Crazy About Ewe

07/07/2026

Hello everyone!

Hope everything is well with you all and with your sheep. Great to see lambing is underway 😊

A vid of a bit of a special needs sheep with a wry neck, who will no doubt get lots of treats as the years go by!

I thought it a good time to do a few updates and recap the past summer and autumn. I am still working on some healthcare plans and will post about this in the coming 2-3 months. If you are interest please PM me, these will be scheduled bookings from my end so you don’t have to worry about what is due when.

Nasal Bot – a lot of sheep had this over autumn this year, but by now hopefully some are sneezing the larvae out if they weren’t drenched for it. If you don’t know, it’s very common and won’t kill the sheep but will make it uncomfortable for a few months. A Bot fly lays its eggs in the nasal cavity of the sheep, they hatch and develop in there until they are mature. Symptoms include sneezing, snotty noses, shaking its head. Mectins and Closantel drenches are best to deal with this.

Flystrike – another quite bad season for strike, a few common themes are starting to come through more regularly each wet summer we are getting. The main one being how length of wool doesn't always correspond to strike frequency and severity of the strike. More and more sheep that have been shorn within 2-3 months are getting flystrike, the common thread between these cases 99% of the time is that they have not been dipped with a high-quality pour on. Unfortunately, the pour ons available to a small flock holder in small enough quantities are of limited effectiveness. Remember Maggo is an antiquated organophosphate that is linked to cancer in humans with over exposure. It is not a preventative but a treatment. Something like salty water, soapy water, flyspray, iodine etc will do exactly the same thing for all intents and purposes – to stop the strike for a few days to give someone like myself time to get there and sort the sheep out with a permanent solution like shearing and treatment with higher quality safer products. As each wet summer passes, more and more strike can be found in the horn coronets, hoof cavities, folds of skin in fat or wrinkly sheep and pizzles in males.

Barbers Pole. A very very bad season for BP worm. Most of the time overburden is linked to some form of stress. The one stressor that will almost always cause BP overburden in lambs is lack of feed. If this is happening year after year then the only solution that will work is to destock a bit. Go with less sheep than you think you need through the toughest time which is summertime for sheep. Adult sheep don’t normally have a problem with BP worm with a few exceptions – heavily strained skinny ewes where the lambs have sucked the life from it over spring and early summer without enough feed (still quite uncommon and mostly will recover without intervention albeit over a long time), breeds that have not developed toughness to it due to being imported into NZ – like Valais blacknose, young rams younger than 2 during tupping as they stop eating and finally, sheep with a deformed mouth like an overbite, underbite or missing teeth. Drench is important, many drenches don’t work properly on BP worm.

Remember this marking season dock and vaccinate lambs at around 3-4 weeks old average age, followed by a booster 4-6 weeks later. Follow tail length regs.

I’ll be out and about a lot more in the coming weeks as the docking and healthcare work increases in the leadup to the beginning of the shearing season!

Take care out there and see you soon.

James

26/03/2026

So you think ya have a wrinkly sheep? Check this guy out... A Polwarth wether that has some spectacular skin surface area. Polwarth is a Merino X with a Lincoln - normally predominantly Merino. This is obviously a black bloodline.

I have nicknamed him the 'Yam' 🤠

22/12/2025

Merry Christmas everyone! A bit of a yearly recap, (and an announcement about Crazy About Ewe’s future 😊)

It’s been an amazing year with of course the spring and summer being the focal point for the shearing year’s calendar. The sheep and lambs almost without exception have been in great condition with an abundance of grass at most places. With your help, I have been able to shear at over 500 different flocks from 1 to 150 head in between September and the 24th of December for the third year in a row. I have only been able to see about 30 new people in this time, but it’s been great meeting you!

Like previous years in amongst the long days, big fat sheep, weird sheep, badly behaved sheep, slow tough shearing sheep, heat – like a couple of weeks ago! - what has stood out has been the amazing people that I’ve come to know through my shearing run. All the friendly smiles, cold drinks, coffees and great chat about almost everything, have made this such a rewarding time. Many of you have been so easy going and relaxed, it’s put me at ease knowing this.

As some of you know my primary work background is engineering, and I now have my CNC machining workshop which I have been running with help at the same time as my shearing run for the last year and a half. This year coming will see this expand further and also branch into my other wheelhouse, which is fi****ms and related products.

Crazy About Ewe – I will still be shearing but as a full-time role of 500 plus clients to date, there won’t be enough time, so I will be switching to a part time role with around 275-300 clients, I will focus on healthcare centered work (with shearing included of course, and I may revisit healthcare plans) and also those who have stuck with me from the early days. I will work out how to structure this over the Christmas and New Year’s break and let people know from the back half of January. This won’t be an easy task but one which I now have to base on the sheep themselves and how frictionless the work is.

A tough one for me all this, but now there is simply not enough time in the day to get everything done.

Thanks again to all of you!

Thanks also to Cathy. She has kept the ship afloat behind the scenes where it counts on the invoicing front.

Have a wonderful Christmas and New Year with your family and friends, stay safe out there and I will see many of you in the New Year and beyond.

James

16/12/2025

Heat, holiday hours and final bookings for 2025!

I’m now booked out until January and am planning for the first time in 5 years to have time off from the 24th to early Jan. If your sheep have flystrike in this time clip the area or use copious amounts of fly spray, iodine, salt water, soapy water etc or a combination of all. If there is necrotic black skin and flesh showing that’s not good – penicillin is usually required to save the sheep at this point. If there are deep holes where the maggots have burrowed in past the dermis layer it will likely need to be put down.

With the heat there have been a lot of people worried about the sheep in the yards for too long this season. They will be fine. What is worse is running big heavy lazy sheep in straight off the grass and bending them into position for shearing. While many people think this is the kind option, this is not. 24 plus hours off feed for big heavy overweight sheep before shearing. They can’t breathe and can kick out violently when they have full stomachs.

Also please remember running around with big sheep 20 minutes before the shearer arrives will heat the sheep up more than it sitting in yard quietly for a few hours in the sun in 25 degree plus temperatures.

I’ll touch base just before Christmas to express my thanks to all this year 😊

James

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02/12/2025

Final countdown till Christmas! Am on track to get to everyone still, but have had the biggest bottleneck I've ever had from the second half of Oct thru till now 😃

Thanks heaps for your patience as some of you have been waiting a while, to give you an idea I had around 400 bookings come through in the last 6 weeks.

I am organizing the next 2 weeks today so I'll be in touch!

Fly strike is starting, remember to try not to use Zapp and Maggo or any of the cyromazines like Cyrex, Cyrazin KO etc as we will then have to delay the shearing.

See you soon, and again many thanks for your patience.

James