This sheep look at me appraisingly from her comfortable perch and viewpoint above me as I walked down the steep path to Rhossili Beach from the village.
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This sheep look at me appraisingly from her comfortable perch and viewpoint above me as I walked down the steep path to Rhossili Beach from the village.
Gower is so full of sheep and lambs at the moment. I was only Rhossili Downs yesterday, it was very windy. So bad my ears hurt.
I love the sheep in Gower, and they are very photogenic with their brightly coloured marks, used as flock identity and also indicating if they have been “served”. I would have liked being up on Rhossili Down with you yesterday despite the wind but trips to Gower or anywhere are out at the moment while I am not so mobile.
I am sorry that you are not so mobile at the moment, that’s rather frustrating. At least the weather is slowly improving (instead of that snow the newspapers were joyfully predicting. I was looking at the pinks and purple blobs on the sides of the sheep on Rhossili and thinking it made them look pretty “punkish” – I did not realise that one of those colours would indicate if they had been served. I saw a lamb with “13” in red on its coat and wondered if that was a bad sign – the others didn’t seem to have numbers!
Thank you, Emma. Yes, really frustrating now that the sun has come out again and the weather is warming up. Still, I have a lovely view from my windows. Concerning the colour blobs on sheep, as I understand it, the ram sometimes has a bag of dye sewn into the wool on his underside so that the back of the ewe is stained when she has been mounted. I think the numbers on small lambs are a way of identifying which lamb belongs to which mother – perhaps this is more important if the lamb has been separated from the ewe for a while after birth for some reason. Somewhere there would have been a 13 on a sheep.
I missed her. The lambs seemed pretty relaxed about hanging out with their mothers, until some strange woman came walking through their field! Gosh I had no idea that the ram was marking all the ewes he’d mounted. That’s pretty ingenious.