First came Laddie, then followed Coco, and now ... Popcorn 🤔


Now that lambing season is over and I am sure that I will not have any more lambs to look after for at least six months, I can finally sit down and write about my winter babies, the latest lambs I've been looking after and caring for. Don't get me wrong, I love the sheep and I adore the little lambs with all my heart, but after having to personally care for a few of them through winter, I am always pleased when the tiring business is all over and I can thoroughly enjoy my rest.

Usually, when a new lamb(s) is born, we separate the ewe with her lamb(s) and then watch for at least half an hour to see how well the lamb(s) is coping in the cold, new world. If it manages to stand on its wee little legs and is able to suckle properly, we leave the mother and baby alone to rest and recuperate. Once the lamb has settled down comfortably, we give it a little boost of selenium to help strengthen its immune system.

If the lamb does not show signs of trying to live or take any interest in suckling half an hour after its birth, we intervene. We try to make it nurse by placing the ewe's teat into its mouth and putting warm drops of milk on its lips. It works most of the time. But sometimes a lamb is too weak or small to nurse; that's when the powdered colostrum and a baby bottle come into play.

November 11, 2018:

On this lovely autumn morning, our lambing season started when three beautiful little lambs were born to Milky Way, a two-year-old ewe who carries the map of the galaxy on her midsection. We knew that she was close to her due date when November started, so we kept a really close eye on her and checked on her several times a day. She was also really big, so we were pretty sure that she was going to have triplets. We were right.

After separating the momma ewe and her babies, we sent them to the "nursery", a cozy pen solely for ewes with newborn lambs, which is also equipped with a heat lamp and lots of dry straw. Then, we watched her and the lambs. The smallest of the triplets was a little white ram-lamb; the other two were medium-sized brown ewe-lambs. The moment I laid my eyes on the little white lamb, I knew in my heart of hearts that I would be taking him home. But it's always best if a lamb is brought up by its biological mother, so I had to be patient and see if he actually needed me.

When we saw that he wasn't getting any stronger or any nourishment, we decided that it was time for me to step in. I took him home, plopped him into a basket, and mixed up some powdered colostrum with warm water to make a thick, milky solution. Then I sat in front of the fireplace and fed it to him, bit by bit. When I felt sure that he drank a good amount, I wiped him down with a soft towel and left him to sleep. And so began Laddie's story.

The first 36 hours of bottle-feeding a lamb are the hardest, most frustrating hours that a person can experience. The main problem is that the lamb has no idea about sucking from a plastic nipple that is encased in a hard plastic lid. The lamb's instincts are to nuzzle the udder until a teat finds its way into the lamb's mouth. It takes a while for the lamb to learn to latch on to the plastic nipple, and until it does, you have gently pry open its mouth and slip the nipple in. Sometimes that can be a problem if the nipple is too large, or too slippery. More often than not, a lamb will take a dislike to the bottle and clamp its jaws shut every time you try to get it to feed.

With Laddie, the first day was okay. Every two hours I'd wake him up, and holding him steady with one hand, I'd gently squirt the thick milk from the bottle into his mouth. He was pretty good about swallowing most of it instead of letting it pool in his mouth and spill down his chin like lambs do sometimes. The first night, however, was very hard. He would cry because he was hungry, but when I tried to feed him, he just wouldn't suck. I woke my brother up to help me, but even with the two of us, nothing worked. I was close to tears because I was so frustrated and because I knew that if this little guy didn't get enough nourishment, he would not make it.

When morning came, we tried again, and this time we could hear him swallowing the milk. By the afternoon of the second day, he was able to latch on to the bottle easily, and by the second night, I didn't even have to guide his mouth to the nipple; he was able to suckle by himself.

Since we're not expanding the herd at the moment, we sell off all the lambs in summer, so I didn't want to get attached to this little lamb. But when you're feeding a lamb eight times a day, watching him learn to hop without falling down, and hearing his adorable little bleat, there is no such thing as "not getting attached". It's love at first sight and at first baa. I didn't want to name him either, because naming a lamb just forges another bond, but I couldn't call him "baby" or "lamby" forever. I thought about calling him "boy", but it sounded harsh, so then I decided on "lad", which eventually became "Laddie". It suited him perfectly.

When Laddie was three weeks old, he would hop out of his bin and leave little "presents" for me to clean up. To retain my sanity, I moved him to the barn. He adjusted well. He started nibbling on hay and playing around with the other lambs, and I like to think that he was happy. I had to go about six times a day to feed him, at first, but the number of feedings was reduced eventually, as he neared his weaning age. Lambs are usually weaned at 2-3 months. I weaned Laddie towards the end of January,  when he was 10 weeks old, just before another lamb came into my care. Laddie lives in the barn now, with a set of lambs that were weaned off around the same time he was.

Here are some pictures of Laddie:

I just love that little face!









January 29, 2019:

It was a cold, snowy day. The roads were slippery and dangerous, but we had to venture out. I had a final test for one of my English courses, and my brother had one for a science course. We were both willing to brave the cold and ice rather than wait until February to write the tests because there's nothing worse than having a pending exam overshadow your life. We also wanted to be done with them before another wave of lambing started. We made the right choice.

After we came back from writing our tests (I did horribly, by the way, because it happened to be one of our down times when everything went wrong i.e. pipes froze, the car slipped into a ditch, dad was ill) and went to the barn for the evening chores, we found six newborn lambs. Not one or two, but six! You can imagine how glad we were that we decided to get our tests out of the way.

When we rounded up all the babies and their moms in the nursery, we found out that one ewe had triplets, one had twins, and another had a single lamb. You'd think that maybe each ewe had only two, so that everything's neat and tidy, but no, we had a set of triplets. Triplets are not something we look forward to, because they're usually smaller and weaker, and the smallest one almost always needs a human parent. It's rare that a ewe can care for three lambs. 

Anyways, the single lamb and the twins were doing very well, but the triplets were cold and weak. And the smallest one was even weaker and colder than her siblings because she had gotten separated from her mother somehow. We actually found her under the hay feeder, and we only knew she was there because she was cried out time to time with a strong, loud voice. We put the triplets and their mother under the heat lamp, and soon enough, the two bigger ones were up and feeding. The smallest one wanted to nurse but couldn't, so we fed her some bottled colostrum. However, she looked strong enough to stay with her mother, so after feeding her, we left her to settle in for the night.

Just as we got ready to head home, another ewe went into labour, so, we stayed with her until she lambed and then moved her to another pen with her twins. Her labour was short, so we were able to get back home by 10 p.m. I slept really well that night.

The next morning, the smallest of the triplets did not look too good so I took her in. She was so easy to care for. She had very little trouble with the bottle, and she was strong. We called her Coco because she had a lovely coat of silky brown fur. By the time she was two weeks old, I had to send her to the barn. She didn't mind at all, and frankly, neither did I. I had another little lamb to look after, and keeping two lambs in the house was just crazy.

Unfortunately, Coco did not survive. Just as she turned a month old, she died. We think the cause of her demise was a bloated tummy. Because we didn't have her for very long, we didn't get a chance to take many pictures. Here is one unclear photo of her on a snowy morning when she was following me to the barn:


Update: I found another picture of her that I didn't know existed


February 10, 2019:

It was a Sunday morning; not my barn day. I was imagining that I would sleep for an extra hour, and then have a leisurely breakfast while I read one of the novels that were piling up on my nightstand. But it was not to be. There was a knock at the door, and a distress message: A ewe had lambed overnight, she was bleeding heavily, her triplets were going into hypothermic shock, and my help was needed.
So I pulled on my barn clothes - grumbling all the while - collected my gear which consisted of clean towels, latex gloves, selenium shots, and a bottle of warm colostrum, and then headed out into the frozen, white world.

The ewe's concern was food. She didn't care about anything else, she just wanted to eat. So we gave her some fresh hay and then turned our attention to the babies. There were three little ewe-lambs, all of them white, all of them wet and cold. We put them under the heat lamp and rubbed them dry. Then we gave them their shots and fed them colostrum. We had to check on this set several times throughout the day. Towards evening, the ewe deposited the after-birth and eventually stopped bleeding. She also let her lambs nurse. Her udder was very large, so we didn't think the three lambs would be a problem for her. It seemed like everything was turning out alright.

Four days later, on the 14th of February, we found out that the smallest triplet was starving. She was her mother's favourite and she was always at her udder, so we never suspected that she wasn't actually nursing. But when we saw her standing all hunched, showing no interest in hopping around with her sisters, we knew that something was wrong. I was reluctant to take her in, but we knew that if we didn't step in, we'd have another casualty.

So there I was, a third baby lamb in my arms when my second was just two weeks old, frazzled and tired of the long winter, my patience running thin. How did this third baby affect my family? She won their hearts, even Father's. My sister bestowed upon her the fatal name of "Popcorn". And even I found myself spoiling her. I do not know if she received special attention because she needed it or because I was just too tired to go to the living room in the middle of the night (maybe it was both), but I kept her in my room, right next to my bed. If she whimpered, I stretched my hand out to quiet her, and when she slept, I left my hand there so she wouldn't wake up. I suppose that's why she thinks she's a special little nut.

I spent the first night coaxing her to swallow little bits of milk from a big syringe. I didn't know if she'd make it because where she should have been drinking at least 100 mL at every feeding, she was barely taking 20 mL. It was a long night, and a sticky one too, because she often spat up the milk instead of swallowing it, so there was milk dribbling down her chin, through my fingers, and down my arm to my elbow. To make this long story short, she survived the night, and by the next day, she was latching on to the bottle with no problem. She had also regained her appetite.

Popcorn survived another near-death experience when she was about two weeks old. During one of her feedings, she gulped her milk too quickly and started bloating almost immediately. We were not sure what was wrong with her at first, except that she was very uncomfortable. But then her tummy started expanding, and we knew that we were dealing with the most common lamb-killer: a bloated rumen.

We massaged her stomach for at least two hours and in between intervals, force-fed her some sodium bicarbonate mixed with water and corn syrup. The syrup is supposed to mask the taste of the baking soda, but it didn't work very well. After realizing that there wasn't any milk in her bottle, Popcorn refused to touch the bottle. I'm not sure if she ingested enough baking soda to neutralize the gas in her tummy, but after a while, the swelling began to reduce. To help her further, I took her for a short walk to the barn, and when we got back, she was tired and comfortable enough to sleep. She was fine the next morning.

Popcorn lived up to her name. Even though she was as small as a sneaker and not very strong, she would pop out of her bin with alarming speed and accuracy. Once she was out, she'd run to my corner of the living room, looking for me. If she didn't find me there, she'd go to my bedroom and try to climb up into my bed! We tried to stop her by putting big pillows all around her bin and even by extending the bin walls with cardboard, but nothing worked. I ended up putting a stop to her antics by tying an old laundry rack to the top of her bin. She could poke her head out in between the bars and look around, but getting out wasn't as easy. It worked, but it wasn't foolproof, because a couple of times, I woke up in the night to see her walking around my room.

Because Popcorn was small and because it was the coldest time of the year, she stayed in the house until she was nearly a month old. She would go with me to the barn in the mornings and evenings, and sometimes I'd leave her there for a few hours, but she didn't get transferred until the second week of March. Popcorn is in the process of being weaned, currently. She hasn't grown too much bigger and neither has she stopped being clingy, but she has developed into a somewhat normal little lamb.

Popcorn:



Popcorn reminds me very much of Lizzie. Lizzie was the first lamb that I brought up, and I think she deserves her own story. I don't know if I can remember everything about her now, but I will consider writing about her. Perhaps she'll share a post with Mawi, the first kid that I brought up. I'm not sure yet.

Yours affectionately,
Ellen Hamilton 💖

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