We had another dramatic delivery this week on our farm.
We brought Mothra into the kidding parlor Saturday night - checked on her every other hour all night - and she still was in labor all day Sunday. But, the more her labor progressed, the more Jan was convinced it wasn’t normal. If it hadn’t been Sunday, we would’ve called the vet. Instead we called our trusty neighbor. Who, once again, had to turn around a baby who was trying to be born butt first! What are the odds that we’d have two goats in a row with breech births? I can’t find the statistics on-line. In humans, the odds of having a breech delivery is 3-5%. Some goat web-sites say 5% for goats, but I can’t really find a definitive source. Still, the odds for two in a row are extremely low!
But, with the help of Jan and our neighbor, Mothra finally delivered two beautiful girls, Millie and Mollie, and we let them all recover in the kidding parlor for an extra day. They were all pretty shell-shocked from a scary delivery. But now they're thriving! (In the photo, Millie is on the left, Mollie on the right).
Now that we have three goat mothers, I am noticing that all goats have radically differing parenting styles. Phoebe is a real helicopter parent. If I pick up Phoebe’s babies and carry them away, she follows me, barking at me like a dog. She orders those kids around, and they hop to do her bidding. Mothra is the most relaxed of all possible goat moms. Half the time I’m not sure she even knows where her babies are. When we get ready for milking, she runs from the opposite end of the pen in order to be first in line. We can’t even get Phoebe to get in line unless we carry her babies to the milking room.
We've started milking with the machine already. Jan started everyone off hand-milking. She doesn’t take the babies away from their mothers, so she has to be very skilled at taking enough milk to make sure the goats produce a lot, but leave enough milk to feed the babies well. Both Mothra and Lulou are making pounds of extra milk already. Which is great, because we’re not going to breed Mothra again. This delivery was so rough, Jan just doesn’t want to put her through that again. But, she’s a great milker, and she was really hard to dry up after she was bred this fall, so we’re just going to milk her as long as possible. Maybe she’ll give milk for years! I hope so! And then, she’ll retire to the back pen, like Triscuit and Madam. I’m pretty attached to Mothra. She was a bottle-fed baby, so she’s extremely human-oriented.
We thought, at first, that Polly, the middle of Phoebe’s three babies, was going to be a bottle baby. We had to bottle feed her for the first two days or so of her life. But, finally, she got it figured out, and now she’s eating like a pig. All our goat babies are. We have a farm full of good eaters! (This is Polly - about to be bottle fed, with her helicopter mother Phoebe asking what on earth we're doing with her baby!)
Meanwhile, in chicken world, we got a fairy egg! I think I’ve talked about this phenomenon before. The first egg a chicken lays can sometimes be a fairy egg. A fairy egg is very small and has no yolk. Occasionally, it doesn’t even have a shell. This one (with no shell) was lying on the floor in the middle of the chicken coop. Maybe the hen didn’t even know she was about to lay an egg!
We’ve had to change our chicken protocol briefly, due to the hens suddenly laying their eggs out in the wild. We had been letting them roam the long pen that goes parallel to all the goat pens all the way back to the end of the farm. They love going out there, eating grubs. And they come back miraculously at the exact hour we normally give them their scratch.
But, suddenly, instead of getting nine or ten eggs every day, we were getting only five or six. When you have one day like that you figure maybe everyone was taking a day off. But, two days in a row like that, you figure they’re laying their eggs someplace else. There’s still a chicken who lays her eggs in the feral cat shelter every day. But, there were a bunch of chickens laying their eggs out in the wilderness of that long pen. We searched and searched for the eggs and never found them. Probably Fluffy (one of our skunks) has been eating them. So, we’re confining our chickens in the pen around their coop. Which is fine - it's perfectly large enough. It just isn’t chicken wilderness. After they’ve readjusted and gotten used to laying their eggs in their laying boxes again, we’ll let them out again.
And, someone wanted a photo of our herd-guarding dogs. Here they are. Vera is on the left, Clark on the right. Clark always lies on the ground right outside the door of the kidding parlor when someone is in labor. They are the best dogs! (Vera's on the left, Clark on the right).
