Baby Stella is the first lamb of her kind

The first Ouessant lamb born in California arrived during the wee hours of April 7 in a calf hutch at Santa Rosa’s Heartfelt Fiber Farm.

Mother Penelope delivered Stella, who weighed 4 1/2 pounds, in a pasture at the side of Leslie and Alden Adkins’ house, inside the structure used to protect the animals at night from coyotes and wild dogs.

Stella joins a flock of 15 animals whose sole purpose is producing wool of all colors and qualities for Leslie Adkins, a fiber artist who became enamored by fiber animals nine years ago. At the time, she and Alden owned the Inverness Valley Inn and started an “eco fiber farm” with Icelandic sheep that shared space with four mini-dairy goats they used to mow the grasses around the inn.

Two years ago, the Adkinses sold the inn and toured Northern Europe before moving to Santa Rosa. They searched for, but didn’t find, native Ouessant sheep, the smallest naturally occurring sheep in the world. Their full adult size is ?19 inches, as measured at the withers. They are native to an island near Brittany, off the coast of France. The small animals are used for eco-grazing in France and can be found mowing parks in Paris. They fertilize the areas they graze and have a small environmental footprint - literally. Their tiny hooves do not score the soil, as larger animals’ hooves do.

Once back in the U.S., the couple located Breton Meadow Farm in Lincoln, Mass., where owners Karen Seo and Ray Tomlinson are up-breeding a flock of Ouessants using imported semen to get a more genetically pure animal.

The couple’s first two Ouessant sheep came to California in the backseat of their Prius. Leslie Adkins now has four, plus little Stella, and a number of sheep on the farm are expected to drop their lambs in the next few weeks.

The fiber herd includes Icelandic sheep, an alpaca, a llama, the Ouessants and assorted other sheep. Adkins shares the animals with her friend Marie Hoff, owner-operator of the Capella Grazing Project.

She gathers the fleeces through pulling, combing and hand shearing, and hires two specialists to shear the sheep, llama and alpaca.

“We are part of the fibershed movement, proud of making beautiful, useful items, in a sustainable, humane manner, with a low carbon footprint,” said Adkins, 63, a retired environmental ecologist.

The animals she raises are never sold for meat. Instead, Adkins sells yarn and finished products at the Point Reyes Farmers’ Market.