Introducing WillowGarden Daniel Day-Lewis :-)

We once again borrowed a ram lamb from Bill Stearman this fall. He's a cute little (VERY LITTLE) guy ... a lovely fawn katmoget. Here is is all decked out in a marking harness, a device that is supposed to allow us to know who he has covered when. However, we had a few issues with the harness, including size, and Jasmine (who kept untying it with her teeth ... sigh). Because he is brown (moorit) - based, any lamb that Kivu has will be some degree of moorit in colour, and either katmoget (like the ram) or gulmoget (like Kivu) or a gul-kat. Katmoget and gulmoget are patterns, not colours, and are co-dominant.


I have had much encouragement to find a large, meat-type ram to breed to the flock. As much as it makes sense, though, a few things keep me coming back to the smaller animals. For one, I get great joy out of cool fleeces (see pic below). Additionally, our sheep are easy to handle, and easy to transport (we use a dog crate in the van).


His fleece is not super-fine, however it is nice and crimpy, and quite a nice colour. Once spun it should result in an oatmeal coloured wool. However, he will be going back to Bill, so we can only hope one of the babies duplicates his colour :-).

You can see the orange crayon well in this photo.

We didn't pick him up until mid-November, so our lambs won't start arriving until mid-April in the spring. And although we only planned on breeding the ewes, we had a lot of rain over the past week and the fence separating the two ewe lambs fell over. Sensibly, they decided they should rejoin the main flock. We may try to move them again later on ... I don't think WillowGarden Daniel Day-Lewis has paid them too much attention yet :-).

Jasmine will once again produce white lambs since her genotype is Awt/Awt. Lambs from Rosemary or Loralei could be Awt/Aa B?/B? (white in colour) or Aa/Aa (brown or black). Lambs from Babette will likely be black, but there is a remote chance she could also have brown-based lambs. The genetics of colour inheritance is fascinating :-). The fuzzy babies are cute too! ;-).