Thursday, October 7, 2010

Classic white

Our aim was to breed coloured lambs. We don't always achieve our goals here, but this was the plan in the sheep line.

To that end we bought Wilberforce the black merino and although he's clearly not shooting blanks and he's passed on a lot of Y chromosomes, centuries of breeding for white wool has overridden his colour genes.
So far we've got seven lambs from five ewes and every one of them white. Which is typical of our smallholding really. Had we wanted a clean, white wool clip we would have been inundated with lambs of every hue.
Still, there are three ewes left to drop their bundles and surrounded by healthy, cheeky, playful lambs with a cuteness factor off the scale it's hard to care too much about what colour they are.