Bondurant, Wyoming, gets one heck of a lot of snow in the winter, but grows lush crops of native hay in creekside meadows in the summer. The Campbell Ranch at Bondurant is an old-time outfit, been there forever it seems, and still uses draft horse teams to cut hay in the summer and feeds the …
Tag: Ranching
Dog/sheep days of summer
It’s 65 degrees this mid-morning, and the herd at the house has been complaining about the heat and mosquitoes. Here are old ewe, Friendly, with some of the orphan lambs, and Rant the Aziat, all trying to enjoy the shade.
Rainy range
We’ve been blessed with a rainy spring and the animals respond accordingly. This is the yearling Aziat Rant playing with Rena, the two-year old Akbash (the all white one), this morning as the sun was coming up over the Wind Rivers. I knew when they walked up to each other nose-to-nose that play fights would …
Sheep shearing
We usually try to have our sheep shorn in mid-April, but this year, we had to keep putting off shearing as we were hit with spring storm after spring storm. Even after the rains stop, the wool has to dry before we can shear. We were finally able to shear this week, just in time …
Livestock in the living room
Every year during lambing, I end up with orphan lambs (although husband Jim claims I am just as likely to steal a lamb as to wait for one to get lost). I love having bum lambs – they are lots of work, but it’s all good. If they are ewe lambs, I keep them and …
Wyoming traffic jam
I had to make a run to the courthouse this morning, and met up with a traffic jam, prompting this entry. Let me provide a short etiquette lesson for cattle drive encounters. First and foremost, don’t get impatient and uptight when you see livestock being moved down a highway. Instead, get out the camera and …
Feeding time
Late every afternoon, we feed big bales of alfalfa hay to our sheep and cows, which live in the same large meadow pasture together at this time of year, along with the burros and a guardian dog. As we drive to the hay stackyard in the noisy flatbed feedtruck, we watch the moose clear the …
Living with livestock guardians
I have the pleasure of living with livestock guardian dogs. Ours is a working sheep and cattle ranch, so our dogs live with the sheep, but I generally raise a litter a year, so that means I am often living with puppies and socializing them to humans, buildings, etc. I raise the pups for other …
Sunday Links
Nagrom has an essay on ranch life, cowboy music, and an encounter with one of the greats. Paleontology, real and not so: Darren discusses the new long- “tailed” birdlike fossil (and tells us that some of its more obscure details are interesting); and shows us how certain Native American art resembles a hypothetical giant earthbound …
The Ranch
We often speak of “The Ranch”– Lee Henderson’s acreage of miles of high desert grassland, canyon, and foothill, located on La Jencia Plain under the Magdalenas and not touching pavement on any side. It is an idael place to run dogs and fly falcons. I thought you might like to see a few pix. Here …