Spring lambs. Nothing better. A welcome Easter, Passover, spring sight.
These are Navajo churro lambs. They are primitive, have a dual coat (guard hair and wool undercoat) are hardy and are a rare species. These lambs, the one looking at us is a ewe and the white faced one is a ram, are living in Johnson Vermont at Plain and Simple farm. They are a couple of weeks old and have filled out on milk.
The mother of the ewe lamb rejected her and she found her way to the mother of the ram lamb.
She gets to the milk by the back way of her surrogate mother, while the ram lamb goes in from the side.
I don’t know why the mother rejected her lamb, she is a yearling and might not have the instinctual skills down, but her lamb does. By going to another mother by the back way while the other lamb nurses, and if the surrogate has enough milk for two, she will allow it, but mostly by the back way, because she won’t see it. If she sees the adopted lamb from the front, she will kick her off. She will smell and lick the butt of her lamb while it nurses, to help clean it and to help simulate it. She knows the smell of her lamb vs. a lamb that is not it’s own.
I like the dark faced ewe lamb. She is a fighter and has the strong survival skills to live, doing what she needs to do to do it.
When a lamb is orphaned, it becomes a free ranger in the flock. It there are other lambs about the same age, then I will be the ring leader, and will naturally establish dominance within the lamb cohort. It has already survived rejection by its mother and if it can find a surrogate mother rather then becoming a bottle baby, it will become very independent. A bottle baby is a lamb that has been rejected and without a surrogate sheep mother, so the farmer becomes the surrogate and the lamb bonds with the farmer vs. a ewe. Bottle babies grow up missing some of the key life lessons of being a sheep and can become dangerous if rams, and poor mothers if ewes. Yes this is very general, and there are always exceptions to the rule and the way the sheep are handled on the farm has a tremendous impact as to how the sheep behave. More on that later.
For now, Happy Easter/ Passover/ Welcome spring.
