This first month of the year has already brought some difficult defeats and some wonderful victories. The sweetest victory is named Bounce, and he lives in front of our fire. He’s a tiny bottle lamb, born a month later than he was scheduled and in a far colder month than expected. My son Eli found him on a subzero morning last week at chore time, frozen to the ground in his own birth fluids, cold and unmoving. Nevertheless, when Eli touched him, the lamb was still alive and cried out gustily. Newborn lambs, before they are fed, have surprisingly capable lungs and bawl insistently if separated from their mothers. That’s how Eli found the second one, Bounce’s twin sister, who was up and running in circles, in pursuit of her absolutely oblivious mom, Lena.

Lena was a bottled house lamb two years ago, so that might explain why she had absolutely no instinct to care for her twins, except that she had one little lamb last year, Loki, and did a terrific job raising him. But some ewes do better on one year than another – perhaps as a result of temperature, or nutrition, or the particular smell of the babies. It’s a mystery of shepherding that no one’s been able to explain to me.

Having found the two babies and noting the placenta still hanging from Lena, Eli did what we typically do after our ewes give birth, to encourage and make sure that bonding takes place: he brought mom and babies into a small pen in the calving barn. Once in the enclosed, warm space, given water and hay of their own and a treat of grain, even the most distracted moms generally turn their attention to cleaning up and nursing the lambs. We’ve had a mom refuse to feed one of triplets several times, but never had a mom reject the whole family. There is an awful lot of instinct that kicks in for sheep when those babies show up! But Lena was frantic to get out of the pen and back to the herd, even stepping on the babies.

So Eli quickly brought the lambs into the house by the wood stove, cleaned them off with warm towels, thawed some goat milk we’d frozen last spring, and got busy dribbling milk into the side of their mouths with a tiny nipple. I had just flown out of town for a 5-day visit to Pennsylvania and Shannon was in Madison for a meeting, so our 18-year-old was on his own. Of course, he’s helped out at many lamb and goat births and he’s bottled multiple house animals, but he’d never before been called upon to carry out such heroic measures on his own. By the time he reached either of us on our cell phones, the lambs were settled in front of the fire and weakly accepting milk, the little girl bleating vigorously and the boy still unable to stand. The only further advice we had for him was to add some powdered colostrum to the milk and make sure the lambs’ tongues were warm before trying to get any more down them. Babies can’t do much with food unless their body temperature is at a minimum level, and contrary to intuition, forcing a chilled lamb to nurse before warming up can do more harm than good.

Adorable twins.

By that evening, Eli had called and held the phone out to the lambs to let me know how they were doing. Both answered in an extravagant round of bleating. And the boy was up on his feet right next to his sister. Things were going better than any of us expected. Then, sometime during the night, the little girl, by far the stronger lamb of the two, took a turn for the worse. At the morning feeding she didn’t want to stand to eat and by noon she was dead, curled up in a little ball on the towel in front of the fire. No one had even had time to give her a name.

When I got home from my trip, I immediately gave Bounce his name. I wanted so badly for him to bounce back! And he’d made a good start, but now he’d picked up some sort of a cold. He had a cough and his lusty bawl had been lost for a tiny little wheezy harmonica bleat. Adorable. Pitiful.

Curled up by the fire.

Luckily, bottle-feeding gave me an easy way to administer all sorts of helpful things to the poor guy – aloe vera, garlic, live yogurt cultures and an immune-building herbal tea. But most animals, humans included, don’t take immediately to bottle feeding and have to be taught. For a few days, the best you can do is slide the nipple into the side of the mouth where there are no teeth, then work it to the front, sometimes pulling the tongue into place underneath it. Then, you gently hold the jaw closed until the baby sucks out of self defense! Certainly, you always have to be careful to have the head oriented in such a way that you don’t drown the patient. Some catch on right away, and most have it down within a few days. For those that are weak or slower to catch on, farmers have tricks like rubbing the underside of the neck while bottling, or massaging the back legs vigorously, the way a mom licks. For Bounce, we had to wake him up every four hours to eat, then pretty much pry his mouth open, insert the nipple, squeeze his mouth shut and hold onto his butt so he didn’t back away while he sucked.

Last night, Bounce pawed at my leg while we were waiting for the milk bottle to warm in a bowl of hot water, and that was a giant step in the right direction. It’s that kind of pushiness we want to see! You can dribble milk into a baby’s mouth for a little while and you can even rescue a depleted animal by force-feeding it through a tube stuck gently and carefully into its first stomach – we’ve successfully saved a few stressed newborns this way. But ultimately an animal that has no drive to eat simply won’t make it. All you can really do for one like that is try to awaken its hunger by offering tastes of good things. Milk itself is quite sweet, and you can really tempt a slow baby by adding a touch of molasses to the bottle. Most animals, dogs and cats included, consider dried feed corn a candy treat, and you can offer that to a lamb that’s a few days old. Dried alfalfa leaves are another popular nibble, and when you’ve got an abandoned baby with a weak sucking response you’ve got to pull out all the stops.

When raised by their mothers, lambs nurse for about 15 seconds at a time, every hour or so. The rest of their days are spent following the mothers everywhere and imitating what they do. So the tiny babies nibble at hay on day two, try some grain at about a week, snip off grass when it’s available and even tuck their noses into the water trough, though they generally come up spluttering until they’re a bit older. Lambs even lick up tart tastes of salt and mineral powders at a few days old.

Today, at last, on his week birthday, Bounce has found his mouth. This morning, at the 9 am feeding, he ran crashing into my legs when I brought the bottle, which is typical behavior for a bottle baby. Then he nibbled and actually sucked on my fingers! Just a few days ago, Eli and I discussed our concern that Bounce didn’t seem to be able to open his jaws much at all. But he is definitely using them now – he nursed for a good long time at nine, took a brief nap in front of the fire, and then got up to walk around the living room nibbling on books, a cardboard box, and finally on a cup full of corn I’d placed on the carpet. When he knocked the cup over, he actually ate up some of the corn off the floor. Later, I offered a bowl of corn and a bowl of water – and Bounce went for both. Clearly, his lips and tongue are activated and his curiosity for the world of food is piqued. Success! Our little guy certainly has a long way to go, but things have taken a turn for the better here in the cozy living room, rapidly turning into our third barn with hay and corn scattered around the white wool rug.

Check back on Bounce’s progress in the next post!