In November, eleven thousand sheep made their way west to Wilder, Idaho after spending the summer grazing in the foothills of the Boise National Forest. But before they arrived home, they got a haircut. Emily Schwing finds out what it takes to shear a sheep, and why you’d do it just as the snow starts to fly.
A handful of pickup trucks and trailers are parked in a half moon around a corral filled with ambivalent looking sheep.
In the distance, you can hear a distinct buzz.
Some of the sheep stand, heads down, in a chute leading up into a trailer. Inside, the ewes wait, like ladies at the beauty parlor, against a railing that drops down every so often. When it does, the sheep shearer gets to work.
Each ewe weighs about 190 pounds. But they don’t put up a fight. In fact, they seem pretty indifferent as clippers buzz the wool off their hind legs, around their backside, up their belly, over their neck and down their back.
The whole process is done in about five minutes, and the fleece comes off like an orange peel.
The freshly shaven sheep is pushed out through a trap door on the opposite side of the trailer. Then shearer John Balderson reaches for another one. He gets it into position. The sheep is nearly sitting up, with its back resting against his legs. This is the right way to do it.
“I’ll never forget when I first learned, he laughs. “I was shearing away and this old timer saw me shear and he said well, I never seen it down like that before, but it might work. And all a sudden, a light come on a I start paying attention watching the other guys shear.”
Balderson’s been shearing sheep for as long as he’d like to remember. It’s filthy and Balderson says it leaves him feeling like there is a knife stuck in his side. But at 63 years old, he makes it look easy.
“I partied one night in Wieser one night and drove clear to Sun Valley, way up in the mountains there, and I sheared 134 head with no sleep before lunch in half a day. It rained that afternoon and I was kind glad because I was about burnt out. But when I was 58 years old there was a couple a kids from eastern Idaho that said they was gonna beat me. They was 24, and I says not today and I sheared 226 that day so…”
In a larger trailer next door, the frenzy of sheep, clippers and men is constant. Little curls of wool float through the air and swirl around on the floor.
Frank Shirts owns these sheep. He’s a third generation rancher. He says the shearing part just isn’t for him.
“No, God! I wouldn’t be able to walk by tonight,” he says. “I haven’t sheared for … hardly any for 20, 25 years. I never did like it!”
It’s November. Idaho’s winter is setting in, and although the sun is shining, the wind is biting. So, why shear sheep now?
“I get asked that all the time, what are you shearing those sheep for?… Well, I like to shear ‘em ahead of lambing.”
In other parts of Idaho, lambing season doesn’t come around until the spring, but for Shirts, lambs will start to appear on his ranch in Wilder in January. Most of his ewes are pregnant right now with two or three lambs, and they’ve also been carrying about 10 pounds of wool on their backs.
“You take ten pounds of this wool and it’s raining, and the ewes are heavy pregnant and then they’re packing that weight and you soak that in water,” explains Shirts, “how much is there another 40 pounds? I don’t know! It’s heavy! If it wasn’t better, I would do it. I’m not doing it to mean to ‘em. They gotta be sheared.”
Although they look a little naked when they come out on the other side of the trailer, the sheep will growing a thin layer of wool, or “coat over” as Shirts puts it, in about ten days.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=tdVhPwT0e3U