A photographer takes a picture of Border Leicester sheep on Sara O’Neill’s Euchre Creek Farm in Siletz. (Kyle Balda/Instagram)By The Oregonian/OregonLive staff
Sheep aren’t the only detectives. Reporters can be too.
First, a mystery: On Instagram, Kyle Balda, director of “The Sheep Detectives,” posted a picture of a man taking a picture of sheep. The caption read, “A remote sheep farm on the Oregon coast a few hours after reading the script for The Sheep Detectives for the first time in 2022.”
The Sheep Detectives stars Hugh Jackman and a lot of voices from other well-known actors.“The Sheep Detectives” is a new film that blends animated sheep and a real-life Hugh Jackman into a story about sheep who solve a murder. The New York Times called the film “delightful.”
But back to the mystery.
A remote sheep farm on the Oregon coast? Which farm could it be?
So, reporters from The Oregonian/OregonLive got to work, looking at property records, finding addresses, Googling. Finally, one reporter matched a photo on Google to the building in the Instagram post.
There was only one thing left to do: We called Euchre Creek Farm in Siletz.
Yup, they were Sara O’Neill’s sheep.
“They called and said, ‘Can we stop by? We are in the film industry and we want to take photos of the sheep’,” said O’Neill, the owner and operator of the locally well-known farm. “And I adore my sheep and was like, ‘Of course, you want to take photos because they’re the most beautiful sheep’.”
Sara O’Neill raises sheep on her Euchre Creek Farm in Siletz. (Photo courtesy of Euchre Creek Farms)The sheep at Euchre Creek are Border Leicester sheep.
“They’re a British breed that does really, really well in western Oregon,” O’Neill said.
“They have a filmic history,” she adds “They are the sheep featured in ‘Babe.’”
O’Neill has yet to see the movie, which was released earlier this month, but she’s looking forward to it although she already knows a little bit about the plot.
“I was totally joking at the time,” O’Neill told The Oregonian/OregonLive, “but I said, ‘Well, as long as the shepherd in the film isn’t the bad guy, you can take pictures of the sheep’.”
“They did give me a call and tell me the film is going to come out,” she added, “and they said, ‘As we promised, the shepherd is not the bad guy.”
Mystery: Solved.
— by Lizzy Acker, Jamie Hale and Samantha Swindler of The Oregonian/OregonLive staff
