I must admit, I’d thought the Southdown was supposed to be the smallest of the Downs breeds. But then, the Ryeland, though similar, isn’t a Downs breed.
While looking for info I discovered two things. Firstly, there is a lot of conflicting info out there about Southdowns. Partly because of the Babydoll (which I’m not even sure we have in this country, do we?) and partly because there seem to be big differences between the UK sheep and those in some other countries. And to make matters even more confusing, many .CO.UK websites have clearly looked up the info online, not checked that it applies to the UK sheep, and posted it anyway...
The other interesting thing I found was
this chart from Signet, showing birth weights for various breeds. Ryeland sadly isn’t one of the breeds on it, but it’s interesting anyway, I thought.