his ribbon.
Time to take the sheep to the show ring. 
Even though we had spent time working with the sheep they were not always cooperative. That is ram lambs, Marv and Meyer.
A friend who lives in Davis helped me show. That’s the judge inspecting Meyer’s fleece.
Checking Marv’s fleece.
This is Lauren, one of the yearling ewes. I hadn’t planned to sell her but she stayed in Oregon as a trade for another yearling. (That will be another story.)
Meridian Marv (Meridian Rotor x Meridian Marilyn) won Champion Jacob Ram…
…and yearling, Meridian Honey (Meridian Alex x Meridian Hot Lips), was Champion Jacob Ewe.
It’s fun to win ribbons and trophies, but there were only two of us exhibiting sheep and I was the lucky one this year. In other years they have won the ribbons. The other breeder has beautiful sheep too and I brought three of them home with me.
This is one of them and she will be introduced formally in another post.
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.
…it’s hard to look tough when you have fuzz on your horns.
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