2011 Soay Lambs at Woodland Creek

While we already have some 2011 lambs already on the ground, the arrival yesterday was one of my favorites and long-time breeding goals - the "black-and-white" (B&W) Soay sheep. I have always liked white spotting on self-colored dark phase (solid black) Soays. After seeking and obtaining self-colored Soays with tiny white poll markings early in my Soay years, I have been increasing the extent of the white spotting in each succeeding generation. Here is yesterday's lamb (a ram) to Woodland Creek Raven '07, by first-time sire Woodland Creek Lightning '09 :

Woodland Creek Rowdy '10 - Raven's "Black-and-White" ram lamb

The bad thing about B&W Soays is that they are hard to photograph, especially new lambs as they are like black holes - the fresh, often wet black hair barely returns any light, and most digital cameras have algorithms that attempt to balance the overall photo to medium gray tones...but I digress. Here is the new lamb with his dam. You can see that she only has a small poll white spot (the white hair on her nose is age-white, not white spotting gene).

Raven '07 and Rowdy '11 - her B&W ram lamb

Here is the sire - you can see that he has less white than his first lamb, the ram above.

Woodland Creek Lightning '10

As for our other 2011 lambs, we did have another nice "3/4" Self-colored Light phase (SCLP) lamb. Like last year, Skylonda Imagine (a light-wild ewe) was bred to the SCLP ram Express. As before, the resulting lambs express the dominant wild pattern, but (I believe) because they also carry a copy of the self-colored gene recessive, the pattern is very "muted". That is to say, when the lambs are new and wet I almost always think they are self-colored light phase, as the wild pattern is so indistinct. Here is a photo of Imagine's 2011 ram lamb, Ish (click on photo to enlarge and see detail - note the uniformity of coloring on the top of the nose, at the chin, and on his legs).

Woodland Creek Ish '11 - Imagine X Express

I will be saving this ram lamb in reserve in case I need a fallback for producing more self-colored light phase Soays.

Lambing for final light-wild Skylonda Soay ewe at Woodland Creek

Saturday the last of the four light-wild Soay ewes from Skylonda finally lambed. As with the others, the sire was the self-light ram Express. Another ewe! That makes four ewes and only one ram. All will be what I call "3/4 SCLP" - that is, all are homozygous for light phase, and heterozygous for self-colored. As such each has a 50:50 chance, mated to a self-light ram, of producing more self-light Soays. This is as good of odds as there have been for a long time!

Skylonda Ginger and Dam Skylonda Geege

Only 3 or 4 more ewes to lamb this year. One for sure, the others may not be pregnant. With 17 live lambs on the ground, I don't need too many more this year!

Two new lambs and a stroke of luck

Two more light-phase Skylonda ewes lambed last week. Each had a single, one a ewe and one a ram. With Blue Mountain Express as sire (self-colored light phase) the lambs HAD to be light phase, and as neither ewe was likely to be carrying self-colored gene, the lambs were both light-wild pattern.

Skylonda Indigo '10 - ewe with dam Skylonda Imagine

Skylonda Escalante '10 - ram with Dam Skylonda Georgianna

My stroke of luck was this. I have the entire ewe and lamb flock accessing the far paddock way up our back hill - which I cannot see from the house and yard. After coming home from work I decided I had better traipse up there and check on one ewe that is close to lambing. After watching them all a while, I spot the lamb Indigo acting funny, then realize that in fact she is stuck. Stuck in the fork of a twin-trunk hawthorne sapling! She had apparently launched herself through the gap, and after getting her shoulders through, wedged just ahead of her hips, with her back feet an inch off the ground. Stuck for who knows how long. And these Skylonda lambs don't cry out much, nor did the dam seem concerned at all. I rescued her and she did not seem stiff or cold, so after a bit of massage she ran to mom and started suckling, so I guess no damage done. Here is the "lamb snare" hawthorne, with a "re-creation" of the stuck lamb using my gloves.

I would have never thought of this (never did, obviously) as a risk. Since I don't count heads every day, and had to work the next couple days, it is likely the lamb would have expired had I not, by chance, decided to go up and visit.
Naturally, the one trunk of the hawthorne was removed to eliminate the hazard. The ewes enjoyed getting their revenge on the "almost killer" hawthorne.

Ten to Fourteen...

Wow - Thursday noon to Saturday noon we had 5 more Soay lambs at Woodland Creek. Each one was something different, genetically. First, on Thursday afternoon one of our "half SCLP" ewes, (A+/Aa, BB/Bb), Chinook, had a little ram. As the odds would predict, it was a dark-wild, and as our luck has been going, a ram to boot.

Woodland Creek Trout- ram  Chinook X Sequoyah

Later that same day we had a "double-first". It was the first ewe that we received from the Skylonda flock dispersal, and also the first RBST Soay that has ever lambed at Woodland Creek. Oh yeah, since the sire was Blue Mountain Express, perhaps the only self-light Soay in North America, maybe a triple-first. At any rate, since there are no self-colored RBST in North America (unless more recent AI efforts have introduced it), the lamb had to be wild pattern, and 50:50 odds for light or dark (Since the dam USA0002 Gwen has to have a copy of the recessive light phase from her dam Celcius). Alas, the RAM was/is dark phase. Cute enough, not special in our flock.

Skylonda Muskrat '10 - ram

 Friday morning, another "Black & White" ewe, Cedarbrook Nisqually, lambed. Unfortunately, ANOTHER ram... but nicely marked.

Woodland Creek Lightning '10 ram

Lightning (guess why the name!) has a nice extension of white spotting compared to this dam Nisqually, but less than his sire Yosemite. Too many B&W rams now!
The real excitement, however, was saved for Saturday. Not only did I obtain my first RBST Soay from Jen Bailey at Skylonda when she dispersed her flock, but she also graced me with many light phase Soays. So the only light-phase RBST Soay that we have at Woodland Creek, USA0002 Fiona, rather suddenly swelled up and decided to lamb.
For my viewing pleasure, she did it mid-day on a Saturday, so I got to observe (and videotape!) the entire birth.
The best part is that she gave birth to twins. Not that uncommon with Soay, but pretty rare at Woodland Creek! We have only had one successful twin live birth here in 5 years and about 65 lambings.
Given that Fiona was light phase, and the sire Blue Mountain Express was also homozygous for recessive light phase, the lambs HAD to be light phase. Since there is no evidence of self-colored in the "legacy" RBST Soay in NA, the lambs had to be wild pattern. Sure enough, they were.

Skylonda Zillah '10 - ewe and Skylonda Trillium '10 - ewe

Dam USA0002 Fiona and Sire Blue Mountain Express

Express, the sire of lambs above.

Blue Mountain Express '08 - self-light NA Soay ram

We should have a breather now for a while before the last 8 or 10 ewes lamb.

Number 9, number 9, number 9...

Our ninth lamb of this year was already up and dry by daylight this morning. One of our "black and whites", and a good outcome at that. Here is little Woodland Creek Rascal, a ram lamb out of WC Raven and WC Yosemite, both B&Ws.

Woodland Creek Rascal '10 ram

He has almost the same extent of white spotting as his lamb-mates this year, Bandit and the unborn lamb of Thumper's. Very nice result. (Although we are getting a bit overloaded with B&W rams...)

Lambing update - Self-colored Light phase

We had our 6th lamb a few days ago - a "Black and White". Disappointly little white, given the parents (WC Yosemite and WC Anasazi). The ewe lamb (Ash) has only a "twink" of white (as Kate Montgomery called it).

Woodland Creek Ash '10 ewe

But today we had two more lambs-these from our line attempting to produce the very rare self-colored light phase (self-light for short) NA Soay. Given the non-existence of these in North America in previous years, I had been working toward creating some. One route to this is to breed self-dark (i.e., solid black) Soays with light-wild Soays. Given that the self-colored parent MUST contribute the recessive Aa, and the light phase parent MUST contribute a recessive Bb, the offspring MUST have at least one copy of each of these. In 2008 I did a number of these breedings, and produced 4 ewes and 2 rams of this genotype A+/Aa, BB/Bb. Of course they all look just like "regular" Soays - all dark-wild. But breedings of these genotypes have a small, but finite, probability of producing the elusive self-light.
Of course the odds are not that good. Below is a table showing the possibilities for mating two "half-SCLP" Soays.

 

You can see that when I bred my four "1/2 SCLP" ewes last fall to a "1/2 SCLP" ram, there was only a 1/16th, or 6% chance of a SCLP. Well, today two of those 4 ewes lambed, and for a moment I was convinced I had hit the jackpot with one. Check out Tahkenitch's ram lamb.

Tahkenitch's ram lamb '10

When I saw the uniformity of color on the legs, belly and under the tail i thought we had gotten very lucky. Closer inpection, though, revealed the telltale light spots around eyes, under chin, and inside ears. Alas, he is not self-colored. He does, of course, have white spotting as both his dam and sire (Sequoyah) do as well.

The second lamb was, as the odds would have suggested, also phenotypically a dark-wild pattern.

Molly's ram lamb '10

A nice enough lamb, but not what I was hoping for! Note that the trouble with breeding for SCLP in this manner is that the genotype of the lambs, for the great majority, will be unknown. Mostly one will get dark-wild lambs with unknown genes for the second allele at both agouti and brown locus, so they can't really be used to further the cause for SCLP. This particular breedign goal may be a hopeless endeavor given the flock size I can realisticall maintain. Given that I have (and can keep alive!) some actual SCLPs, I have a "sure" thing for next year, and very good odds with the SCLP ram as sire, so I will probably go that route.

Lamb status at Woodland Creek

No new lambs today but with nice weather I sat and watched the 5 new lambs cavort. Here are a few photos from today. First, three separate and distinct color phases of Soay lambs. Left, a dark-self with white spotting, center, a light-wild with white spotting, and last, a "common" dark-wild, also with white spotting. Get the idea that I have lots of white spotting in my flock?

Bandit - r, Santa Fe - r, and Pistol - e

Yesterday's little dark-self ram has now been named - Dakotah. Here he is basking in the sun. You can surely see why I just love the shiny black of fresh new black lambs! Note his mother's light-self (uniform brown) leg in the background. Dakotah has to be Aa/Aa, BB/Bb, SS/S?.

Woodland Creek Dakotah '10 - ram

Our development of light phase in the NA Soays has consisted of selecting those that have less and less pheomelanin (the reddish pigment so prevalent in many PNW NA Soays). Woodland Creek Santa Fe has the least "pheomelanin cast" of any lambs we've had here at Woodland Creek. Bandit in the background. What a contrast.

Woodland Creek Santa Fe '10 -ram

Little Santa Fe has the oddest little face.

Woodland Creek Santa Fe '10 -ram

And finally, since I touted the "4-color" rams shot a few days ago, with some fresh grass as a lure, it was pretty easy to capture a single photo showing all four color phases in ewes. Below, in the foreground from left to right is: dark-self, dark-wild, light-self, and finally light-wild. You can see from my ewe flock that I like a mix of colors and coat patterns!

Lambing count stands at 5 (live) and more on the way within days, I would say.