The Soay Sheep Chronicles

Over the last few days we have been talking with a potential customer about the feasibility of shipping several lambs by air to her next summer.  In the course of those conversations she wanted to know how much our lambs weigh when they are sufficiently past weaning to be ready to ship by land or air.  The airlines have pretty strict rules about how small “pets” must be in order to ship two animals per crate so as to keep the cost at a tolerable level.

As luck would have it, we were able to quickly give her average weights for 33 lambs weaned at 12 weeks who we happened to weigh after they had been acclimated to grass-only meals for about a month and were physically ready to leave our farm.  Here’s a quick summary of the weight data, which we hope will be useful to other breeders and potential buyers who also are considering air freight or just plain wondering at what rate Soay lambs grow.

These 33 British Soay lambs were born between April 3 and April 12, 2011, and all were weighed on August 5, 2011, when they were within a few days either way of 4 months old.  The data includes lots of twins, whose weights not surprisingly tend to be somewhat lower than single lambs, although not universally so.  The data also includes Peanut, our ram born at 1 pound 15 ounces.  If we had excluded him from the data, the average ram weight would go up about a pound.

The 13 ewe lambs ranged from 22 to 34 pounds, with a mean weight of 26.5 pounds, median weight 26 pounds.

The 14 ram lambs ranged from 20 to 40 pounds, with a mean weight of 32.4 pounds and a median weight of 33.5 pounds (the Peanut effect)

The 6 wether lambs ranged from 22 to 34 pounds, with both mean and median weights of 28 pounds.

For now …

It seems Peanut has a fan club. Almost every week I get either an email or an in-person question about whether he survived, is he okay, what’s his fate, and so forth. Most creatures wait until they are a little older to use up their 15 minutes of fame.

Peanut stayed in the high, dry feeding area with his twin and mother much longer than most lambs. We like to get them out on green pasture as soon as possible in the spring. But since Peanut started life at under two pounds, we decided to keep him on milk and let him play at eating hay until we were sure he could make the transition to milk and grass. Our friends Leslie and Dennis took this picture.

Peanut as a scrawny lamb

Recently I was down in the ram area taking pictures of rams going to new homes this fall when I noticed Peanut mugging for the camera. Can you tell which ram he is?

Where's Peanut?

Peanut is over on the right, sporting yellow tape on his horns. The disgusted look on his face is because he and his buddies were forced to leave their lush grass for a few hours while we sorted out rams going to new homes.

You wouldn’t think a sheep that started as small as Peanut would need identifying tape, but he’s now the same size as some of our smaller 2011 rams and we still want to keep an eye on him. And not just for his own health reasons, either. A few weeks ago he figured out what ovine puberty means. While he was still with the “little kids group” we were surprised to see him paying way too much attention to the mother of the twins, the only adult ewe in the group. Off to the ram pen he went!

Peanut has nice conformation

At this point, we are confident Peanut, a line-cross full British ram, will be ready to breed when his year comes up. Until then, he’ll figure out how to fend for himself amongst the big boys. We probably haven’t seen the last of his escapades.

For now …