Lambs - Bond

All three ewes from Bond’s group have lambed and each gave us a ewe lamb, which will make decision time difficult. But then, it always is. We gave Bond Constantinople, Onyx, and Persia in hopes of getting some fine, high quality ewes, and we’re pretty satisfied with the results. Last year, Bond improved every ewe he was bred to, and we were very interested in what he would do with these particular ewes. Bond’s two year old micron test was: AFD: 23.6; CV: 18.6; SF: 22.5. Our goal is to reproduce that in as many ewes as we can. Plus, we just like the way the Bond lambs look. All have nice toplines, tails, and heads, to go with their improved fleeces.

Here is Constantinople’s ewe lamb. She only had a single this year. The lamb is a fawn yuglet katmoget, with an impressive fleece and is 51% UK. Again, not a huge amount of UK blood in this lamb, but enough to introduce the fleece characteristics that we want.

Persia twinned this year, which was a surprise. Her ram is built extremely well and has a wavy birth coat at this point. I haven’t had time to determine whether he might be polled, but there is a 50/50 chance. He’ll be at least a half-poll. He is black with nice spotting. It’s always cool when we get unpatterned lambs with katmoget-to-katmoget breedings. If I had to guess, I’d say he’ll probably have a four or five inch fleece length, which is about right, I think. I have no idea how fine he’ll be, but out of those parents, he should be pretty nice. He may end up being for sale, but we’ll have to see how he develops. He really doesn’t offer us anything genetically that we don’t already have.

And finally, Persia finally gave us a ewe. And we really like her potential. Great structure, fleece, and presence in one package. She’s a very pretty dark, silvery blue katmoget with a very consistent fleece. We’ll be keeping a close eye on her to see how she develops, but she’s as close to what we are breeding for as we could have hoped for. She’s almost exactly what I envisioned with this breeding. She is 48% UK.

Onyx also lambed yesterday, but I don’t have pictures yet. The lamb looks very much like Persia’s ram lamb, however. Solid black with interesting spotting on her head. Stunning conformation, and a wavy black fleece. I don’t really know where her fleece is headed at this point because her mother also had a fleece like this when she was a lamb and she ended up being fine with a lower CV. I would say this lamb might be very much like her mother, but unpatterned. She is 57% UK.

A good collection of lambs out of these breedings! Some excellent conformations to go with fleece diversity and fineness. We would’ve liked to have put Bond with more ewes, but we’re trying to maintain genetic diversity as we improve our flock, which isn’t as easy as it might sound.