Just where the flat, manicured Illinois farmlands begin to fold and ripple into rolling woodlands, that's where you'll find Mary Swindell's pristine Bellwether Farm. Mary's farm is home to a beautiful flock of rare polled Barbados Blackbelly sheep.
I arrived a little early, so I dropped by the farm just to make sure I was in the right place, and was immediately absorbed into the enthusiastic preparations. All weekend long, there was not a stranger to be seen, for the gathering was intimate and wonderfully friendly. The board members shouldered the entire responsibility of organizing an intensive, almost exhausting slate of seminars, talks, field trips and demonstrations. Participants were given prodigious packets of information. Topics ranged from scrapie eradication, to the new National Animal ID plan, to hoof trimming to fecal exams, and guardian dogs, to the fundamental differences between horned and polled stock. I must confess, my brain was swimming by the end of the two days. Woven throughout the fabric of the event was the sinuous presence and participation of a mob of border collies. These dogs were as much as a heartbeat to the steady rhythm of the weekend. If the sheep were the object of the meeting, the dogs were just a filmy thought away from being managers, participants, owners, comrades, and indisputable lords of the flocks. There wasn't one there that didn't think it had more right to be there than anyone who had actually paid for the privilege. There wasn't one there that didn't reckon the whole event would have been a wash without them. They wove in and out among us, on their dog business, on their people business, and on their sheep business. And when it was sheep business, it was "step aside, let me show you how a pro does it!" The dogs were incredible. Maybe some of us went away not thinking about getting more sheep, but ALL of us went away wanting a working border collie! Having had the privilege of helping a bit beforehand, I am well aware of the prodigious effort on the part of the board members to provide such an incredible learning experience for the rest of us. My sincerest thanks go to Mary Swindell, Carol Elkins, Josh Weimer, James Harper and Mark Fleming, Mary's friends who assisted and who educated us, and all other hands that worked so hard to produce such a one-of-a-kind experience. I've just put an ad in the paper, looking for a few more sheep, with a much greater confidence level in where I'm headed with my sheep enterprise. Best regards, Barb Lee =============================================== This message is from the Barbados Blackbelly Sheep mailing list (http://www.awrittenword.com/listserv/index.html). To respond to this message, send e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe or change your membership options, go to http://lists.coyotenet.net/mailman/listinfo/blackbelly To search the archives, go to http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
