In her article "Bum, poddy, or penco" (1952), Marjorie Kimmerle used data from the Linguistic Atlas of Colorado (Kimmerle, McDavid, & McDavid 1951) to show variation in the terms that were used for orphaned lambs throughout the Centennial State. To do so, Kimmerle focused on three lexical variants in particular: penco, which was limited to the southern third of the state; bum(mer), which was in general distribution in the north; and poddy, in small pockets scattered throughout the north. Kimmerle attributed the distribution of the Spanish variant penco to the influence of Mexican sheepherders who drove their herds up from Mexico and Texas through New Mexico and into Colorado. As part of the standard jargon of the sheep industry, bum(mer) -- apparently derived from the German Bummer 'idler, loafer, lounger' -- was used in parts of Colorado where the influence of Spanish was little more than it was in other parts of the U.S. (1952: 91). Finally, Kimmerle traced poddy back to the Australian sheep industry, which was the largest in the world at the time of her writing. In this post, I revisit variation in these terms in Colorado, as well as Utah and Wyoming, by looking at data collected from 1988 to 2004 toward a Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies (LAMR).

The following figure shows all the variants for "orphan lamb" that were collected from LAMR informants:

As in Kimmerle's Colorado data from the mid-1900s, bum(s) and its variants, which include bum lamb(s) and bummer(s), comprise the lion's share of variants for "orphan lambs" in the Middle Rocky region. The dataset also consists of penco(s), as well as maverick(s), dogie(s), orphan, bastard(s), and orphan lamb(s), and the inevitable oncers that are found in nearly every dataset. It is worth nothing, however, that poddy is nowhere to be found in the LAMR dataset. 

As first presented in Antieau (2006), the areal distribution of bum(mer) and penco(s) in Colorado retains the general pattern that it had in Kimmerle's time, as shown in the greater context of the Middle Rockies in the figure below:

As the figure shows, while penco(s) can still be found in the southern portion of Colorado, its hold there may be diminishing, as bum lamb(s) was the preferred variant of the Durango and Saguache informants, and the Lake City informant reported using bum for "orphan lamb." Nevertheless, that is it still in use is testament to the persistence of traditional dialect boundaries (Bailey & Tillery 1996).

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References

Antieau, Lamont D. (2006). A Distributional Analysis of Rural Colorado English. Athens, GA: University of Georgia dissertation.

Bailey, Guy, and Jan Tillery. (1996). "The persistence of Southern American English." Journal of English Linguistics 24(4): 308-321.

Kimmerle, Marjorie M. (1952).  "Bum, poddy, or penco." Colorado Quarterly 1:  87-97

Kimmerle, Marjorie, Raven I. McDavid, Jr., & Virginia McDavid. (1951). "Problems of linguistic geography in the Rocky Mountain area." Western Humanities Review 5: 249-64.