Texel sheep

The Texel is a breed of domestic sheep originally from the island of Texel in the Netherlands. It is now a popular lean meat sheep in the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Uruguay and Europe. The Texel is a heavily muscled sheep. It produces a lean meat carcass and will pass on this quality to crossbred progeny. The wool is around 32 micrometres and is mostly used for hosiery yarns and knitting wools.

History

The Texel sheep originated on the isle of Texel, the largest of the Wadden Islands off the north coast of the Netherlands. The exact origin of the breed is unknown although it is thought to be a cross of multiple English breeds. It was slowly bred into a meat breed of outstanding carcass quality. It is now one of the most common meat breeds in the Netherlands, making up seventy percent of the national flock

Characteristics

The Texel breed is a white-faced breed with no wool on the head or legs. The breed is characterized by a distinctive short, wide face with a black nose and widely placed, short ears with a nearly horizontal carriage. They have black hooves. The wool is of medium grade (46’s-56’s) with no black fibers. Mature animals shear fleece weights of 3.5 kg (7.7 lbs) to 5.5 kg (12.1 lbs).

Texel

Texel (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈtɛsəl]) is a municipality and an island with a population of 13,641 in the province of North Holland in the Netherlands. It is the largest and most populated island of the West Frisian Islands in the Wadden Sea. The island is situated north of Den Helder, northeast of Noorderhaaks, also known as "Razende Bol" and southwest of Vlieland.

Name

The name Texel is Frisian, but because of historical sound-changes in Dutch, where all -x- sounds have been replaced with -s- sounds (compare for instance English Fox, Frisian Fokse, German Fuchs with Dutch Vos), the name is typically pronounced Tessel in Dutch.

History

In the early Middle Ages and before, Texel and Wieringen may have been much bigger and met each other as opposite banks of the Marsdiep, which was then a river with banks of permanent land: see here.

In the 13th Century Ada, Countess of Holland was held prisoner on Texel by her uncle William.

Texel received city rights in 1415.

Texel was involved in the Battle of Scheveningen (1653) during the First Anglo-Dutch War and the Battle of Texel (1673) during the Third Anglo-Dutch War.

Texel (disambiguation)

Texel is an island and municipality of the Netherlands.

Texel may also refer to:

See also

Texel (graphics)

A texel, texture element, or texture pixel is the fundamental unit of texture space, used in computer graphics. Textures are represented by arrays of texels, just as pictures are represented by arrays of pixels.

Texels can also be described by image regions that are obtained through a simple procedure such as thresholding. Voronoi tesselation can be used to define their spatial relationships. This means that a division is made at the half-way point between the centroid of each texel and the centroids of every surrounding texel for the entire texture. The result is that each texel centroid will have a Voronoi polygon surrounding it. This polygon region consists of all points that are closer to its texel centroid than any other centroid.

Rendering texels

When texturing a 3D surface or surfaces (a process known as texture mapping), the renderer maps texels to appropriate pixels in the output picture. On modern computers, this operation is accomplished on the graphics processing unit.