North American Flocks

If you are not ready to pay the higher purchase price of a flock of all-British Soay or you want to be able to play around with breeding, explicitly aiming for particular colors, particular horn shapes, spotting, or other “looks,” you can do what some of us did – start with Americans. It allowed us to “test drive” having Soay sheep before we started building our British breeding flock.

There are as many ways to put together a North American Soay flock as your imagination can dream up – breeding for all black Soay, breeding for polled ewes (no horns), breeding for larger animals to sell for meat – you name it. Here is one example to help you get started in your thinking.

We started with four North American ewes and one British ram – Chestnut. From reading and talking with experienced breeders, we knew from the start that breeding British rams to North American ewes usually produces extremely well-conformed animals with the somewhat smaller frames characteristic of British Soay sheep, but also with the possibility of a much wider array of fleece color from the North American stock.

Our first year, we bred Galadrial to Chestnut. Galadrial is a nice looking, average size brown North American ewe with lots of British in her background. Chestnut is a Full British, quite short, stocky, small brown ram. The result of this breeding? Twins Antony and Cleopatra, both of whom have classic “British” looks – clean lines, excellent sweeping horns, salt and pepper grey or light brown fleece. Antony and Cleo are shown here as newborns with Galadrial, and also as adults. Handsome, aren't they?

The next year, we decided to breed Chestnut to a very different sort of North American ewe, Grace, one of our Blue Mountain foundation ewes. Grace is a really big girl, sweet tempered, and possessed of gorgeous long mahogany fleece. She is also a great mother. But, nothwithstanding her winning personality and lovely fleece, Grace's pedigree includes no Full British ancestors, and is incomplete to boot.

We assumed we would get a dark brown, hopefully mahogany, lamb from the Grace/Chestnut breeding, a sort of reverse Lady and the Tramp situation. Once again we got twins, but this time out came the most beautifully-colored Soay we have ever seen, Fennel and her twin Fenugreek, who surprised us by being light-phase (tan). As newborns, they both had gloriously fluffy, light reddish fleece. The good news is that both of them have retained their luxurious fleece, deep colors, and overall good looks as adults. Here they are.