Well.
I guess I actually haven't posted on this blog since before
my Dad's accident. That sucks. For the few of you who have wandered by, I apologize.
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We're at about 6 lambs and 9 kids so far and I'm beginning to think that we'll be doing some culling of does and ewes who failed to produce. If the animal is a nice one, I'll give her another season (everyone deserves a second chance - I myself am failing spectacularly to get pregnant as we speak *grrrr*) but I definitely put a star next to her name in the herdbook.
I'm off to Tractor Supply today to get some whole corn to supplement the nursing ladies and milk replacer.
Yep, I said milk replacer.
Yesterday Evil Genius Husband came back from doing the chores early. I could tell something was up.
"We might have a problem," he said.
We might have a problem is my taciturn hubby's version of screaming and tearing his hair. This is as anxious as he gets - outwardly - and I was immediately gripped by dread.
"What?! What is it?"
"There's a kid," he said, "who doesn't seem to belong to anybody."
Oh crap.
So I secured my own offspring, grabbed my gumboots, and slogged up to the barn. There, wobbling in the last of the evening light was the smallest live kid I'd ever seen. He was the size of a squirrel.
"That's one of the baby goat's kids," I said. None of my older does had had that kid. It was a quarter the size of the others. So we looked at the 3 or 4 youngsters and sure enough, found our escape artist, Brownie, was the missing mom.
This doeling resisted all our efforts to keep her in the kid pen and had escaped several times in the fall and gotten back in with the herd (and the buck). She's smallish to begin with and supporting a pregnancy has kept her growth back. She
might weigh as much as a bag of grain. Maybe. And she acted as if
there was no kid.
So we decided to try out the new adoption pen. I ran down to the house to check on the Brood and get a bottle and EGH scooped up MicroBuck and Brownie.
We tried unsuccessfully to get some donor milk from one of the other does but everyone was milked out by their own robust kids. I gave up and went round to see if I could get the MicroBuck latched.
As I came 'round the barn I heard MicroBuck calling shrilly. He'd been keeping up a constant yell, so I wasn't surprised ... but I was startled when I realized it was coming from the woods. Had that wee thing escaped the adoption pen (he was surely tiny enough to just walk through the gate)? Had he been silly enough to walk his bite-sized self out into the dark woods? How was I going to keep him in with his mum all night?
I turned to tell EGH to run and get the MicroBuck before a 'possum did when I realized that I was looking right at him ... in the pen with Brownie.
A few moments hunting in the dark and the woods-screamer was revealed to be
another kid - assumedly Brownie's and a little doe. I tried unsuccessfully to get them to latch and ended up feeding them the tiny bit of colostrum I could milk out. Two bottle kids. Great.
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Update: both MicroKids were alive this morning, still won't latch, but had a meal of cows milk and colostrum. Tonight they'll get Very Expensive milk replacer. *sigh*
The head stanchion is on the left with a feed box, hay rack and - you can just see it there closest to the gate - a water pail. I found a flaw immediately when I put Brownie in: she's so small that she can get out of the stanchion. I'll have to work on remedying that.
