California Red

Spurlock made the cross at Davis, California, and the breed was then carried forward by Aime and Paulette Soulier of Winters, California.

It is a young breed with a short, documented paper trail: one founder, one family of developers, one registry.

Rams weigh 180 to 250 pounds and ewes 130 to 140, and both sexes are polled.

The fleece is silky and of high quality, with a Bradford count of 50 to 60 and a staple of three to six inches.

Calm and gentle, by the California Red Sheep Registry's account: alert and athletic, but rams and ewes alike are known for easy-going temperaments and responsiveness to quiet handling.

The ewes are patient but possessive mothers that bond well with their lambs and can be quite defensive of them. The registry credits that mothering with very few lambing or lamb-raising problems.

Meat and handspinner wool. They breed out of season, so a flock can lamb off the spring peak and take more than one crop.

Ewes are good mothers, and the meat is tender and flavorful by the sources' account. The red fibers are sought by handspinners for the color.

Heat is fine; they function well in hot weather.

They do need shearing despite the hair-sheep parentage; the Tunis and Blackbelly cross kept a true fleece.

The trade is rarity. Numbers are small and concentrated in the western states, so both stock and buyers are limited, and the breed is kept more by smallholders and fiber people than by commercial producers.

California Red Sheep Registry, Inc. keeps the book. Ask whether the animal's fleece holds the red fiber the buyers want; the color changes with age and the clip is half the argument for the breed.

Recent sale prices on HoofnHorn, where there are any, are further down this page.