Shepherdess: Notes from the Field

"I tackled the ewe, tipped her onto her back, put her hind legs over my shoulders, and lifted the ewe’s hind end off the ground. I slipped my hand into the birth canal, along the side of the lamb’s head. As my fingers groped blindly for the lamb’s legs, a silver bracelet slid down my arm and banged the lamb’s nose.”

Author and shepherdess Joan Jarvis Ellison wears silver bracelets and makeup. She grew up in the city. She has a master’s degree in biophysical sciences. She is a busy mother of two children. What was she doing with her hand in the back end of a sheep? How had she come so far from the research laboratory and the city? In Shepherdess: Notes from the Field, Ellison tells the story of her journey from research associate and mother to shepherdess. With a growing understanding of sheep behavior and health, Ellison deals with the thorny problems of what to do with too much manure, whether or not to eat your own sheep, and how to find self-respect in a farmyard. Shepherdess: Notes from the Field is funny and sad. You'll learn more about sheep than you ever imagined you'd want to know, and more about life than you knew before you opened the book.

Joan Jarvis Ellison grew up in the suburbs of a large city. Her closest encounter with farm life was a white rat in a plastic cage. After earning a master’s degree in biophysical sciences and working for several years in a research laboratory, she retired to Pelican Rapids, a small town in rural Minnesota, to raise children and sheep.