We have our first orphan lamb. We are not sure why she was orphaned, just found her along in a corner of the paddock where there were no other sheep around. We left her there for a few hours but no one came to claim her, and it was starting to get dark. I knew she wouldn’t survive the night if we left her.
Jasmine has christened her Ella! Each year our pet lambs all start with the same letter of the alphabet. So far we have been through all the letters up to E. Last year we had Donald (fondly know as Donzy) Dougall and Daisy!
Jazz always spends lots of time with the orphans and as you can see Ella is already very comfortable with her!
Little Ella didn’t look like she’d had much to drink, if any, in her young life, as was probably less than a day old. Every year I try and milk some colostrum from some ewes if I can, and freeze it just for these type of situations. So I was glad I had some to defrost for her. She took a little while to learn to drink from the bottle, some catch on really quickly, others take a bit longer.
We put the orphans in a cardboard box by the fire in our living room for their first night, as often I have to get up and feed them during the night. As you can see below, by the next morning Ella had had enough of the box and was determined to get out and play.
Even with the lid flaps tapped up to make the box taller, she still managed to get out!
Now she is outside. We have a few panels that we put together out in our stable yard. We can add to them to make it bigger if we get more lambs. For the first two days she was having about half a beer bottle of milk three or four times a day. She quickly progressed to a full beer bottle, now its day five and we have just upgraded her to about 3/4 wine bottle three times a day! The next step will be a full wine bottle, twice a day, as she starts to eat grass.
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