Thursday, November 12, 2015

Ewe-A-Day - Whispering Pines Siena


 
Siena is another flock favorite for a lot of reasons. She has a fantastic fleece and is built really well. She was our first Pompey daughter and also the first indication that I was onto something when I brought him in to help improve our fleeces. She is a definite improvement on her mother in all categories and we have been fortunate to get nice offspring from her. Barenfang is an excellent example of what she can do, as is Knightley (a great ram out of Canterbury that I have not talked about yet). When I sorted fleeces this year, hers stood out because it has a great combination of traits. Her four year old fleece stats are: 27.2/4.9/18/8.1/26.
As you can see, her average does not stand out as being exceptional, but the fleece is truly outstanding. It’s a fleece that I would want to reproduce over and over. It would be nice to shave a few microns off of it, but that’s not always possible. Sometimes finer isn’t better. Some of our finer stuff just isn’t as nice as this one. Our breeding goals have evolved somewhat since we bred for Siena and Blue Sapphire, etc. A lot has changed over the years and yet we still have these ewes in the face of much pressure to cut back. I think that’s a testament to how good these ewes are. It also shows how unique I think they are. You just don’t find stuff this good out there…anywhere. We are the only ones dumb enough to sell stuff this good, and that’s only because we have to eventually or we have to stop breeding altogether.

Below is a picture of Siena with her ewe lamb from this year out of Canterbury. Unfortunately, she has her mother's head and not her fathers, but there's nothing wrong with that either.

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