Bottle feeding again

Lambie turned up on Tuesday in one of our paddocks. We have no idea who his Mum in as he was in a paddock that normally has horses only in it. We do have around 10 pregnant ewes but only one of them has given birth (twins) and is the wrong breed to be the mother. So our best guess is he somehow got into our paddock (we are a lifestyle block) from a neighbouring farm, but we don’t know.

I picked him up and put him with our ewes but none of them claimed him, or would feed him. He was already pretty close to death and couldn’t stand up as may have been a day or two without feeding. But luckily just down the road a store sells colostrum and milk replacement for lambs.

So for last three days have been bottle feeding him six times a day, including 2 am, 5 am etc etc. After our second son went onto solids, I never thought I’d be doing overnight bottle feeding again!

Sadly Lambie isn’t a good drinker. I’ve been told some lambs guzzle down a bottle, but it takes 60 minutes or more to get him to drink even 100 mls (he should be doing 150 mls six times a day) so I’m spending several hours a day feeding a lamb rather than polling or blogging or sleeping!

Also he is really difficult to keep feeding standing up (he runs away) so much of the time I have him on my lap on a towel, which he poos on like any new born!

So the kids love having a pet lamb, but I’m hoping we can adopt it out to someone who has more time to feed it!