The overriding query we have is – When’s the best time to see lambs or bottle feed one?
There is a short answer and a long answer. I will give both 🙂
Short Answer:
Between late May and mid June.
We don’t often have any lambs to bottle feed.
Long Answer:
We begin lambing on the 12th April. All our sheep lamb outside in the fields, so they lamb at a time of year when good quality grass is available to meet their high energy demands for milk production.
Our lambing season usually lasts 6 weeks. Mums’ especially first timers, are often nervous or protective around their new born lambs and need to be disturbed as little as possible. Even our friendly, chilled out Herdwick Experience sheep will need a few weeks to bond with their lambs before they can be handled by people their mums don’t know.
We try and avoid having bottle fed ‘pet lambs’ as they often fail to thrive as adult sheep, they are extremely time consuming and milk powder is very expensive, about £60 per bag ????
However, there’s often lambs who are brought inside because they’re weak/poorly or their Mum’s are having problems. Then we can get to cuddle these ones! ????
