sheep shearing

February 6, 2019 by Stephany Wilkes 2 Comments

The Phenomenal Pora, or Some of What I Learned at Advanced Shearing School

I attended Advanced Shearing School with Australian shearing guru Mike Pora from January 28-30, 2019 in Newell, SD, and thought other shearers might benefit from some of what I learned.

I took this class for a few reasons. First, as shearers are known to say, “If you’re working too hard, you’re working too hard,” and I am working too hard. Second, I wanted to learn more about shearing fine wool sheep, which are rare on the West Coast; I shear mostly crossbreeds, or non-fine wool breeds. Fine wool sheep in the US are found in Nevada, Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, etc.

Third, at this stage in my life, I cannot get to Australia for a few months to learn to shear there. Well, technically I could, if I intended to abandon my grandmother with dementia and cancer here in California, but that’s not an option. I figured that if I can’t get to Australia, the Australian was coming to us, and that was the next best, doable thing. (Young and/or unattached shearers, do you hear me? Go learn and work in Australia. See the world! Vamanos, whippersnappers! Fly, my pretties, fly!)

Finally, I often work alone and not on crews with expert shearers who can teach me things. As a result, I develop my own shearing adjustments and bad habits, of both the conscious and unconscious sort. I need eyes and expertise outside of me to help me learn and do better.

And it sure was a good excuse for a vacation with the lady shearers you’ve only met online. We were in a Vogue article together and now we’re friends.

In regard to working less hard, and doing everything we can to ensure we can shear as long as we can, Mike taught us footwork and positions to get the sheep to hold more of its own weight, and to get that weight off of our legs and knees. People think shearing is hell on our backs, and it can be, but my knees, quads, and hamstrings take the brunt of it, because those hold the sheep.

A few things to note in this photo: The sheep is holding its own weight, comfortably shifted onto its right hip (not its tail, which sheep hate). Mike’s left knee is over the back of the sheep’s neck, and the sheep’s spine is behind Mike’s calf.

When standing this way, you can feel the sheep’s spine behind your left leg, their back bone leaning against your leg bone. The difference is that your left leg is not required to hold the sheep and prop it up. Your leg braces and grips the sheep, but does not support it.

After feeling the right way to do this, I realized that I often have the sheep’s spine on the wrong side of my leg, supported by my front shin, with my left knee holding up a substantial portion of the sheep’s weight (no wonder that knee is the crackly sounding one). Altogether, this meant that, while shearing the sheep’s first hip, I was supporting the sheep’s weight with my left knee, while also bending forward in half to reach over to the tail. Not fun, and so much harder than it needs to be.

We learned this lesson in the first hour of the first morning so, very early on, I had already learned something valuable that will make my life substantially easier, and prevent injury, wear, and tear. “This class doesn’t cost enough,” I thought, and I meant it.

But there’s something more going on in this position, too. Notice how the sheep is angled, almost matching the angle of Mike’s foot, which is not straight but pointed outward from his body. Mike is looking down over the sheep’s hip more than its belly. When shearing the belly, crutch, and first hip, many of us are oriented more directly over the sheep’s belly, in a straight line, and not at this angle.

This brings me to another big lesson: crutching when the sheep’s weight is situated more like this, and not just when fully laid back as they can be during belly shearing. It was, initially, a bit mind-bending to look down and see the sheep’s crutch area less open and a bit more tilted, with its rear, left leg resting into the crutch area more than unusual, but crutching was still possible, safe, and made the transition from the crutch into the first hip much easier.

As for getting the sheep to hold more of its own weight… When I learned to shear, I was taught to have my right knee turned in to the right side of the sheep’s brisket when shearing the first hip. This meant my right knee ended up holding the sheep up at the brisket, not just bracing it but preventing it from slumping over to the right side. By copying Mike’s moves, the sheep supported more of its weight, required less of my leg pressure in the brisket and, combined with the sheep’s spine sitting behind my left leg, made for a much easier shearing of the first hip.

But wait, there’s more.

The above photo may look like a typical one of shearing the first hip, but let me tell you about what Mike’s left hand is doing (and does next). Because the sheep is stable and holding a good bit of its own weight, Mike can really pull the skin on that leg juncture and hip right up toward him (not just rolling it toward him, but pulling that hip more up than over). This makes the skin taut on these wrinkly fine wool sheep, for a clean, nick-free hip of nice wide blows.

Another pro tip for this stage of shearing: On your blows up the spine, the bottom teeth should land where the tip of your middle finger on your left hand is. This sounds like I’m telling you to aim for your finger, and I’m not. What I mean to say is: When you’re finishing the left hip, doing those blows from the tail up the spine, and your left hand is pulling and rolling the sheep toward you so that you can reach to and over the sheep’s spine, the fingers of your left hand are pointed at the floor. The imaginary line that would extend from the tip of your left middle finger across the sheep’s back is the depth for which you should reach with the bottom tooth of your comb.

And now, a few words about neck blows. The above is the correct positioning for the neck blows. The sheep’s chin is at a 90-degree angle to it’s neck, a normal position (vs. the sheep’s chin being pulled back, akin to our walking around with our chins high in the air, which is neither normal nor comfortable).

Mike showed us how to pull the skin on the chin up to tighten it (much more comfortable for the sheep and its breathing), and NOT pull the chin itself, as some instructors teach, in the “Pull the chin taut and get through it quickly” school of thought. All shearers know, or should, that the greater the sheep’s comfort, the less it fights, and the easier the shearing is as a result. Shearers have every incentive to keep sheep as happy and comfortable as possible, and this is one more way to do so.

In the neck blow photo above, you can also see how the sheep is supporting more of its own weight. The shearer’s right knee is still behind the right brisket, and both of the sheep’s right legs are behind his (i.e. the shearer’s right leg is where it’s supposed to be, in the crutch between both sets of legs). At this point, shearers are like “Duh, that’s what you’re supposed to do.”

But this is the most difficult footwork position for me, and always has been. This is because I am terrified of cutting the sheep’s neck and shoulder. So my WRONG AND ILL-ADVISED modification has been to push all of that sheep’s weight out in front of me during the neck blows, more akin to the position of shearing the last side. This puts all four of the sheep’s legs in front of my right leg, and all of the weight (on the sheep’s hip in the above photo) bowed out in front, supported–but NOT well controlled–by my right leg and left forearm and hand.

The upshot is that these maneuvers stretch the front shoulder skin out nicely, but that’s about the only benefit of my mangled, ugly dance. I don’t have enough control, the sheep feels like it’s falling forward and about to collapse toward the ground (because it is), and the sheep kicks because all four of its legs are totally free to do so. Joy.

So let’s talk about what we should be doing on a wrinkly, fine-wool neck as taught at this advanced school.

In the photo above, the great Emily Chamelin (AKA Lady Shearer Prime) has the sheep in the correct position, and Mike Pora (left) and Alex Moser (right) are talking about the pressure of comb teeth and the dreaded wrinkle. Fine-wool sheep (Merino, Rambouillet, etc.) have a wrinkle like a wattle, and shearers take great care not to cut it. Mike showed us how, on the first neck blow, you want the comb pressure on the top teeth and, on the second blow, on the bottom teeth. This effectively leaves you shearing each side of the wrinkle and not cutting it. This is a very subtle, nuanced and important technique.

I have been using a neck blow modification that has worked well so far, and that Matt Gilbert taught me especially for wrinkly-neck fine wool sheep. I may continue it even after this class, but will devote time to practicing Pora’s method. Matt’s modification is to turn the sheep’s head to move the wrinkle. You can get an idea of this using your own neck.

Look straight ahead, and turn your level head all the way to the left. The skin on the right side of your neck is smooth, and there’s a wrinkle on your left side. So, you would shear the smooth, right side, where there’s no wrinkle to worry about. When you turn your head to the right, the wrinkle is on your right and your skin is smooth on the left, so you shear the left. This cleans the neck in two wide passes.

Now, let’s talk about the long blows.

Notice how the sheep is on its back more than on its side, and that the sheep’s right shoulder and brisket are against the shearer’s left shin. This creates more control of the sheep. I have not been doing this properly.

I hate to admit that, after six years of shearing (and not enough sheep), I sometimes still turn the handpiece off, walk the sheep into this position, and start up the machine again. The pros spin the sheep around and, as it lands in this place, take the first blow without skipping a beat. Sometimes I do that, just not as often as I’d like.

Mike asked a good question: “Stephany, what does a hay bale do on its end?” “It spins,” I said. And there’s the wisdom. If the sheep is sitting on a small point, and holding enough of its weight, you can basically pivot/spin it down into the long blow position, voila (with an assist from lanolin).

Another lesson I will implement right away is the six-sheep focus technique Mike taught: Pick one improvement to focus on (like a certain footwork position, or maybe the comb pressure on the sides of the neck wrinkle, etc.), focus on that for the next six sheep, pause, evaluate how you’ve done and what you need to fix, and shear the next six sheep.

My self-assigned homework is to find some sheep to walk around with. If I had my own sheep, I would do nothing but walk them through each position with only my legs, hands free, until I got every bit of the footwork right. Shearing jobs don’t lend themselves to this, as the job needs to get done, but I’m thinking of asking some friends to let me walk their sheep around with my legs for a day. This is why we take time for things like school, though: we can practice at school in ways we cannot on a paid job.

I can’t cover everything I learned in just a few days, but I hope this post inspires other shearers to take a course with Mike Pora, the master of nuance and finesse.

And good heavens, it was gloriously beautiful.

June 24, 2017 by Stephany Wilkes 6 Comments

I, 80

“Where are you from?” people ask. “Where do you live?”

“I-80,” I say.

The name of this business still holds, though. Interstate 80 is transcontinental, inching east-west (or, I dare say, west-east) from San Francisco, California to Teaneck, New Jersey.

Stretch of highway, and green and white highway sign that says Donner Summit, pine trees and blue sky — My buddy, my pal

Spend too much time alone in the car and you start talking to the highway. After Morning Edition starts its second loop and the next audiobook CD from the library is too scratched to play, you might say, “I swear I’m beginning to recognize some of those construction workers, especially on the approach to the Carquinez Bridge. You know, you look so different out here, it’s hard to believe you’re the same I-80 I drove in the Midwest, though you’re concurrently 80/90 in that region, from Portage, Indiana to Elyria, Ohio, where my great-grandmother dwelt as a child and did not fondly recall it. You’re a toll road there, too. Whenever the snow got bad on I-94 West, as I approached Lake Michigan, I would cut south to you via 23 or 69 or 131. I thought your tolls might mean you’d be better maintained–plowed and salted–through Ohio and Indiana.”

Hypothetically speaking.

Wikipedia reminded me that revered John McPhee wrote about I-80 best (as he does most things) in Basin and Range, which became Annals of the Former World, which you should read. McPhee describes the geology revealed when the land that would become I-80 was excavated and leveled:

“What about Interstate 80, I asked him. It goes the distance. How would it be? ‘Absorbing,’ he said. And he mused aloud: After 80 crosses the Border Fault, it pussyfoots along on morainal till that levelled up the fingers of the foldbelt hills. It does a similar dance with glacial debris in parts of Pennsylvania. It needs no assistance on the craton. It climbs a ramp to the Rockies and a fault-block staircase up the front of the Sierra. It is geologically shrewd. It was the route of animal migrations, and of human history that followed. It avoids melodrama, avoids the Grand Canyons, the Jackson Holes, the geologic operas of the country, but it would surely be a sound experience of the big picture, of the history, the construction, the components of the continent.”

A pale brown desert in winter, low mountain in the Great Basin, with snow squall clouds above it — Snow approach. Winnemucca, Nevada.

I was born in the Motor City to an auto worker and submit, as further evidence of misplaced birth, the fact that I do not like driving. I will do just about anything to avoid it, which is why I’m confined to city living I don’t otherwise relish. I need public transit, walking, and biking. The idea of spinning up the ignition for a half pint of half-and-half or a store run for pastel muffin-cup liners is agonizing. (“Oil,” I can hear you say. “Just oil the muffin pan. You don’t need the liners.”)

And yet…

Pine trees, lake, mountain and blue sky with fluffy white clouds on a sunny day — Donner Lake

Interstate 80 is, sometimes, what was once the Oregon and California Trails. Waypoint names like Emigrant Wilderness and rusted metal signs at Nevada rest stops keep you humble. “Hubris,” they whisper. “Hubris.”

This year’s once-a-century rains made lakes where there usually are none, smack dab in the middle of the desert and wild to see. They are disorienting, these massive, flash lakes, but people say they used to appear more often than they do now. Lakes that appear every decade or so, at best, are an entirely foreign concept for someone from the Great Lakes that date back to the glacial. Water in the West is ephemeral in more ways than one.

A brown lake that usually isn't there, in the desert, distant mountains on the left, low scrub sage in front, and a blue sky with wispy white clouds — An alkali lake in Modoc County, California, that I have never seen before. It isn’t usually here, and won’t be for long.

This year, the Yolo Bypass flooded, filled to spilling with silvery brown chop. It was a sight. The Yolo Causeway is an interstate bypass that is 16,538 feet long, more than twice as wide as the Mississippi River at its widest point, in New Orleans, where it is roughly 7,600 feet wide. It’s a good thing they’ve left the Bypass a floodplain. It is green now, holds tractors and workers, and tells us yes, this is a real river delta.

It makes the fact that Creedence Clearwater Revival (a standby in my CD player) hails from here make sense: the humidity, the breeze reprieve in summer, fishing skiffs… When CCR sang about life on the river, it wasn’t a contrivance.

Left a good job in the city
Workin’ for the man ev’ry night and day
And I never lost one minute of sleepin’
Worryin’ ’bout the way things might have been

Amen, brother. Ain’t that the truth.

And the snow, the snow. I do miss it, and loved having mornings when I woke up to this. I was as giddy as a kid, skipping motel coffee to get out into it and slide over to a diner in snow boots.

A flat parking lot with four cars, lightly dusted with snow — Waking up to a new world. Going to be a chilly barn today.

I happened to be driving through the Sierra when eight feet of snow fell in five days, shutting Truckee down. Avalanche threats stopped the trains from running. Mammoth saw over 20 feet of snow in three weeks in January. It buried the ski lifts and I-80 was shut down for 12 hours.

White snow and blue sky at Carson Pass, in the Sierra — Carson Pass

I’ll spare you the saga, but I spent eight hours at Donner Pass over a stretch of a few miles. I watched with dread as snow accumulated on the hood at the rate of one inch per minute. My brand-new pricey snow chains broke in multiple places, and I had to bind them together with the baling wire that was holding my shearing cutters, using my hoof trimmers like pliers.

The chains, continuously thwacking and breaking in new places, threatened to wrap themselves around my axel and create a $5,000 repair. I eventually reached a sufficiently low elevation to remove them and draft behind a semi that melted the snow just enough to keep me from sliding into its trailer.

What is normally a five-hour drive took 13.5. I will, perhaps, never be so relieved to see anyplace as I was the Black Bear Diner in Auburn at 9:30 PM. I almost embraced the waiter. I do not know how the Donner Party lasted more than a few days. I am not surprised that so many of them died: I am amazed that half of them lived. How?!

I will find a way to negotiate a 4WD vehicle into this household, a desire only amplified by my midlife station (or a convenient excuse). As the I-80 miles stretch before me, I dream of a white Toyota pickup so tall I need a step stool to climb into it, the sort of truck that can sometimes be won at county or state fairs. It will have gold trim, and glittery decals of shearing combs and cutters affixed to its sides, and a vanity plate that says WOOL GRL or GOT WOOL, and a covered bed to camp in.

Such a truck will require a herding dog, one socialized to all farm creatures who can gather the still-eating sheep the customers have failed to bring in from pasture, again. I will name the dog Cedar or Carson or Moab or something equally western sounding.

Then I think of parking a truck in the city and tickets on street-cleaning days and wake up. Rosebud…

To my own amazement, I have developed a list of preferred McDonald’s locations. Yes, my turned-up nose has come down somewhat, even if I only eat the hashbrown (in the singular). My McDonald’s preference is based on two things: synchronicity with my biological cycles (i.e. duration since initial coffee) and the ease of approach to and from I-80 through the maze of All The National Brands that does not enable anyone to move from one business to another easily, the parking lots disconnected, the forced pulling out to pull back in.

Okay. You can, technically, walk over the dividers and irrigated tree rows, so long as you’re prepared to raise ire and become a social pariah (especially in dirty overalls between jobs). In that context, on foot across parking lots, people assume you’re a pan-handling meth head and start asking after your stolen shopping cart because you are, after all, a human outside of a car.

Self-employed and roaming, I have come to depend on McDonald’s and their clean bathrooms, fast wifi, and reliably fresh coffee that is neither a dark roast nor scalded to syrup from sitting on a hot pad, so much so that I now worry we may have vilified McDonald’s too much and they will close. I feel no small guilt for having listened to the author of Fast Food Nation speak at a Chicago Farmer’s Market so many moons ago.

Texting is out of hand but, if nothing else, finally makes driving feel exactly as dangerous as it is, statistically speaking, what with the swerving, lane drifting, and ditch diving.

I feel lucky to have seen and heard thunder this year. What a gift, this record-setting season of rain, and every day in it.

Desert, distant mountains, and rain clouds and a wall of rain falling on mountains — Thunder.

January 30, 2017 by Stephany Wilkes 1 Comment

Shearing Season Opener

My shearing season officially opened on January 27-28, 2017 in Petaluma. I am elated to be back at it, putting my back into it. Historically, the first day back is humbling. This year was no exception, but I got off to a far better start than last year, and I am happy with how these two working days went. Don’t believe me? Note the ridiculous grin on my face as I finish my first sheep of the day, and soak my husband’s baseball cap with sweat (I washed it today!):

A woman with short blonde ponytail and tan baseball cap in a blue shirt, bent over a sheep laying on its side, removing its wool — Yee haw! Last few strokes on the first sheep of the year, red in the face and sweating. Yes, you can see some extra wool on this sheep that had multi-year wool growth. I left it there on purpose. Beneath that dense wool are wrinkles. I opted to leave a little more wool in favor of fewer nicks. That’s how I roll. You need not agree.

Being a lot less sedentary in January and lifting weights at least twice a week helped a great deal on my first day back in the barn.

This first job was better than usual for another reason: I got to do it with Jordan Reed, whom I met at shearing school four years ago now.

A woman in blue shirt, tan overalls, and tan baseball cap standing in front of a sheep pen, containing spotted sheep, with her arm draped over a thin man in bandana, tank top, and pants. — Fast and filthy friends. These overalls add 30 lbs. and I don’t care. We are about halfway done shearing the sheep (a total of 77 or so) at this point.

Jordan and I are, in some ways, an unlikely pair of friends: We were, each of us, fortunately and totally wrong about each other. On the first day of shearing school, Jordan took me for a “rich fiber lady” and I was a bit intimidated by what I misinterpreted as bravado. By the fourth day of shearing school, we were trading Salon Pas patches and bottles of wine. Jordan took me out on my first “real” shearing job, which taught me a great deal and gave me the courage to continue and book jobs of my own.

Shearing friends are special folk: near and dear, crew and craftsmen, they are the people who have seen you through the wars, who have seen you at your worst, who have seen your stupid mistakes and tears of exhaustion, and bring you back from the brink to keep going, even though your quads may be screaming and your spine feels detached from your lower extremities.

A man in bandana and tank top, squatted over a brown sheep, shearing off the wool on the top of the sheep's head, using a motorized handpiece — Jordan shears a Shrek sheep, one with between three and five years worth of wool growth. He did an excellent job.

I learn something new and challenge myself in different directions on each job, and this one was no exception. Approximately half of the 77 total sheep had two or more years worth of wool. This is common, because it can be very difficult for flock owners to find a shearer.

Multi-year wool growth creates a challenge for the shearer. Wool is heavy: one year’s fleece might weigh 8-15 lbs., depending on the breed, and it increases with each passing year. The weight of that wool pulls on the sheep’s very thin, membrane like skin, creating wrinkles over time. This makes the sheep’s skin much harder to make taut, and thus easier to cut. In addition, the lanolin can dry out and, with dirt added, create waxy clumps that are difficult to push shears through. When dealing with all of this, shearers have to use extra precaution and time to remove wool in the safest, most humane way possible. It is a test of skill, for sure.

We did a good job. It was difficult at times, but we got through it and the sheep looked clean (and not nicked to bits) when we were finished. Look at this fleece! Much of it had felted on the sheep’s body. My suggestion was to further felt it, which would also clean it, and throw it in front of the fireplace to use as a bearskin rug equivalent. Am I right, or am I right?!

A man in bandana and tank top with a complete brown sheep fleece spread out on plywood, on top of hay — Marvelous shearing by Jordan. The sheep was so happy to have 3-5 years worth of wool off its body that it just about pranced out of the barn.

A couple of dozen sheep, some spotted, in a barn, standing on a straw-strewn floor — Friesian sheep in dappled barn light, and as far away from us as possible.

Clear garbage bags full of raw wool fleeces, white and brown — I admit that seeing the fleeces bagged up this way makes me feel like we accomplished something.

The following morning, we had just 20 sheep to shear between the two of us, about a few hours’ worth of work with sheep penning, gear moving, and so on. It was 37 degrees in the mornings. Chilly! I was so grateful to be in a nice barn.

16426035_10209667277453482_304007276766619395_n — The lucky sheep of Day Two are penned and within reasonably easy reach.

I “let” Jordan shear both rams. This guy, Romeo, was a beauty and Jordan did a beautiful job:

We included the handpiece for a real "trophy" photo. — We included the hand piece for a real “trophy” photo. Is this a gorgeous ram or what? This year, we’re told, he impregnated all but five ewes!

Thank you, Fran LeClerc and Jordan Reed, for taking and sharing all of the photos in this post. I love you both and am so grateful for the lives we lead that, every so often, put us in the same place at the same time, doing the same enjoyable work.

sheep shearing

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