Gulf Coast Native

Gulf Coast sheep, also called Gulf Coast Native, Woods sheep or just Native sheep, came from the Spanish flocks landed in the New World from the 1500s. The exact ancestry is unknown. Churro sheep were commonly shipped to the Americas and probably contributed, and the fine wool suggests something pre-Merino in the mix as well.

Spanish missionaries, Native Americans and settlers ran them across the Southeast as far north as the Carolinas, and for centuries they were the only sheep in the deep South. Nothing else could take the heat.

The adaptation is visible: no wool on the face, legs or belly. Most are white, but blacks, browns and spotted faces occur. Most rams and some ewes are horned, and either sex can be polled. Rams run 125 to 200 pounds and ewes 90 to 160.

They breed and lamb year-round, lamb on pasture without help, and carry well-documented resistance to gut parasites and foot rot. That resistance is the whole argument for the breed in a low-input flock.

It is also what nearly killed them. Once anti-parasite drugs arrived in the 1900s, farmers switched to bigger breeds, and the Gulf Coast was kept alive by a handful of Southern families.