mother mouse has died leaving 8 babies

Question
Hi my daughters mouse has just died and has left 8 babies behind they are only 2 weeks old and have not opened their eyes yet.  What can we do? Our friend has a mother mice with 8 babies also and we were wondering whether or not she would take them on and she also has another female mice without babies and was wondering whether or not she could be a surrogate mother as well. Or will we just have to hand feed them all ourselves and for how long??? Thanking you in anticipation.

Answer
Hi Danielle,

Surrogate mothers work best if they already have a litter, because otherwise they won't be lactating.  Babies from another litter also need to be within a few days of age, otherwise mom might notice the difference, or the older babies could trample the younger ones on accident, just trying to get to the milk.

If they're close enough in age you can put them in and try, but first you need to get the orphans smelling like the new momma.  If you pick momma up and turn her upside down, she should urinate a little bit and you can gently rub this across the orphans so they'll smell like her.  Failing that you can rub some of her dirty bedding on them so she can't smell the other mom.  How well she'll accept them just depends on how relaxed or anxious of a mother she is.

If mom turns out not to be too happy with the idea, you can feed the babies by hand using a syringe and kitten milk replacement - there are some wonderful instructions here:

http://www.rmca.org/Articles/orphans.htm

The most important thing in that case is to monitor their weight very carefully for any losses.  If they're 2 weeks old they should be opening their eyes any day now and will probably want to explore solid food, so keep some in their cage for when they get investigative.  Around 3 to 3.5 weeks they will start moving to solid foods completely, and they're ready to wean as soon as they're eating solids regularly and have figured out how to use a water bottle.  I just recently had to hand-feed orphans about that age and they wanted fed about 4-5 times a day, and in a few days had dropped down to 2 times a day, but all babies are different.  As long as you keep them warm, feed them as much as they want, and monitor their weight closely they should thrive.  :)

Best of luck!
-Tam