One of my neighbours has Dorpers. His always seem to lamb a month or two ahead of mine. Not through any mutual planning, but we must be running on a similar schedule....just not in synch. I called in to speak with him and see how his lambing went. In that discussion he told me about a lamb that was rejected by his mum, and he thought he would have to take it in and bottle feed it. But the lamb refused to accept his rejection, and hung around, persistently getting in for a feed when he could even though she kicked at him and turned away. After a couple of days she relented and took him back. Very unusual, I've not seen that.

And now we've had almost the same thing happen! A little ram was one of twins, and the mum was favoring the other one. We could see he was running out of puff, starting to fall behind. Another day and he'd be too weak and not able to compete at all, so we took him in. He was a good feeder on the bottle and thrived. Two days later it was a nice sunny day, so I took him out and left him with the mother's group that had stayed behind in the protected goose paddock. Best to get them socialized as quick as possible, we think.

When I went back in the afternoon to round up the sheep for the night, and collect him, he'd attached himself to a harried sheep with twins. Not his mum, by the way, a stranger. She didn't want a third lamb, and kicked at him, head butted him and walked away. But with twins she was always looking around for the other one, and our survivor was a master at the guerilla-feed...duck in, grab a mouthful before the sheep worked out it was the cuckoo again.

Self-adopted lamb sneaks a guerilla snack

A week later he is still going strong. She doesn't look for him or call him, so its up to him to keep up and keep track of where she is, but he still zooms in for a feed in the fly, and she's still brushing him off. But he'll be fine. I took a bottle out the first day and offered it to him. He stared at me, and through me. No interest!

We've had quite a few twins. Always cute. They are a few days old now and starting to play the Mad Run game, where a lot of lambs chase each other along an embankment, get to the end....and turn round and run back again.

The Mad Run is even more exciting when there's a territorial goose involved.

We are almost done I think, maybe one or two to go. I'll check again tomorrow. But one of the last ones delivered today, triplets. I'll see how they go being fed. They are small, and its a ghastly day predicted tomorrow with up to 50ml of rain, so if they are not getting enough feed they will chill and shut down fast.

When I went out to round them up this afternoon, there was one lost lamb bleating sadly. He was quite grubby, and appeared to have not been cleaned properly. As far as I am aware there was only one birth last night. Surely she didn't have quadruplets? I took the lost lamb over to the triplets mum and prodded him towards her. Crying, he wandered over. She checked him out, sniffed his head and bum. Nup, not mine. She's kinder than most, she just turned away. Some sheep headbutt the lamb to drive them off.

So I took him back to where the sheep were congregating. They were working through the 1/4 cubic metre of greens waste from the supermarket I gave them for an afternoon feed. It's all a bit crazy...there's all sorts of food in the bin, and its a race to see who can score the best stuff. There's a lot of pushing and shoving, lambs get separated, mums start calling, lambs are crying...it is a scene!

In the mix was our lost lamb, still bleating. He approached various sheep and they one by one boofed him off, poor bugger.. And then, he found a sheep that didn't chase him off. She sniffed him cursorily, and kept eating. He worked his way round and latched on for a feed. Apparently that was his mum. Not sure how long he'd been lost, or whether she was looking for him. I'll go out again this evening and make sure he's ok. Again, with the rain coming tonight you wouldn't want an unchaperoned lamb chilling by himself.

Not all the stories from this year have a good result. We had three stillborn, or rather, die during birth. Two were just too big, and died in delivery. I helped, but it was too late to save the lamb. Another sheep delivered a lamb in the night and a fox got it, but the oversized lamb damaged the mother and I had to put her down.

And the saddest one was today, a bottle fed lamb that I delivered in Sunday after chasing the mum for two hours to get it out. I thought it was dead, but it coughed and a bit of heart massage and a few puffs of air and she was off and running. She did well in the house, and yesterday was skipping and dancing. Last night she went down, legs stopped working, she stopped eating. When I ran my hands along her back and legs the flesh rippled, and I think that it was pain causing the twitching. I decided it was going to be a slow painful decline and ended it. Awful to do, but best to do it as kindly as possible.