Feeding & Nutrition

The lamb was born in a cold snap and rejected by her mother within an hour, which is how I ended up at two in the morning with a bottle, a heat lamp, and a creature the size of a loaf who thought I was the only warm thing in the world. We named her Shorty because one front leg had come out folded and she walked like a politician with a secret, all confidence and a slight list to one side.

Bottle lambs are a commitment nobody warns you about properly. They eat every few hours, day and night, and the milk is not cow's milk from the carton, which will scour a lamb into dehydration before you finish your coffee. You need lamb milk replacer, a powder mixed warm, fed through a rubber teat sized for a small mouth. Get the temperature wrong and they refuse. Get the powder wrong and their gut turns to water. I learned both lessons in the first forty eight hours and paid for them in laundry I will not detail.

Shorty took to the bottle like it was the one true thing. She would wheel around when she heard the kettle, jam her head against my leg, and butt the bottle with a force that surprised a ten pound animal, because lambs are pushy from birth and it is how they get fed when there are twins and a mother with limited patience. Rejected lambs keep the push, lose the competition, and you become the competition and the mother both, which is a lot of roles for one tired person at three in the morning.

For a month I was the flock. She followed me to the shed, to the gate, to the clothesline, and stood against my boots when I stopped, visibly offended by any stillness that was not hers. The neighbor said she would imprint, that she would never quite be a sheep again, and I told him she was a sheep, just a confused one with a person shaped mother. He was right, of course, because he had raised a dozen, and I had raised none until the cold snap decided otherwise.

Nutrition was the whole job. The replacer carried the fat and protein a growing lamb needs, and the schedule mattered more than the amount. Too much at once and the belly bloat kills them, quietly and fast. Too little and they fail to thrive and you watch the ribs come out like a zipper under the wool. I weighed her on the bathroom scale, the kind with the squeaky foot, and charted it on the fridge, because a rising line is the only proof you are doing it right when the animal cannot thank you in words.

Then came the grass. Around week five I let her nibble the lawn, a few mouthfuls of something green and real, and her interest in the bottle began to slip. This is the weaning instinct, the move from milk to forage, and you support it, not fight it, the way you let a child pick up the spoon even when the mess is terrible. I started leaving her with a small paddock, came back with the bottle less often, and watched her turn toward the earth instead of my boots, which felt like a small betrayal and a large success at once.

By summer she was mostly a sheep. The folded leg straightened, or near enough that the list became a memory, and she ran with the two ewes the farmer lent me to teach her the flock was bigger than one human. She still came when I called, but the desperate wheel at the knees had gone, replaced by a more sheep like saunter that said she had places to be. The bottle sat in the shed, washed and coiled, a relic of the spring she thought I was her mother.

I would do it again. A bottle lamb is exhausting and weirdly bonding, and you learn more about ruminant nutrition in a month than a book will tell you, because the book does not wake you at four with a crying loaf under the stairs or explain that the cry changes pitch when the mix is too cold. Feed the replacer right, watch the weight, let the grass take over when it is ready. That is the whole science, and Shorty, now a yearling with a proper fleece, is the proof it works.

The farmer who lent the ewes told me I had done it right, which meant more than it should have. He had seen bottle lambs fail, the ones fed cold mix or fed on a schedule that suited the person instead of the lamb, and he said the chart on my fridge was the difference between a pet and a corpse. I believed him. A rising line on a fridge door is a strange thing to be proud of, but I was, because it meant the small loaf had decided to live, and the folded leg, which the vet had warned might never straighten, had come good enough that she could run with the flock and not be left behind at the gate when the others bolted for the far hedge.