Lamb 072

I asked Dominique to pick up 072 so I could photograph him.  His mother is 159 and his Birth was recorded 6 days ago.  He was the 72nd purebred Saxon Merino born this year, hence his ear tag number.

I'm amazed that he, and his dam too*, know that he is a special sheep (good sheep seem to know their excellence and it is this self knowledge that amazes one); I can see by his calmness and the way way he carries himself that he is special.  The way he looks at me. He has that sense of assurance that only good sheep have; being that he is a purebred Saxon Merino, he will have superior wool, better wool than his peers have, in those important fiber qualities of fineness, uniformity and density; he should pass these qualities along to certain of his offspring when I breed him two years from now.

*Two days earlier I had tried to photograph him as he stood in the barn with a very dear Nikon 14 mm-24 mm  zoom lens on my D-700; as I bent over to get close to him, his mother, 159, interceded and bumped me leaving her nose print on the convex glass of the wide angle lens. "What you doin gettin so close to my boy?"