The average flock size of Macherla sheep in the present study is 134.31±4.6 and the minimum flock size of the genetic group observed in the present study is 50. In general, Macherla sheep are reared in larger flocks by the shepherds. Similar observation was noted by Choudary (2013) with an average flock size of 122.64. The flock sizes reported in Madras red sheep was 85 (9-315) (Raman et al., 2003), in North coastal sheep of Andhra Pradesh was 64.98 by Gangaraju (2010) and 67.46 by Anandarao (2010), Nellore jodipi was ranged from 25 to 30 (Virojirao et al., 2008). The overall income is directly depending on the flock size of the sheep farmers. The increase or decrease of the flock size is controlled by the factors such as number of family members, disease, grazing resources and availability of labour etc.

The study on migration practices showed that 75% of farmers followed both migratory and stationary type of sheep rearing and 17% farmers adopted stationary system alone while 8% of the farmers followed migratory type throughout the year. The average distance travelled by migratory flocks was 76.26 Km.

Macherla sheep were housed mostly during nights and the lambs were housed in special enclosure, which were similar to housing practices reported for North coastal sheep of Andhra Pradesh (Gangaraju, 2010; Anandarao, 2010). The nature of houses varied from part of residence (66%) to separate house (31%). Open housing system was observed in 61%, while closed housing system was followed by 39% of the farmers. The shelter is more of Kutcha type (80.43%) rather Puccatype, limiting the latter housing system to 15%. Majority (67%) of the shelters were made with thatched roof while 25 percent used asbestos and two percent of the houses had tiled roof. About six percent of houses had other roofing material such as bamboo and wooden material etc. The thatched roofs were mostly made of palmyra leaves.

The feeding patterns followed by the shepherds are presented in Table 1. The most common practice of feeding was grazing (70.58%) in the fields. Grazing and supplementation with grains (rice, jower, horse gram, and maize), especially for breeding rams and ram lambs was practiced by 29.42 percent farmers. The practice of grazing and supplementation is essential for maintaining good health and reproduction. The findings were in conformity with results of Gangaraju (2010) and Anandarao (2010) in Vizianagaram sheep. Feeding green fodder, dry fodder, concentrates at different proportions might be related to cropping pattern in the area and awareness about supplementary feeding among shepherds.

Majority of farmers practiced more than 8 hours of grazing (62.74%) and 37.25 percent farmers adopted 6–8 hours grazing in fields. The tendency of walking longer distances in search of grazing material might be due to the exhaustion of locally available grazing lands. The present survey revealed that the migration period ranged between 5 months to 10–12 months in a year. During active crop time, Macherla sheep famers went for migration in to Nallamalla forest where Krishna river water can be utilized for drinking purpose both were present adjacent to the breeding tract. The forest was excellent source green fodder, abundance of green fodder may be one of the major reason for heavy size of the Macherla sheep and shepherds will stay 4 to 6 months in forest (September to February).

Majority of the shepherds informed that community lands, waste barren lands, roadside grass and harvested fields, forest lands were being utilized as grazing resources for sheep. The findings were similar to the results of Gangaraju (2010), Anandarao (2010) in Vizianagaram sheep. The extent of utilization of different grazing sources of the study area was well documented by Raju et al. (2018 and 2019). In the present study, it was observed that water was provided both during grazing and housing time. Providing water during grazing period is an important recommendation by researchers to ameliorate heat stress (Hyder et al., 2017a, b). Most of the farmers (96%) have not adopted the important weaning management practice. Further, 20.63% of the shepherds fed their sheep with concentrate mixtue; majority of them included agro-industrial byproducts in concentrate mixture. Replacing conventional feed resources with agro-industrial byproducts such as non-protein nitrogen compounds is necessary to meet the feed resources’ requirement for ever increasing population (Reddy et al., 2019a, b).

The health management practices of Macherla sheep are presented in Table 2. Majority of the shepherds dewormed their flocks thrice a year, while less proportion (20.58%) performed deworming twice a year. All the farmers in the study are immunized their sheep to protect them from infectious diseases. Among lambs, mortality rate of upto 10% was recorded in 18.27% flocks, 11–20% mortality in 41.35% flocks and more than 20% lamb mortality in 40.38% flocks. The higher mortality rate in lambs might be due to post weaning stress, improper adaptability of lambs to feed and fodders and infection during post weaning period. These results are in conclusion with the reports of Singh et al. (2007) who reported a mortality range of 5–20% in adults and 12–30% in lambs.

In farmers’ flocks, Macherla ewes lambed scatterly round the year as the breeding rams remain always with the ewes during grazing and penned together. Male to female ratio in the field flocks was 1:39.27. The scientific literature suggests an optimum sex ratio of 20–25 ewes per ram in order to prevent the inbreeding and maintain the reproductive health of the breeding ram. Hence, the farmers need to be educated to increase the number of rams in their flocks. Gangaraju (2010) and Anandarao (2010) reported mean ram to ewe sex ratio of 1:25 to 44 and 1:43.81, respectively in Vizianagaram sheep.

The socio-economic attributes of Macherla sheep are presented in Table 3. The overall mean land holding in the surveyed area was 3.41 acres. Most of the farmers studied were small farmers (34.78%) holding 2.5 to 5 acres land followed by 29.34% land less labor and 22.82% marginal farmers, who have sheep rearing as a main source of livelihood. Similar status were reported from Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka by Choudhary (2013) and Reddy et al. (2018).

The present survey on farmers rearing Macherla sheep revealed that average family size of the farmers was 5.44 members, which concurs well with the findings of Choudhary (2013) in Andhra Pradesh, and Reddy et al. (2018) in Karnataka, while it was lower than the observations of Rajanna (2011) in Andhra Pradesh. Literacy rate plays a key role in adoption of new methods in sheep husbandry. The literacy rate of the selected farmers was found to be 79.34% with primary and 20.65% with secondary school education, while Virojirao et al. (2008) and Guruprasad et al. (2019) reported that majority of farmers were either illiterates (32.67%) or educated at primary level (39.33%) in Chittor district of Andhra Pradesh and Hassan district of Karnataka. The results pertaining to annual income were corroborated well with the reports of Choudhary (2013) and Rajanna (2011) in Andhra Pradesh and Reddy et al. (2018) in Karnataka. On contrary, lower income was reported elsewhere (Rajapandi, 2005; Thilakar and Krishnaraj, 2010; Dhara et al., 2019).

The small land holding size, a good proportion of land less laborers, and ideal climate factors could be the reason for sheep rearing. Many of the sheep farmers (90.2%) maintained the flocks with their own family members as a source of livelihood. Similar results were reported by Saravana kumar (2003), Gangaraju (2010) and Rajanna (2011).

Morphological features of Macherla sheep were studied from a total of 1279 sheep (61 rams, 692 ewes, and 526 lambs). The color and other morphological characters of Macherla sheep were distinct from three strains of Nellore sheep (Brown, Jodipi and Palla strains), the only recognized breed of Andhra Pradesh and Vizayangaram sheep a lesser-known sheep breed of North coastal zone of Andhra Pradesh.

Wide variation was observed in the coat colour pattern of Macherla sheep (Fig. 2 and 3). The predominant color pattern observed was bi-colour of white and black (44.41%), followed by brown and white (35.65%), brown (18.64%), and black (1.88%). Majority of sheep had hairy coat (98.12%) and very few (1.88%) were covered with wooly coat (Fig. 4a). The coat color variant was also observed in Vizayangaram (Gangaraju, 2010) and Vembur (Selvakumar, 2016) sheep breeds earlier.

The head, ears’ profile and wattles of Macherla sheep were peculiar and characteristic (Fig. 4b, c and d). The predominant head profile was convex (84.91%), while some were with slightly convex heads (12.98%). The ears pattern was mostly pendulous (96.79%). The wattles were present in 75.45% of Macherla sheep Roman nose or nose similar to Roman (convex) shape was also reported in Nellore (FAO, 1982), Vizianagaram sheep (Gangaraju, 2010), Mandya (Jain et al., 2005), and Macherla sheep (Choudary, 2013). Pendulous ear pattern in sheep was also reported by Choudhary (2013) in Macherla sheep and Yadav et al. (2011) in Munjal breed. Further, few authors reported the presence of wattles in South Indian breeds like Nellore (FAO,1982), Coimbatore (Devendran et al., 2009) and Macherla sheep (Choudhary, 2013). However, Selvakkumar et al. (2016) reported that the wattles were absent in both the sexes of Vembur sheep.

The results showed that majority of sheep possessed black colored muzzle (86.86%) and some with brown (11.10%) and very few with white color (2.06%). The eye lid color pattern was mostly brown (31.50%), followed by black (57.54%) and white (10.87%). Majority of the animals had black colored hooves (99.68%).

Both sexes were horned; but a meagre 2% of the horned sheep were females. The recorded horns were of two types viz. slightly curved (20.69%) and curved (79.31%). In most of the sheep (39.66%), horns were oriented backward, downward and forward, 21.26% backward and downward, 16.09% outward and backward, 4.07% upward and 18.92% backward. Horned rams and polled ewes are not unusual in sheep breeds of South India (Anon, 2004).

The study revealed that majority of the sheep (84.55%) had slender type of tail and very few with thin tail (15.45%). The tail is curved in most of the flocks (94.13%). The tail length in Macherla sheep was classified into short and medium. Overall, 88.04% animals had short tail and 11.46% of the animals with medium size tail. These findings were close to the reports published by Choudhary (2013) who reported slender, short tail in majority of the sheep, while the remaining had thin and medium length tail. However, Singh et al. (2007) reported most of the Nali sheep within and medium sized tails.