Baby Bottle Lambs
It’s lambing season on the ranch! It’s common for mama sheep (ewes) to have multiple babies, like twins or triplets. When this happens, sometimes one of the lambs will get abandoned or rejected by the mom. In that case, the lamb becomes a bottle baby. This will also happen if the lamb is born too early or too weak and wouldn’t be able to to survive outside on their own with the mama.
Right when you get the bottle baby lamb, you’ll want to bring it in and sit with it by the fire to warm up. Initially, you feed them colostrum, not milk replacement, because colostrum is for newborns. Colostrum refers to the first milk that the body produces during pregnancy. It’s yellow and thick in consistency and some people refer to it as ‘liquid gold!’ It’s very important that the baby lamb gets colostrum in the first 24 hours of their life… it makes a huge difference!
To make a bottle, you can use an empty plastic water or soda bottle. You can purchase pritchard nipples or ‘teats’ that you screw on the bottle top, which is what the lambs will suck out of. You’ll put powdered milk replacer in the bottle, then fill up the rest of the bottle with warm water - making sure it’s not too hot! Then you can shake the bottles until the milk replacer is completely mixed in.
The lambs will be very excited to eat, so they’ll start sucking on the water bottle teat… sometimes the newborn lambs won’t suck right away, so you’ll have to open their mouth just a little bit and squeeze the bottle for them. Lambs usually eat about 2-3 times a day, depending on their size and age.
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Enjoy this video, ‘All About Sheep,’ where the girls will show you how they feed their baby bottle lambs.
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