. This aerial shot (courtesy of Stephanie and Matt Roberts) looks from north to south. The farm is about 3000 acres, small by Australian standards. They raise sheep for lambs and wool and Angus beef.
This is Stephanie. She met me, per Plan A, at the Melbourne Airport and we headed north about 4 hours to the farm near Cheshunt, Victoria. Her house is lovely. Warm, inviting and comfortable. High ceilings (some pressed tin), hardwood floors, and many other details salvaged from materials in the original building. An open floor plan. We stayed up late and talked about lots of things last night. I slept well.
Not being sure of the agenda today, we went to the main house this morning about 9. Matt and Lindy Roberts live there and Matt runs the farm. Stephanie told me I’d like them, and was she ever right. They are a very attractive young couple with two young daughters. Both girls had left for school (which has 22 students total - and they all get picked up by the same bus…there aren’t a lot of neighbors in this part of the world) so that by the time we got there and Matt had set his plan for the day: ‘drenching’ the sheep.
The flock had been ‘fly struck.’ He’d noticed it yesterday while doing some other chores. Some tell tale dark spots had appeared on several of the ewes’ backs, 
a certain sign that they’d become infested with fly eggs and maggots. Blowflies are the culprits. They don’t breed during dry spells, which the region has had plenty of during the past few years, but it’s been damp this year. Perfect conditions. Matt looked at me and asked me if being up to my elbows in maggots before lunch had been featured in the tour brochure. Let me at ‘em, said I.
So our day was set. The flock needed to be ‘drenched.’ Drenching simply means administering an oral treatment to ward off future infestations, a simple but time and labor intensive process. But more importantly we needed to separate the fly struck sheep and treat them immediately. We began by inspecting each sheep and separating the ‘dirty’ ones from the flock. The lambs, characterized by their smaller size and wool (never shorn), needed culling as well. They’d been treated when they were weaned a few months ago. The dogs (more about them in another post) drove them into a holding area in the barn and we got started.
Matt did the heavy lifting. We drove 20 or 30 sheep into a narrow chute. Starting at the front of the column, Matt, one by one, administered the treatment and released the ewe to Stephanie and me. If it was ‘dirty’ it went into another holding area; otherwise it was released to the lower paddock. Lambs for now went with their dirty cousins.
Watching Matt work, non-stop under the strong Australian sun was a lesson in itself. Firm but gentle, he avoided head butts and kicks, absorbed body blocks from panicked ewes and methodically worked his way through over 500 sheep one by one. Aside from stopping to reload the reservoir of his injector and getting some water from the tap (and discovering a red-backed spider…think black widow…resting in the tap’s cool shade) we didn’t take a break until the flock had been inspected.
Next came treating those ewes that had been ‘struck.’ They were all herded onto the second floor of the barn, normally used for shearing. Matt gave us both lessons in holding and maneuvering sheep…I need to keep my day job…and he worked on each one as we brought them to him. 
The infestation was impressive and ugly. The dark areas visible on the surface of the wool, when sheared away reveal massive colonies of blow fly eggs, most of which have hatched. The maggots burrow into the sheep’s skin and left unchecked cause terrible damage and death. Once the affected area was exposed (often much larger an area than was indicated by the visible spot on the sheep’s coat), Matt treated it directly with an insecticide and released the sheep.
We finished the entire flock late afternoon, called it a day and cleaned up. Here I give shearing a go. Again, for a sheep handler I make a pretty good broken down airline pilot...
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