Shepherd Camp at Little Creek Ranch
An update has been a long time coming! Shepherd camp happened months ago in April but I hope you’ll still enjoy reading about my time there despite the delay. 💓🐏
As much time as I spend reading, watching, and thinking about doing many farm things, it’s never the same as getting to experience it first hand. Text and images don’t let you feel movement, warmth, and texture. You don’t get to hear more subtle sounds or smell the animals and environment. You don’t get to experience what it feels like to be surrounded by sheep in every direction and the comforting envelope that the scent of lanolin brings.
Visiting farms and ranches is also rewarding in other ways. I’m so motivated by what folks are able to accomplish over the years — especially the beginning farmers in their first decade. (That’s anyone who has been farming/ranching less than ten years according to the USDA!) I’m inspired by setups and intrigued by questions I didn’t know I had before walking through those farms myself.
I applied for as soon as I knew about Shepherd Camp 2023 at Little Creek in Montana knowing I was going to need to figure out how to make it happen. I’ve enjoyed my past camping trips in Montana so this was a good excuse to go back. Another big plus is that it’s a retreat for women where we’d get hands on experience during lambing season. Getting time off work was easier than finding someone to watch after all the animals.
Caroline Nelson and Lacey Carr hosted us for a weekend full of joy, laughter, learning, doing, heartfelt conversations, and cute bottle babies. The vibe is different when it’s only women, and Shepherd Camp was that much more special because of women like Erin McKenzie, who filled our bellies with delicious food at every meal, Heather Puckett from MT Cross Farms, who gave us a shearing demonstration, Juliet Flynn-Christensen from Hidden Hollow Ranch, who gave us a stock working demonstration with goats, cattle, and sheep, and Mady Braught, the photographer who took our portraits including all the beautiful photos in this update.
Being at Shepherd Camp with this welcoming group of women was MAGICAL! Shared quarters and meals at Flynn’s Ranch bonded us and pushed us to open up our hearts and minds with each other. This trip is one I’ll never forget because of the experiences I got to share with a gritty group of women that I’ll forever be rooting for.
Stock working demonstration
I’ll love Appa no matter how often I catch him eating his own poop, but when I compare him to Julie’s dogs, he’s definitely more indoor couch floof than clever canine, descendant of wolves. It was impressive to watch how Julie’s dogs were so in tune with her and the livestock. Her commands were firm but soft-spoken and her body language provided further instruction. It felt like you could see the dogs reaching out to her for directions even though their bodies were still. Awareness and intelligence at its peak on display. Working dogs operate on a whole new level becoming the rancher’s multiplier.
Learning how to tan hides
I learned a lot from Lacey during the trip — one of the things being how to tan hides. Tanning hides is a sensory experience that involves your whole body. It’s a physical activity where the repetition becomes meditative. It was neat to see Caroline’s hides under salt waiting for their transformations. All the steps involved in tanning a hide makes you appreciate the beauty that comes from hours of trimming, soaking, stretching, scraping, massaging, and some more scraping. Someday I’ll go to one of Lacey’s hide tanning workshops to immerse myself in the process and come home with my own tanned hide.
Ranch chores and bottle babies
It was pretty fun doing farm chores somewhere else. I really like checking out other people’s setups, and it was nice to be able to ask Caroline questions about her setup. Farming has given me a new found obsession with gates and fencing. I have to confess I went home and replicated a few things that I saw while I was at Little Creek. In the mornings and at night, we’d go and check in on the sheep and feed the bottle babies. The bottle babies are TOO CUTE, and incredibly friendly from associating humans with milk. We also filled water troughs, mucked stalls, spread straw in muddy areas, and just generally spent time hanging out with the ewes and their lambs.
Shearing
One of the things I was most excited to see that weekend was the shearing demonstration with Heather. I learned that there’s so much I don’t know about sheep’s wool and fiber in general, but that’s an exciting discovery of the rabbit holes I can go down. Seeing the demonstration and hearing Heather answer all our questions made me a lot less anxious about Edith and my wethers getting sheared this year. Heather’s shearing demonstration was fun and filled with information and laughter.
Unlike Appa’s haircuts where he comes out looking dapper with a perfectly neat trim, Edith and the Fiber Boys didn’t come out looking quite as sharp after their shearing. They have little tufts and some areas that are more uneven. I’m not sure what the norm for sheep shearing is but it makes me want to go to sheep shearing school so I have the skills to confidently shear the sheep to my standards even though I know they don’t care. It would also be nice not to be bound to the shearer’s schedule and have the flexibility to shear when it’s appropriate based on the weather instead of having to pick a date months in advance. Edith didn’t seemed as bothered with her shorter coat, but it seemed like the wethers were uncomfortable in the heat we got in early May.
Births
Learning about and observing ewes that are lambing up close was amazing to experience. With so many ewes at the ranch, new lambs would pop up in the pen when we’d come back for checks. We went over things to look out for when ewes are lambing and the different positions lambs can be in on their way out. The normal presentation is with both legs forward, but lambs can end up in other positions that make it difficult for ewes to birth them like when the head or forelegs are facing the wrong direction. There were two yearling ewes that ended up needed intervention while I was there. I’m glad we were around to see what an intervention can look like. It was interesting to see how ewes can behave towards their lambs and how to encourage ewes and their lambs to bond.
All the lamb things
One of the things I was looking forward to the most was learning how to perform all of the lamb tasks like health checks, vaccinations, ear tags, and castrations. There’s also the record keeping, a topic that keeps coming up more and more in every area of running a farm. It was fun to catch and sort the ewes from their lambs. There’s a way to move around sheep that keeps them calm and moving in the direction that you want. It’s like a dance with the sheep that feels more and more natural as you spend time herding them.
I was most intimidated by ear tagging lambs after reading about how to do this so I tagged as many lambs as I could. It was extra fun to be part of our assembly lines where each of us learned and then taught another how to do a task because I’m usually farming by myself at home. You can see and feel the vein that needs to be avoided, and the lambs are unfazed. We didn’t get into docking because Icelandic sheep have naturally short tails so there was no reason to dock any tails.
Portraits
I must admit I wasn’t excited at first to have Mady take my portrait because of how awkward I feel when cameras are pointed at me. Mady has a calming presence and I’m glad I have this photo to remember how peaceful and happy I felt that last day before we headed home. The sky really does feel bigger in Montana and it made me feel like my future is wide open too.
Shepherd Camp reaffirmed to me that I’m headed where I want to be in life. The sheep started out as utilitarian orchard mowers that would allow tighter row spacing for the pawpaws, but they’ve been a joy to keep. I went to Montana unsure if I’d be up for breeding my own sheep and came home knowing I could handle lambing season on my own. Thanks for letting me practice on your lambs, Caroline!
I’ve returned home invigorated and confident that I can get my own ewes through lambing season at Pronky Hollow Farm someday. Up next for us are four ewes and a wether that’ll be joining the flock this summer. I’m excited to meet them and continue my sheep shepherding adventures. 🐑