Three Weeks

Their mother died when they were three weeks old. Twins. A ram and a ewe. They were big lambs. Big when they were born and growing like gangbusters. Their mother was a good milker, a good mother. She died of bloat. She was too far gone to save. It was sad and unfortunate. She had raised many good lambs.

While it is common to wean dairy lambs at 30 days of age, 3 weeks is too young for weaning. I worried about the twins. Would they survive? Were their rumens sufficiently developed?  Were they chewing their cuds yet?  I offered bottles to both of them. The ewe lamb drank a few times. The male never. They wanted to be left alone. They ran from  me. I marked them with blue paint (see picture) so I could keep track of them, in case they needed intervention. They didn't.

The ram lamb, a month old

Fortunately, they were eating creep feed, a mixture of cracked corn and soybean meal. They had hay to munch on. They were grazing. They probably stole milk from a ewe or two. They experienced set backs after their mother died, but they survived. They did okay. More than okay, especially the boy. Now you can't even pick them out in the flock.

I learned that lambs can survive after being weaned at 3 weeks of age. It's not ideal, but they can make it. If they hadn't been eating creep feed, it probably would have taken them a lot longer to catch up and they would have been more susceptible to worms and coccidia.