Sheep thrills in Santa Rosa

Despite a couple of breakaway ewes and two brief near-stampedes, six dozen black- and white-faced sheep kicked off the annual Farmer’s Day at the Sonoma County Fair with a parade through downtown Santa Rosa to the fairgrounds Sunday morning.

Photo Gallery: Sheep Drive to the Sonoma County Fair

So successful was a longhorn cattle drive last year that fair organizers thought sheep would be an interesting adventure this time around, for the 76th annual celebration of agriculture.

“We’ll see,” said new fair board President Saralee McClelland Kunde from atop a horse before the event. “It’s going to be interesting.”

That it was. Sheep are naturally edgy in unfamiliar circumstances — even more so when surrounded by a couple thousand city folk pointing cameras and phones at them.

With their handlers also a bit nervous, the 72 Hampshire and Dorset sheep were led from their temporary pen on Mendocino Avenue and turned onto Fourth Street trailing a brass band on a flatbed truck.

Almost immediately, a couple of skittish ewes in the front made a mad dash forward, briefly eluding the corralling measures rancher Joe Pozzi and other sheep wranglers had designed. There were wranglers on horseback, on all-terrain vehicles and on foot.

Watchful border collies from the Redwood Empire Sheepdog Association quickly came to the rescue, herding the wayward sheep back into the pack.

But then a larger wave of sheep surged past the curtain of orange plastic netting wranglers held up as a moving fence and briefly threatened to stampede down the main drag.