Ram Lamb, Ding Dong

 There's a new man out in the pastures this week. See that dark faced sheep with the orange collar? That's our new ram lamb! He's a Katahdin/Dorper cross, and would you believe he's only five months old?!

  All of our sheep have names. It makes record keeping easier and helps Big Onion and I communicate about things like which sheep we saw limping yesterday or who looks like they might be pregnant.

 Soon after he got here, we started talking about what we would call this boy. Since he's a ram lamb, we joked about calling him Ding Dong (as in the Edsels Rama Lama Ding Dong), but he's such a big majestic beast of a sheep that Ding Dong just didn't seem to fit his manliness. I told Big Onion we should call him something masculine like Steve. He said, "You want to call him Steve? We should call him Phteven!"

  Which resulted in an uncontrollable bout of giggles from both of us. Seriously, just google "Phteven" and try not to laugh. That picture and the ones like it get me every time!

  Anyway, I think we have settled on calling this new sheep "Steve Ding Dong." It is totally befitting of his dignity don't you think? If nothing else, it amuses us.

 Meanwhile, as I was taking the pictures of Mr. Ding Dong, Rialey was busy doing her best border collie impression to make him feel at home. Steve came from a farm with lots of them!

  We are very excited to have this new lamb as part of our flock. We are just about desperate for some new blood. Our entire flock came from one source, so we cannot be sure how related everyone is to each other. Plus, that combination of breeds in know to produce very high quality meat sheep. We'll be getting rid of our current adult ram, McLovin, very soon. Then we need to make some hard decisions about Angus and Buzz. We may decide to keep all three boys since all seem to get along just fine, and we'd like to option of producing more pure Katahdins. 

  Our shepherd is very pleased with the addition to her flock!