The Independent Stitch

Rare Breeds Survival Trust's 2011 Watchlist for sheep

The Rare Breeds Survival Trust, which monitors the status of livestock breeds in the British Isles, has published its 2011 Watchlist of breeds that need attention to stay, as they say, off the slippery slope to extinction. From the whole list (a PDF), I'm focusing here on the sheep:

Categories are based on numbers of breeding females.

CRITICAL (category 1)

• Boreray

ENDANGERED (category 2)

• Leicester Longwool
• North Ronaldsay

VULNERABLE (category 3)

• Castlemilk Moorit
• Devon & Cornwall Longwool
• Hill Radnor
• Teeswater
• Whitefaced Woodland

AT RISK (category 4)

• Balwen
• Cotswold
• Lincoln Longwool
• Manx Loaghtan
• Norfolk Horn
• Oxford Down
• Portland
• Soay
• Wensleydale
• Whiteface Dartmoor

MINORITY (category 5)

• Dorset Down
• Dorset Horn
• Greyface Dartmoor
• Shropshire

A few random notes:

* The Norfolk Horn is not the original breed, but has been bred back up from near-extinction (just a few sheep), using in part one of the more modern breeds that had previously been developed from a Norfolk Horn foundation, the Suffolk. Called the New Norfolk Horn for a while, the "New" part of the name has now been dropped, even though the successors may only carry part of the genetic heritage of the original breed.

* The Isle of Man cares so much about its traditional Manx Loaghtan sheep that during the foot-and-mouth epidemic of 2001 the parliament, known as the Tynwald, cancelled one of the island's highest-earning tourist events (a massive and famous motorcycle race) in order to reduce the possibility that the sheep would be exposed to the illness.

* The Dorset Down and Dorset Horn are not the same as what is often just called the Dorset (also known as the Polled Dorset, which, oddly, originated in two different locations from two different breeding efforts). (The Dorset Down is one of the six basic Down breeds. The Dorset Horn and the Polled Dorset, while they have Down-like wool, are not on that short list.)

* The Southdown is not on the RBST list, but is on the similar list prepared by the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy (ALBC). The two organizations have different criteria for evaluating populations.

The information released with the new edition of the watchlist notes that some livestock breeds have recently become more vulnerable because of world economic conditions. People who could previously have kept a small flock have had to sell their animals.

I like the format of the new list. It also notes that, over time, the following sheep breeds have progressed from category 1 (critical) to category 5 (minority) and currently have large enough populations to have been discharged from the equivalent of the breed ICU (intensive care unit), at least for now:

• Black Welsh Mountain
• Hebridean
• Jacob
• Kerry Hill
• Lleyn
• Llanwenog
• Ryeland
• Shetland
• Southdown
• South Wales Mountain
• Wiltshire Horn (a hair sheep)

A separate section of the RBST site tracks breeds of sheep that are vulnerable because their populations are concentrated in very limited geographic areas. The categories are based on how small an area contains 75 percent of the breed's population. Breeds at risk for this reason include:

CRITICAL (category 1)

• Exmoor Horn 
• Whiteface Dartmoor

ENDANGERED (category 2)

• Rough Fell

VULNERABLE (category 3)

• Herdwick

AT RISK (category 4)

• Devon Closewool

MINORITY (category 5)

• Devon & Cornwall Longwool

You'll note that the Whiteface Dartmoor and the Devon & Cornwall Longwool face the double whammy of limited overall numbers and high geographic concentration.

Changes among the sheep from the previous list

I need to keep and archive copies of the official lists, marked by the year (the RBST PDF for this year is clearly labeled, but I think that's new). I do have extensive notes, and copies of web pages, and (somewhere) dog-eared copies of pages pulled from old copies of RBST and ALBC publications.

Breeds don't tend to move quickly up or down on either the ALBC or RBST lists: conservation is a slow process. For The Fleece and Fiber Sourcebook, co-author Carol Ekarius (the livestock person, to my fiber side of the equation) wisely suggested that we provide a label for "conservation breeds" instead of listing specific categories for the individual breeds. That overall status isn't going to change quickly, whereas the breeds' specific locations within the population assessments do move over broad swaths of time.

Handfuls of individuals can make a major difference in a breed's prospects—in either direction. Any shift in status, either up or down, is worth remarking on.

According to my notes, there were two shifts among the sheep from 2010 to 2011.

• Cotswold moved to category 4 (at risk) from category 5 (minority)
• Whitefaced Woodland moved to category 3 (vulnerable) from category 4 (at risk)

These breeds have both moved in the more vulnerable direction, toward lower populations. They are breeds with very deep histories, each located with a specific landscape.

Cotswold

Cotswold, one of the luster longwools, comes from the Cotswold Hills, on the western and southern edge of central England (how's that for a confusing description? check the map for the area I'm talking about). The breed once was a major support of the British economy.

It is a lovely handspinning wool, excellent for knitting and crocheting and exquisite for weaving. The breed contains genetics for a range of shiny fleece colors from black through a variety of grays to glistening whites.

Whitefaced Woodland

Whitefaced Woodland, from sheep with durable constitutions that originated in the southern part of the Pennine mountain range, produces fiber that is quite variable from animal to animal, with some coarser and some relatively finer (although none gets past "medium" in feel). The wool, like their faces, is white.

I knitted the swatch with Aran-weight Whitefaced Woodland yarn from Garthenor (spun at Sue Blacker's mill). The pattern is #107 from Knitting Patterns Book 250 by Hitomi Shida.

_____

P.S.

Sheepwatching notes: Even though its breed is not labeled, and I am (as noted above) a fiber rather than a livestock person, and I'm open to information that might correct my notes, if I had to say what breed is in the photo at the top of the RBST's list I'd sure pick Oxford.

The sheep in the photo is undoubtedly one of the six core Down breeds, because of its colored face and white wool—well, and the general shape of the face. Three of the six core Down breeds are on the current Watchlist (Dorset Down, Oxford Down, Shropshire; a fourth, Southdown, is on the ALBC rare breeds list; Hampshire Down and Suffolk are not on either list). There are other breeds that have colored faces and white wool, but the Down breeds have a kind of characteristic "puffy" look (that's a highly scientific descriptor that I just made up).

It isn't a Dorset Down, because they have lighter colored (generally brownish) faces. (It's not a Dorset Horn, because they have white faces and they also have distinctive horns on both rams and ewes!)

Shropshire is another possibility, and Shropshires' faces are darker than those of Dorset Downs, but they have a somewhat differently shaped profile and growth pattern of wool on the face.

Although not all Oxfords have as much wool on their faces as the sheep in the picture, many do (and some have even more). Plus the face shape is Oxford-y, if I dare say such a thing. Oxfords are sturdy sheep, and they are exceptionally large. Size isn't something we can gauge from that head shot, but we can get hints of posture. And that sheep looks like it's standing in an Oxford pose: sort of upright and staunch. I vote for Oxford.

Photo shoot post 4: staging

It's true: I have been doing a few things at the photo shoots other than taking snapshots of other people while they work. In fact, I've been on my feet and moving around at least 90 percent of the time; comfortable shoes have been my most important wardrobe item. The other 10 percent of the time I can sit next to my computer on a wooden stool and give my feet a break.

My job, which I think of as staging the materials for the photos, is to:

• select the fibers, yarns, and other bits that will be in each picture,
• move them smoothly to the area where the shot(s) will be taken,
• be sure that what shows in the finished image is what needs to be there (although I'm only taking time to check this when art director Mary Velgos and photographer John Polak have questions—during the first day of our work together, we established general principles that solve many issues without my additional photo-specific input),
• retrieve the fibers after they have been photographed,
• restore the items to their folders and file boxes, and
• maintain a tracking system that double-checks that we aren't missing anything.

In between, I have been helping Mary figure out if we need to expand the number of pages allocated for this or that breed (or whether we can, perhaps, condense one section or another, thus gaining pages to be used elsewhere). This sometimes involves judgment calls about placement of information, and sometimes requires me to write or rewrite material.

In one case, Carol Ekarius and I had written a one-paragraph introduction to a section. Mary's layout calls for a spread for each section-opener (lots of photos on the left, text on the right). That paragraph looked lonely and the page looked bare. Something had to be done about it. Fortunately, we discovered the situation on Wednesday. I spent that day and the next mulling what could be added that would not just be filler but would increase the value of the book, and doing a bit of research through my files to come up with supporting information. On Friday, I wrote new text, using my computer. Then I loaded the additional material on a USB drive, walked over to Mary's layout computer, inserted the text into InDesign on the page in question . . . and then got to trim it by about half, so it would fit!

In many cases, I'm cutting a few lines so we can get the photos to work smoothly and beautifully in the layout. Fortunately, even after several rounds of editing there are almost always surplus words that can be eliminated without decreasing the amount of information. Doing this work within the actual book production file means I can cut exactly the right number of words in exactly the right places to make the copyfitting adjustments perfect, instead of having to guess from across the country which changes might have the desired results. Familiarity with both book layout and InDesign are serving me well in these tasks.

But back to the responsibilities that are taking most of my time during the shoot. . . .

My primary working area is a 4 x 8-foot (1.2m x 2.4m) table (supported on sawhorses) roughly 6 feet (2m) from where the photos are being taken. Here's how I set it up:

Each of those manila pockets is a breed or type of fiber. The pockets along the back of the table are sorted into groups of "just finished" and "to be shot soon." (There are many file boxes elsewhere in the studio that contain previous and future days' work.) The pockets lying flat on the table are in the immediate line-up to be photographed. The plastic bags (on top of their respective pockets) contain extra fibers. For example, whenever I had enough fiber available I packed extra locks of wool so that if our first choice gets messed up we have a backup. They are also where the fibers to be photographed come from, and where they go back to. There is a set of plastic bags for each individual type of fiber.

This detail from the image above shows a sequence of fibers that will be photographed together, laid out on a scrap of mat board so they can be carried undisturbed over to the shooting area:

Those samples happen to be a bunch of gorgeous Lincolns grown and contributed by Christiane Payson at North Valley Farm (Oregon) or gathered and contributed by Beth Smith at The Spinning Loft (Michigan).

I'll talk about the cards in front (with the green dots) in a moment.

Here's part of another set of samples ready to go into a photo set-up—these are some of the North Ronaldsays, which were collected and shared by Jennifer Heverly of Spirit Trail Fiberworks (Virginia) or grown by June Morris (North Ronaldsay, Scotland) and sent to us by way of June Hall (Cumbria, England):

The small white tags are identifiers that travel to the photo table and back with the fibers. In this case, there are manila skein tags with two of the sets because their white tags were used for another purpose (to identify the last-minute knitted and woven swatches) and went AWOL in the process. No matter how many labels I have printed for each type of fiber, we often run out. . . . Once the completed photo has been shot, the white tags are set on top of the fibers and a reference image is made, to facilitate the writing of captions later.

My big table is near another table with an iron, which is plugged in and constantly hot, that I use to give shots of steam to skeinlets (to restore their "airiness" after having been packed tightly into folders and boxes) and, less often, to locks of wool that have been bent while they were being transported. I also have been steaming some of the background fabrics for Mary while she's setting up a shot (more on the set-up in the next, and final, installment in this series). The "ironing board" is a terrycloth towel on the metal surface of the other table.

Here's my primary table when a set of fibers has moved over to Mary's and John's area:

The white cards with the green dots tell me what fibers are out working at the moment. The snapshot below shows one of the images about ready to be photographed, with its backgrounds in place. Outside the edges of the image area, you can see some of the the tiny cards that were below the skeins and locks when I set them out and that will be laid on top of the locks for the extra picture that gives us a detailed record of which fiber was which. One card is on the wood just above a set of locks. Another is farther away, on the very edge of the scrap foam core that was used to transport this group of samples. Based on positioning of fibers and the cards we can see, the third card for this group is probably out of sight on the left.

Now more about those cards with the green dots. I made a record card for every fiber I processed. The basic materials consist of old business cards (their nice blank back sides coming into play) and one of the large-size fiber labels. Originally, these cards accompanied the fibers through the washing process and identified the drying fibers. Now they've got a new job.

The boxes below contain the cards for the wools: those yet to be shot are on the left, and those for which we have completed the pictures are on the right (with the date of the image added in the upper right corner).

Based on the number of cards in each box, I'd guess that I took that picture on about the fourth day of the sheep-fiber photo shoot. A green dot means that I spun a sample skein of the fiber (most of the cards have green dots). A red dot means that for some reason the fiber I received was not of good enough quality to spin. Sometimes I had to spin red-dot fibers because we couldn't get any better fiber (in which case a green dot was added). A yellow dot means that the fiber was not spinnable for some reason not related to quality. Often a yellow-dot sample consists of a collection of small locks to show color variety.

A couple of fiber packets got special, handwritten labels:

I'm allergic to something that came along with that particular wool. It may have been a type of grass or a chemical the sheep was treated with. In this case, once the fiber was clean I didn't have any problems with it. However, we're photographing locks of wool straight from the sheep, so that baggie is marked. I left the fiber in the bag until just before it was photographed and put it back in immediately after the picture was done. A few fibers ended up marked this way because they'd been stored in mothballs.

Mostly we don't have pictures of me working, because I was taking pictures of other people working. However, John took my camera and caught me spinning a last-minute sample of extra-wonderful Shetland that I got from Oliver Henry, of Jamieson and Smith, when I was at UK Knit Camp in Stirling, Scotland. (I don't usually spin with my hands that far overhead so my neck tips back; I was trying to do something specific with a tiny bit of fiber and the not-quite-perfect tool.)

The spindle I had with me was too heavy, but I couldn't resist doing the best I could with the tools at hand to get that particular wool into the book.

For reasons of packing space (and weight) and financial constraints, I only brought a few tangible treasures back from my trip to Scotland and England. One of those items was my mascot for the first seven days of shooting:

It's a needle-felted Herdwick sheep made by by Ellie Rowell of the cooperative Wool Clip gallery in Cumbria. Yes, the body is Herdwick wool. I'm very fond of this little creature and when the days of photography got long during the first shoot, it made me smile. It's since taken up residence next to my main computer in my home office, where it also makes me smile.

Scotland and England: a few people I've been meeting

I have intermittent internet connections here in the British Isles, although the USB modem I bought has been working amazingly well for where I've been. The experiences are rich. I've met so many wonderful people, including all the participants in the six classes I taught* at UK Knit Camp in Stirling, Scotland; the other presenters at the camp; the organizers; and others I've encountered in all the packed-to-overflowing days.

* Three groups on breed-specific and rare breeds wools, for both spinners and knitters, as well as three introductory spinning classes.

I'm not sure I'll ever catch up with the blog posts that I want to do, so I'm going to post a few collections of photos and brief comments.

Mostly I am somewhat bashful about taking photos of people, and I like to keep my full attention on the conversation. But I snapped a few.

This is Lawrence Alderson, without whom the Rare Breeds Survival Trust would almost certainly not exist. It's always such a pleasant shock when someone whose rigorous and wide-ranging work you've admired for decades turns out to be an exceptionally nice person, too.

 

Oliver Henry, the wool buyer for Jamieson and Smith in Shetland, shared his knowledge of the wools from the islands' sheep. A "normal" wool grader for the British Wool Marketing Board goes through seven years of training to be qualified. Oliver took a summer job decades ago and has been grading and buying wool ever since. His mind and hands encompass an incomparable stock of knowledge.

Jean Wilson is a preeminent sheep judge. She keeps Herdwick sheep and here is demonstrating a judging point on one of this year's lambs. Herdwicks lighten up in color as they mature. Jean is a woman of vast knowledge, strong opinions, and few words.

I have met a lot of fantastic people, including these and many others. What a gift of this trip these encounters have been.

Herdwick: like no other sheep, like no other wool

I'm way behind on blog posts: lots to say, not enough hours right now. Running fast for a deadline (that I now see in the rearview mirror and I'm still trying to meet it); there's hardly time for sleeping or eating.

But here's a quick note about what I spun up yesterday: Herdwick. Sheep, Herdwicks primary among them, are responsible for the landscape of England's Lake District. Beatrix Potter (locally Mrs. Heelis) raised Herdwicks and was the first woman to belong to the breed society. There are lots of good conservation stories involved with Mrs. Heelis, the Lake District, and Herdwicks, although I need to keep moving. . . .

Herdwick wool is truly distinctive. When we went looking for samples for The Project (deadline buzzing), the shepherd who ultimately supplied us with some wondered why in heck we wanted it. Admittedly, it's not usually the first choice among handspinners and textile crafters, although it's available as ready-to-use yarn, as well as finished products, and there's no reason not to play with it. What I like best about Herdwick is how unlikely a fleece it is, and how its qualities push my creativity. (They push industrial creativity, too: Herdwick wool provides the basis for naturally sourced insulation.)

But I need to get back to work, and I want to show some Herdwick first. The fleece Herdwicks grow consists of several types of fiber: a relatively soft, woolly undercoat that keeps the sheep warm (and independent: they live pretty well without much human intervention); a hairy outercoat that repels water (Herdwick wool gets wet more slowly and dries out faster than other wools); heterotype hairs, which change their character depending on the season (warmer in winter, more moisture-resistant in summer); and kemp, that wiry, stiff, twist-resistant fiber that in most other breeds is strictly discriminated against. In Herdwicks, kemp adds texture that just ups the ante on the game; there's enough that it becomes a factor, rather than a hindrance. These fiber types are so scrambled they resist separation, although you can tease them apart if you work at it.

Color, too: kemp is white, and while Herdwicks are born black they quickly begin turning gray and keep up with a steady lightening effect as they age, always tweedy with a range of shades mixed throughout the fleece (no spots).

Herdwick wool is normally quite long: 4 to 8 inches (10 to 20 cm) is pretty usual, longer is possible. My samples were 2.5 to 3.5 inches (6.5 to 9 cm), making them a bit harder to handle than a more average fleece would have been. Nonetheless, I had an enjoyable afternoon and came up with a few bits that show the range of Herdwick:

 

Obviously, the top is a mass of (clean) raw fiber. The tiny medium gray skein on the left is some undercoat, imperfectly removed; it's quite soft, soft enough for a sweater or hat. The larger darker gray skein is the whole caboodle, spun up together. It could be woven into a coat. The light gray bristly skein on the right is mostly kemp and rough hairs, with some of the finer fibers left in to help hold the yarn together. The dimensionality of that yarn gets my idea-mill going.

FANTASTIC texture! And natural color fun. Makes me think of rugs, baskets, hairy bits added to something basically smooth . . . and to wonder how much undercoat I could get out and how it would work up into a sweater. As well as pricking my curiosity about whether the kemp might work in pottery glazing the way horsehair does.

Herdwick sheep heft or heaf to a particular spot of ground, staying put without fencing, and ewes teach lambs where they live. If a piece of land is sold, the sheep go with it. You can't just move another type of sheep onto this landscape because they'd wander all over the place (or need enormous amounts of fencing) and couldn't stand the climate (a few other breeds do well here, but Herdwicks are still outstandingly suited to it). Because of their geographic concentration, the Herdwick population was hard-hit by control efforts for foot-and-mouth disease in 2001.

Herdwicks have a lot to teach us, in many regards: about connection to land, about variety and experimentation, about loyalty and versatility. And about careful stewardship, in many aspects of life.

And now I need to get back to work. Next up is a trip to Kerry Hill (the wool, not the place), which is a totally different spot on the fiber rainbow: all white, just a bit lustrous, crisp but not too crisp, and with quite consistent fibers all in a narrow range of micron counts. . . .

 

Never a dull moment, although some folks might wonder. . . .