prepare to go aah…
September 28th, 2008 - Posted in sheep - by Sarah|
We now have a set of twin lambs at the Croft that are 5 days old today. On the day that they were born one was noticeably smaller and weaker than the other (lying down wearing a woolover in the photo below). We decided to take the weaker one away and bottle feed it to give them both the best chance of survival, especially as their mum, Hat, is only one year old herself.
So our last few days have revolved around bottle feeding 6 times a day with Colostrum and milk replacer and both lambs are doing well. They are quite different to look at though both show signs of Mittens’ parentage (fine Gotland faces with handlebar ears) so they are our first Gotland-English Leicester crosses. Neither have really got names yet as we wanted to be confident that they would survive before getting our hopes set on Cajun Lamb Salad again.
The one that we’re feeding has dark hair and skin under the white rosebud curls and a couple of black spots about the size of a golf ball – one on the back of its neck and one on a leg. It also has brown and tan patches in the downy wool on its legs.
The other is pink and white with no dark patches at all. It is doing fine with Hat despite us having heavy rain yesterday followed by a cold night.
We will continue to post more cute photos as we take them over the next few weeks.
Also on the subject of sheep, we have started shearing again and tackled Mittens and Socks first. We knew that we should have really done them sooner but this winter has been so wet that it’s been hard to find a time when their fleeces would have dried out. A few weeks ago they looked like this…
… and now they look a bit thinner. Mittens is still quite dark grey,
while Socks is silvery white in places.
