Now that the fence is complete, we have slowly been introducing farm animals. The first to call Healing Moon Farm & Ranch their new home were the llamas! The white llama we named Couscous, and the brown llama is named Cocoa. They were very scared of us at first since they previously lived on a huge several hundred acre ranch with hundreds of llamas and very little human interaction. However, with a lot of patience and a little bit of chopped corn…
Couscous (left) and Cocoa (right)
After a couple months of Couscous and Cocoa getting acquainted with the ranch, we introduced 2 young Dorper rams! Dorper sheep are known for being the lowest maintenance sheep for a rancher to have. They were bred specifically to be self-shearing, and very low maintenance. Unfortunately, after about 4 days of having the two young sheep, a mountain lion got into the pasture and killed one. Llamas are not known to be much of a match against mountain lions (we didn’t even know we had any out this far!) but surprisingly they chased her off! Since the young ram had wandered off on its own away from the herd, by the time the llamas got there he was dead.
We mourned the poor little guy and buried him on the property where we planted a weeping willow tree in his honor. We hated to lose one of our animals, but we learned a lot from it. Since then we have predator-proofed the entire perimeter. By using a combination of motion censored spot lights, predator lights (blinking red lights that look like the eyes of a predator and deter other predators), adding a gate to completely enclose sheep at night in the lean to, and lining the perimeter with wolf urine - yes, you read that right - we are happy to report no predators have returned!
Sheepy
About 2 months after Sheepy arrived, we introduced 2 new Dorper sheep. Both are pregnant ewes. We named the spotted one Bluebell and the traditional one Mary Jane. We are expecting lambs within the next 2 months! We are super excited and just finished building lambing jugs to protect the mamas and lambs and reduce risk of lamb mortality. Stay tuned to hear all about the lambing process and what we learned.
Check out the video below where we say hello to all our farm animals:
