At five months a lamb isn’t really a baby anymore, although they retain their playfulness, sweetness, and goofiness. They have yet to take on the more dignified manners that their parents, aunties, and uncles display.Since their birth, this year’s lambs have loved to cozy up inside something. In the beginning it was an empty sweet lick tub or old picking bin. As they got older, they liked to curl up in the small containers in which we fed them hay. Once they were able to jump high enough, they took to the adults’ feeding bins, 35 gallon galvanized sheep tanks. Unfortunately, I was never able to get a good shot of them nestled in the tanks, especially when more than one hopped in.
We are getting close to the time to separate them from their mothers so they can move to their new homes. The lambs are isolated in the smaller sheep pen, and since grazing is scarce in there, we are giving them alfalfa hay, a big treat.
This morning when I went out to say good morning, each of the three bins had a fuzzy lamb’s head sticking up above the rim. It happened that they were all brown lambs, so the effect was particularly endearing.
By this time next week they will be settled into their new homes and hopefully the ewe-mammas will have stopped looking for them. It will be quiet again as fall transitions into winter and we await the arrival of next year’s babies.
