Sheep work done

Well Annmarie got us up early and the two of us went out to wrangle the sheep this morning.  We herded them into the corral and the fun began.  Sarah was visiting with her cousins so she was missing out on all the action.  We needed to tag them all, blue tags for boys and red tags for girls.  All the tags had numbers so we could track the sheep's production.  Some of the boys needed to be banded and a few of them still needed to be wormed.  Annmarie was catching the sheep and I was inflicting all the pain on the sheep.  The trouble with this is I am not experienced.  So I was learning as I went.  We would herd the sheep into the sorting chute and then catch them to administer their punishments.  The problem is the sheep are fast.  I was trying to catch this little twenty pound sheep (grasshopper) with a pair of tag pliers in one hand.  Annmarie kept hollering at me to drop the pliers and catch the lamb.  The trouble is the sheep are like little jumping beans.  The damn lamb kept jumping up to my shoulders trying to get by, Annmarie was hollering and I was laughing so hard the lamb got away.  I ended up on the ground rolling around.  It took us just over an hour to get every one through.

So this afternoon I am out moving the sprinkler and I noticed that one of the Baker girls had already torn out her ear tag!!  How are we going to track the births if we cannot keep everyone tagged?  So we are going to take pictures and place them in the computer program to track the sheep.  Who knows how this is going to work.

Tools of the trade.

Sheep after the wrangling

Sheep with new tags