So Happy Jack feeds well all day Saturday, and he runs with the ewes, even crossing the (now nearly dry) Woodland Creek several times. One ewe, Kaya, has taken an interest in looking after him, even though she is not showing any signs yet of impending birth of her own lamb. Obviously, she cannot respond to his attempts to feed him, but she crosses and re-crossed the creekbed repeatedly to urge him safely across. Odd to me, as most of the ewes simply ignore him. Kaya is only a 2-year-old, and was honestly only a mediocre mother in her inagural lambing last year. Perhaps she is getting the hang of it.
So after bottle feeding Jack for his bedtime feeding about 10PM, I come back to find my cell phone ringing, and it is the nearby Soay breeder of the orphaned Jack again. With obvious consternation, she describes that she may have gotten mixed up in the confusion of dark of night and 4 nearly-identical lambs with 2 ewes, swirling around while trying to evade capture - and after observing the remaining 3 lambs all day Saturday, she now fears she captured and brought the wrong lamb. So we discuss our options, and to make a long story short(er), she brings a second orphan lamb over late on Saturday night! Since we now fear that the scent of the lamb replacer has now passed through the first lamb and he will be rejected by his mother, we decide not to risk hauling him back and maybe having to "re-orphan" him... so now we have 2 orphan Soay lambs. The second lamb eats greedily from a bottle and is put to bed on a full stomach, so we are confident he too is in good shape.
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