The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Livestock => Sheep => Topic started by: Bionic on April 18, 2014, 04:31:58 pm
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Do you have the same breeds as the locals around you? Do the sheep all sound the same?
I have Ryelands and am surrounded by various Welsh commercial breeds. My girls have very distinctive voices, deep and quite appealing. Whereas the local sheep all sound as if they have strangulated hernias and sore throats.
Are the commercial sheep speaking a local dialect?
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That's an interesting question, my Kerry Hills sound quite different to the Cheviots.
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:thinking: Mine are usually very quiet. Is that a Soay thing?
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I have both Down and Mountain sheep and they usually make a noise only to greet the arrival of a feed bucket during lambing. They all sound the same - insistent and hungry!
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our wensleydales had very deep voices.
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I'm sure they do at least have different accents. The question is, do all sheep of the same breed sound the same, or does it depend on where they live? Can all sheep of the same breed no matter where they're from understand eachother? Can sheep of different breeds speak to eachother, or is that why they can be so standoffish for months after two breeds are put together?
In the hills - we have one Soay who makes the biggest sheep noise I've ever heard, but she is ancient so maybe she's deaf and just shouts :D
I've certainly noticed that my sheep rarely make a noise outside lambing time, and even then they are quiet compared to all the yelling commercial breeds round about - but that's maybe because they're taken to a big field they don't know and put there with their lambs, so there's mayhem til they all settle down and find the right mums/lambs, whereas ours know exactly where they are.
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Ummm.... I can identify individuals amongst my sheep from their voices. Not all of them, but some of them.
Sadie has a completely different sound to any other sheep on the farm, including Buffy, who came with her.
There's a deep (and loud!) timbre to the call of some of our Beltex- and Texel-out-of-Mule sheep that identifies them as being ones sourced from the moorland farm. The only other sheep we have that sound similar came from another moorland farm :thinking:
On the whole, our Texels are extremely quiet. They call their lambs when necessary and they call out to each other when the feed is arriving. Some of them call us to tell us it's time the feed was arriving ;). But compared to the Swaledales and Mules on the moorland farm, they are practically mute!
And the Mules here are a lot more vocal than the Texels too.
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I can tell some individuals by their vocals too ..... guess they may all be different but you tend to know the 'odd' ones for various reasons. .... I can tell each of my orphans from a distance.
As to breeds being more vocal .... this may be related to their normal environment ..... not being vocal when you have a lamb on a mountain or moorland would be rather a bad mothering trait.... whereas on flat grazing it is not so important.
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My four (Zwartbles) all have similar voices, I guess, but I can tell who is shouting very easily as they are quite distinct from one another too (does that make any sense?!).
Our nearest large flocks are a dairy flock of the same breed and a flock of Whiteface Dartmoor but I can't tell which flock is making which noise!
ETA: I do know that certain members of the tit family (blue and great primarily) have localised accents - to the point that they don't recognise the song of their own species if it's being sung in the 'wrong' accent!