Cash working on 3/06/09

Here is a stoic boy, my Cash man. He is awaiting his next command.

Here he is starting some of his driving. He will pretty much walk straight on to his sheep.

He will convince them shortly to get moving. There are not too many sheep that will stand up to Cash.

Corbie working on 3/06/09

I got to work dogs a few times this past week, actually three times! Woo Hoo!! I am going to do separate posts for each one tho.
The first one here is Corbie. I took some pictures of her driving. Above she is moving quickly to cover her sheep. This is good for her as she can get a little sticky when driving. But she was taking her flanks decently. She still needs work on that.

Here she is taking the sheep away and towards a hill in this field. She has turned in and it walking straight in on them.

Here she was first taking them away and they were a little panicked. But they did settle down.

Another sign of spring coming

I figure that another sign that spring is coming is that our ewes start looking very pregnant. We should start lambing around April 3rd. I took these pictures on March 6th, so they have roughly a month until they are due to lamb. This girl definitely looks preggers and like she is ready to go.

This one doesn't look like she is quite as far along as the one above, but she is still pregnant.

This girl is starting to hang down and from the front she looks almost as big as the first picture above.

Signs of spring??

The past couple of days in the mid to upper 40's can certainly make a person think that spring is coming. The picture above is on one side of our front field. The water was running so hard that it created suds. You could hear the creek all the way behind our house roaring as the water was running through so quickly.
Another sign of spring is that after doing evening chores I heard a robin scolding on my way back up to the house.

This is another shot showing the "suds."

This is the other side of the field where the water comes in from neighboring fields.

This is the middle of the field. Besides the water that is coming in from the previous picture, there is also water that is coming in from the right of this shot from yet another field.

This is along the west side of our driveway coming from a field.

This shows where the water is first coming down along side of our driveway. It was actually flowing across the driveway, something that I haven't seen in the 8 years that I lived here.

Flanks, flanks and more flanking

It has been much warmer here the past couple of days. It reached 44 degrees here today with no wind this afternoon. So, obviously we have been out working dogs the past couple of days. They are all rusty from not being able to work much this winter, other than holding sheep off of the feeders. So, I have been working all three of mine on flanking exercises to get them to free up on their flanks again. I can also only do so much in the sense of outruns due to snow, slush and water. Cash was working really nice and was taking some of my inside flank commands while working on driving. Corbie, for whatever reason, wasn't taking her inside flanks. This is odd as she is usually better at that than Cash. Cash is usually so strong eyed and such a line dog that he doesn't want to flank while driving. Go figure! So, for now we will work on cleaning up flanks again. Jag wants to go back to slicing his away inside flanks. One extreme or the other with him sometimes. So, it's back to flanking exercises for him too. Unfortunately due to the snow piled up by all of our fences I can't do any of the exercises with any of them with me up against the fence. So, we will just have to make due with however we can do the exercises.