Contractor-work continues on the Rod Shippey Education Facility and Field Lab at the UC Hopland Research & Extension Center. This building, when completed in the fall of 2012, will serve the needs of the entire community, allowing county-based UC Cooperative Extension advisors, campus-based faculty, and other local educators and entities to offer programs that meet the needs of people throughout the North Coast.

After cold weather delayed the concrete pour of the slab for a while, the contractors beat Mother-Nature by covering the foundation with plastic and heating the foundation site for a day thus allowing the main-slab-floor pour the following day.   Progress is continuing with further earth moving and a bit more concrete work.  Framing will begin soon.

Local business support is beginning to get exciting with Performance Coatings Inc. donating all siding and post&beam stain in their LEED certified, eco-friendly "Verde" line of stains, and Nor Cal Recycled Lumber donating a significant part of the recycled-wood Douglas-fir post material.

For more information on the Shippey facility please go to:

ucanr.org/sites/Rod_Shippey_Facility/

Many folks are probably not even aware of the group of woodpeckers called "sapsuckers" as they can be a very secretive bird with habits like scurrying behind a branch as an intruder walks by.  The four species in this group are the: 1) Williamson's Sapsucker, 2) Red-breasted Sapsucker, 3) Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, and 4) Red-naped Sapsucker.  All species have a white rump, bold white wing patches, and a least a trace of yellow in the belly.

Most species of sapsuckers have a faint "mew" call reminiscent of a kitten.  These woodpeckers drill rows of evenly-spaced round or squarish holes in the cambium layer of certain tree species.  These "wells" develop a sap flow from the tree that also attracts insects. The bird will return to these wells time after time to feed upon both the sap and the attracted bugs.  These sap-wells are also fed upon by other bird species such as Anna's Hummingbirds and Ruby-crowned Kinglets.

All four species have been found in Mendocino County, and all but the Williamson's has been found at the UC Hopland Research & Extension Center.  Here you see the expected and most-common Red-breasted Sapsucker (Sphyrapicus ruber) which is common throughout the non-desert portions of California.

One of the important research resources that the UC Hopland Research & Extension Center provides to UC researchers (and others) is the availability of a uniform sheep flock.  Because HREC has maintained a rather "closed-flock" of "Western Whiteface Targhees" over the decades, the individual sheep are quite uniform in size and genetics, with an excellent data set for each individual animal. 

Researchers from the UC Davis Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital (VMTH) are currently looking to see what the effects are of dietary zinc supplementation on the lambing rates.   Preliminary data, even though we are early into the lambing season, shows what appears to be a significant increase. Final conclusions cannot be made until the research project is completed however.

The birth of lambs has begun at the UC Hopland Research & Extension Center here in the southeast corner of Mendocino County.   Over the many years of sheep management and research here at the Center the most efficient methodologies are normally used.  In most cases, the ewes are brought into the main sheep barn for lambing and then placed out into the fields after maternal bonding is assured.  Lambs are weighed, ear tagged, and side- branded (to match the side-branded ewe number) before they are placed into the fields.

Here you see some few-day-old lambs and ewes basking in the early morning sunshine.