And I Will Call Her Bunny

Easter Sunday morning, at about 1:30 AM, we took delivery on two brand spanking new baby doelings, delivered by our doe goat, Sparky. In these first couple of days, saanen kids are reminiscent of rabbits, hence this one will be our Easter Bunny. The other is Bender. In Dairy goat naming convention, it's a 'B' year and the rest of the reference is too obscure for most folks.

We had been waiting for Sparky to deliver for a couple of days. It was a nice sunny day on her due date Friday. But she didn't deliver. Friday night was a windstorm with some rain. Saturday it snowed enough to stick. Saturday night was cold and wet. Sunday morning, early, more so.

Here is sparky with a pretty glazed look getting close to labor.


She kept licking us in the face and hands, like she was washing off the after birth. Getting practice for the real event.

In spite of the weather and late delivery, every seems to have turned out OK. Two Doelings, nursing, peeing and pooping. All good sings.

While all this goat delivery was going on, he was tangling with a Skunk. He'll be sleeping outside for the near future even if I wasn't out there sleeping with the kids and new mom.

On of the benefits of sleeping out with the goats, my wife brings me out coffee in the morning..

Tilt'n back a couple of pints

It's been a very busy spring. Bottle kids on top of extra kids. We have twice as much ground planted. We have maxed out on daily chores with the new animals and farmer's markets. We have been working at learning to work smarter instead of harder, but finesse comes with experience and it's tough to learn much without making a mistep here and there.

But as the kids get older, our efforts are beginning to bare fruit. Literal fruit in the garden, Fruit of our labors with the goats. We had gyros from last year's bucks this weekend. And there is enough milk in the house for drinking again.

It's nice to be able to tip back a pint or two in the evening.

FINALLY!!!!

Our last doe finally gave up the goat.



We only have three milking does, so some people will look at this and say big deal. But today our last pregnant doe finally kidded. A healthy doeling, thank you very much. It feels like about time, we have been waiting for kidding, kidding, taking care of kidding related crisis and following up with kids for a month and a half. I think that I have slept in my bed in the house three times during that period. I was ready for it to end. And Heddar, the last doe, took her sweet bippy time waiting for pretty much the least convenient moment. It was raining, my wife had left the property and I was trying to get on the road for business. As I was telling myself I needed to jump in the car to go, I checked on her one more time to find her in the midst of a contraction with two hooves and a bubble sticking out. But it turned out OK.

And just to prove kids are unsafe at any speed, the new kid peed on me within 1/2 hour of birth.




All of these photos captured in their wild state by a boy who is not yet four.

A telling of true events, only the names of the innocent have been changed

It was an adequately uneventful birthing.

Sparking started showing signs in the late afternoon / evening, goo and such. About 10:30 my wife came back from checking on her saying there were contractions. Sparque broke her water at about midnight. About 12:15 AM she showed the first sac, followed by a second. We hemmed and hawed about which sac to deal with first. The second one was the first to show a hoof, so that's the one we dealt with first. My wife had to reach in and reposition the head to get it to follow the front hooves and that kid went quickly afterward. It was the Doe. We did all the toweling off and cleaning up while we waited for second one. Checking Sparque's abdomen, I could feel the second kid, but it was a solid 20, maybe 30, minutes before contractions started again. That whole time, the second one's sac had been protruding about three inches out of Sparque's butt. Once I knew I had two hooves at or out of the birth canal, I pierced the sac. She was tired and laying down, so it took some gentle pulling, but it was probably only three contractions from the end. We cleaned them off and got the first feeding of colostrum into them. The doeling fed off Sparque directly, but I hand fed the buckling as he wasn't strong enough to stand or move around right off. Both kids are feeding off the Sparque's teats this morning. Sparque is a good and attentive mother.

Given that lag between the kids, I am really glad we didn't jump the gun and pierce the bucklings sac early. If we had chosen the wrong one to start with or pierced it right after the doe passed, we would have ended up "reachen in and fishen 'round" which I don't like to do. There was a certain amount of drama, but not enough to nourish anxiety in the future.

Ruffles is still in a funk. She has been barely eating since her kidding. She was only making enough milk to feed the one baby and we weren't sure she was making enough for even that. She had pretty much rejected the first kid, Amos, in favor of the second, Andy. Funny because Amos, the first, seemed bigger and more robust to me at birth. But early on Andy caught up and surpassed Amos. We went through the last of our freezer colostrum and have been feeding cows milk since. That smarts.

Ruffles has gotten a vitamin B complex shot and is due for another today. She has also been getting Nutri-Drench, which she hates. Given her obvious depressed mood, I hesitate to force the Nutri-Drench. She's had pretty much free choice grain, but she shows no interest. It ends up feeding the chickens and not her. She has been out on pasture, and she'll browse some, but doesn't seem to have a sustained interest in any food. I have made sure she has minerals, we've tried separating her from the herd with her kids and without, nursing and not. The best seems in the herd without her kids so she has companionship but the kids aren't running her ragged. I just haven't found anything that seems to make enough difference, she is wasting away to skin and bones quickly. And the latest is she's giving raisin poo. Normally her poo is nice big plump black olives. Now they are shriveled little wrinkled raisins. Maybe some yogurt or probios is the next thing to try. I am pretty unhappy about her progress. It makes us question if this is her last pregnancy. But with Sparque kidded out, some of the milk pressure will be off and hopefully we can make some progress.

A Buck and a Doe

Sparque final shared her secret with us.



Sparque was actually due on the 15th, so we were getting a little antsy to find out what was in store for us. After she was late a couple of days, my wife started reading all the goat books. One of them said call a vet if the goat is more than four days late as the kids can get to big to fit through the birth canal. That wasn't something I wanted to hear so I was glad that on the morning of the 5th day (roughly 12:23 AM) we had both kids out without calling on the services of a vet and very little reachen in. Keeping goats is already expensive, having a vet out for a delivery would pretty much spoil it.

So now we have two new kids to add to this years list, a buckling and a doeling. Alice and Alarm.

It's April, Remember?

It's fun to camp, and Ruffles has been depressed since the delivery. Companionship seems to help. Well, companionship that doesn't eat her grain, anyway. It's a little tight in there for Ruffles, the kids and me, but Ruffles does like to snuggle. No, really.

So I have been sleeping out in the goat house. Last night it rained. A lot. And I was reminded I should have put a plastic liner under an old tarp like this. I had over estimated the water proofness of that blue tarp. I got dripped on all night. I contemplated going inside, but I was warm and dry inside my sleeping system, so I weathered it. In the morning I awoke to snow on the ground. Maybe I should have gone in.

The other morning I tore down half of the winter chicken house, flopped the panels over the fence and reassembled it as a two ended goat shelter. With this, I have two nursery shelters and a main shelter. We have a delivery due any moment and another at the end of the week. Pretty soon, Little, the whether, will be the only adult not nursing kids. In there is a bed of coarse wood chips and straw on top of that. It gets everybody up off the ground, keeping them warm and dry. Even the drips last night didn't really get the area wet. This morning I salvaged a piece of plastic from the chicken house and used it to line the tarp to stop the drip. I'll find out tonight how effective it is.


It has been really nice weather for more than a week. Into the seventies in early April.



The Sunny weather was helping Ruffles ward off the blues. I'll have to pay attention to her to get throuhg this wet weather.

All the best laid plans of mice and men

...Are dashed by the relentless flow of nature.

That's Ruffles on top, her daughter Heddar below. They are both pregnant in the picture. Preggers as my wife might say. Ruffles has been ready to pop for a little while. As I alluded to before, I have been sleeping in the goat house for a while. As it turns out, I had the breeding date wrong. I was twelve days early. And it took me ten nights out in the goat house to go re check my notes. I started sleeping out in the goat house again as the new date approached. Another four nights. Mostly in the rain. As of this morning, no mucus plug, no nesting behavior, no braying, nothing. I checked again at about 10:30 AM, again nothing. I went out at just before noon to give the pregnant does their grain snack. From a distance Ruffles looked like she had some pink showing through the leg hair. "Does she have leg mites I didn't notice?" I thought to myself. Then I noticed the umbilical cord hanging down. Hmm, and umbilical cord, I wonder were that came from?....

After all those nights sleeping in the goat house. Mentally preparing myself for "Reachen In". Wondering if I had enough light out there. Trying to schedule my work around this unpredictable event. She went and had the kids without me. Two healthy doelings, just what we wanted. Ruffles is eight and we might only get one more pregnancy from her. She is by far the best producing doe and we were really hoping to have more does from her line. And we really wanted to get more does from her.










The doelings needed a little help finding and holding a teat. It doesn't help that Ruffles has not nursed kids before. In the past, we have always hand raised (bottle fed) Ruffles' kids. Part of the idea is the kids view the person who feeds them as a member of their herd, maybe their mother and are less skittish with them. And the Doe views the one milking them as their kid. Last year, with a different doe, we decided to try allowing the kids to nurse on the doe. We let the kids nurse freely for the first two weeks. After that, we separate the kids from the doe at night to allow her to build up some milk for a morning milking. Then the kids nurse during the day. At about two months, we separate the doe from the kids (which she was ever so grateful for). Allowing the Doe to nurse the Kids gets us off the hook for a lot of midnight feedings. It also gets the doe off the hook for an engorged udder for those first couple weeks where her production demands milking twice a day. I do have to work hard to get a good imprint with the kids since I am not bottle feeding them. I'll still sleep out in the goat house for a few more nights. But that makes it easy to ensure they are getting enough to eat and are staying warm at night. It also means we have to teach ruffles to be a good mother. She's never done it before, and so far, I am not so sure she is interested in learning. Sparky figured it out last year, so I imagine Ruffles will to.
Either that or we move back to the old model for her....

A little later the same day:

Ruffles wasn't real thrilled with this whole motherhood thing. I think I heard her say something about great grandmothers shouldn't have to breast feed. Or put up with infants. Here I am using my arms locked into a peice of stock panel to get her to hold still long enough for the kids to nurse. While I was doing it alone two hours later, I thought to myself, ya right, this is easier than bottle feeding... But the kids will be up and agile soon enough. They'll be running her ragged wanting to nurse.

What Love Looks like

This is what love lookes like. It starts at six times a day (at least a couple of them in the wee hours) warming bottles of milk and heading out to the kids. And to have the milk to warm means milking. That's only twice a day, but for us that means Six AM milkings. The first couple of nights, I just slept out in the barn with the kids. Sleeping with the kids reminds me of my two year old son. Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night and since he is awake, we must be too. Climbing on our heads, yelling in our ears, prying off our eye lids. The difference between my son and goat kids is hooves. Baby boys feet aren't sharp and hard. And Baby goats don't wear diapers, so when they pee, it soaks through your sleeping bag. Just a hypothetical , of course. Until it happens. And then, well, at least they will be well imprinted.




















At least it is warm enough that I feel secure having them sleep in the goat shed with their mothers. Probably would have been fine all along, it is the end of April, after all. But Ruffles the Doe goat was a little gruff with the babies, particularly the buck kid that was not her's. And Sparky, well, she can be a little clutsy. For a goat, she's kind of addle minded... And, well, they will have a good imprint with humans now.


The Doe (on the right) can actually go right through the cattle panel, it's more of a suggestion to her. But she doesn't generally care to. The buckling, on the other hand, thinks nothing of going places he shouldn't. I was hoping the electric fence would be enough to keep him in, but alas, no, he needs a physical reminder, hence the plastic fence around the poly wire to keep him in the paddock.

This is the expanded Goat Shed. I added two more panels to the north side of the existing shed. The beauty of cattle panel structures, I suppose. We are adding three more paddocks so we can have more seperation in our rotational grazing. The north and south paddocks will be five strand new zealand style electric (high tensile smooth wire, permanent). the space in between is strung with three strands of poly wire, a plastic "temporary" fence. It carries the same current as the new zealand fence. Sparky has more than once told us it still packs a wallup. I touched it myself the other day. It's still "hot", but not as potent as the new zealand fence.

An addendum

This is an addendum to my previous post about our first kidding. We thought the evening was over. I had posted pictures on the blog. Both of us had showered and were headed for bed. It was about 1 AM. My wife went out to check on the doe before we went to bed. She came back into the house carrying a still born kid. The doe had given birth to a second kid without us two hours after the first. It was a sable (Saanens have a recessive gene that leads to dark colored Sables as opposed to the normal white Saanens). The kid's eyes where either so sunken that they appeared to be missing or they were unformed. The vet says that means it probably had been dead for more than 24 hours.

In addition to the second still born kid, the doe didn't pass the placenta. This happens and the doe sometimes reabsorbs it. But we were slow to reacte to it because we are inexperienced. Our doe ended up on antibiotics. I also have since learned that I should have been reaching in and fishing around for that second kid. The vet assumes twins or triplets until proven otherwise.

When we realized we had not reacted quickly enough to the doe's retained plecenta, it hit us pretty hard. If there had been a third kid in the womb that did not come out, it would be in there decomposing. Since the cervix was closed up, there would be no way to get it out (C-sections can be done on a goat, but the prognossis isn't good). Our whole dairy operation flashed before our eyes. We could loose the doe. The kid was still floppy and we might loose him as well. And if we could screw it up once, what's to say the other doe would survive kidding? All these thoughts flashed through our minds while we were on an emergancy after hours call with the vet on call.

We went the course with the antibiotics. It meant there was a milk witholding period so we would not be able to drink the milk for two days after the last antibiotic injection. The doe looked good, good apettite, no mastitis, temp was normal. But she had the most awful brown sticky discharge coming out of her vagina. Some discharge is normal but this color was concerning. We are keeping a close eye on her.

In the meantime, the buck kid has been thriving. I weighed him last night and he has gained 8 pounds. He is frisky and vigarous.

So, after all that, we where anticipating the next delivery with some trepadation. We thought we were reasonably well prepared for the first one. The second one hung over us heavily. We expected her to be late, she always has been in the past. I checked on her at midnight the night before she was due, she wasn't showing any signs of labor. But at 6 AM the next day when I went out to milk, I found the doe on the ground with head and neck delivered. That's a bad thing, it means the front legs are both back, preventing delivery. There was also no way to know how long the do had been like this. I wasn't sure at first, but the kid was alive, but it moved it's mouth. I had to run back to the house and get my kidding supplies and get my wife to help me. Back at the doe, I lubed up my hand and forearm and tried to explore the babies position. But I couldn't push the baby back or get my hand past the cervix to reposition the forelegs. I was really worried. I even called the vet (at their suggestion, they said they could talk me through a tough one). When my wife got there, she lubed up and tried since her hands and arms are smaller. She got one then the other hoof, but wasn't sure if they were from the same kid. But the kid popping out should beyond a doubt they were from the same kid. I did a quick survey for a second kid and found nothing. Within 20 minutes, we were seeing the afterbirth coming out.

Things seem to be going OK for both the mother and the kid. In spite of how big with pregnancy the mother was and the single kid, the doe kid was not big. She has a good sized frame, but she was thin and gangly. She has made good progress, though. She is walking and starting to scamper around. Here mother seems sore and maybe depressed, though. She is eating some, but not a lot. And her milk has not come in strong yet. It is building though. We have hope.

Kidding has been a grounding experience for me. A reminder of the fragility of all life. Also the level of risk managing livestock entails.

New Kid on the block

We had our first kid today. A difficult but rewarding experience. I know enough to say that the goat did all the work, even though it felt like a lot of effort on our part.



















As far as we can tell, the kid is healthy. He took a bottle of colostrum within an hour of birth.



















Since it is a boy, we'll hope for good confirmation and try him as a pack animal.

It's late and it's been a long evening. Maybe more details at a later time.

Exciting news

We had the vet over the other day. And not for lunch....

We are coming up on a year with our goats and it was time to get some injections, preventative care for the hopefully pregnant goats. I also wanted to get tested for CAE (the goats, not me). I also wanted the vet's professional opinion of the health and general condition of the goats. I am still developing a critical eye for goat flesh.

One of the things that has been nagging us is whether or not our goats are actually pregnant. I have been poking and prodding them looking for a sign one way or the other, but I haven't been convinced. But I had to dry them off (stop their udders from producing milk) two months prior to the assumed due date. That was about a month ago. Ever since, I have been thinking about "what if they aren't pregnant" They wouldn't go into heat again until fall and kid spring of 2009. That would mean all the work around maintaining and feeding them with no milk for more than a year. That would have been a big disappointment since dairy products is the reason we got the goats. I enjoy the girls, but they are a big responsibility. Without the milk it wouldn't be worth it.

So anyway, the vet did an ultrasound and we confirmed both goats are with kid. Hard to tell if it is one kid or more, but at least one each. So be looking for pictures of new kids come May.

Making Chevre

Earlier, I talked about getting goats this year. We now have two Saanen dairy goats. We milk everyday getting about 3/4's of a gallon. The majority of the milk we drink. We also skim off some of the cream for ice cream, make yogurt and cheese. We have been making a simple farm cheese, just vinegar and lemon juice to form a curd, herbs and spices and drain the whey through a cheese cloth and eat. No culture or aging involved.

Recently, we tried making a cultured cheese, chevre. We used a recipe I found at Fias co farm, with culture and rennet from Dairy Connection . I did struggle a little bit with the rennet ratio. Apparently, there are different strengths of rennet out there. I ended up going with .72 ml of single strength DCI classic animal rennet (plus an ounce of cold, non chlorinated water) for my half gallon of milk.

After milking, I combined the diluted rennet, culture and the still warm 1/2 gallon of milk in a sterile stainless steal pan. Then the pan went into a well insulated cooler. We were trying to maintain an even 72 F for the culture for the following 18 hours.

The culture had worked over night awhen I checked the milk in the morning and found it had curded up nicely. I was a little relieved because the first batch had not setup and came out as a yogurt. That was the struggle with the rennet.

I ladled the curds into a double layer of cheese cloth lining a large colinder and the whey drained into a bowl underneath.

After most of the whey has drained off, we picked up the corners of the cheese cloth and tied them to make a bag and hung the bag under a pot lid. Then the bag hung in a tall pot for a couple of hours, drining the rest of the whey.



The cheese came out nicely. It has a tangy taste with a texture similar to cream cheese. It spread nicely on bread and crackers. I think I'll try some herbs in it next time. Definitely worth doing again.