After

The thing about time is that it marches on.

It seems like years since the day we put 17 goats in the ground, but it has only been 16 months. And it looks like it may have been worth all the heartache.

All the goats from the infected group are now gone. From the two young does I kept, we got one kid, a sweet little mottled doe who we called Lucy. The other doe, a quad herself from a long line of big families, did not get in kid despite running with the buck for four months.

Newborn Lucy, the beginning and end of #kidsnatch2019

We submitted a milk sample from Lucy’s mother for testing, but came up with nothing. I attempted to make a cheese from her milk, but the curd did not set up properly, the same problem I had been having with the sick goats before. With the milk problems and fertility problems I had to assume that those last two does were infected, even though they had no coughing or lameness. So they were the last two to be buried. With them gone it is likely we will never know what the cause of the illness was.

After losing one of my young bucks to an injury, I was anxious to get some does in kid to the other buck, Angus, and decided he could run with two of my young does for three weeks only. Both does got in kid straight away, and a couple of months later, despite my attempts to keep them separate, he bred my third doe, Merida, who is his half sister by the same buck. After that there was nothing to do but wait.

On October 24th Georgia gave birth to triplet does at 145 days gestation. The first one was tiny, delivered into my hands under a tree in the paddock, with her head bent back and entirely dead. I dragged the poor doe into the shed and helped deliver the next two kids, who were well on the way and only needed a little bit of guidance. Georgia was an amazing mother from the beginning, and the bigger kid Daphne was quite precocious, but little Lily needed a few days of help to get up and feed before she could fend for herself.

Tiny Lily, getting the hang of it.

Under Boo’s supervision, Georgia and her kids adjusted to life in the big paddock.

Being small and a bit early, Georgia’s girls stayed in the shed for over a week and didn’t move out into the paddock until they were nearly two weeks old. I had just enough time to clean out the pen and prepare it for Peanut’s impending kidding. Things were very different this time around, with Peanut labouring all night before I helped her deliver an enormous single buck kid. Little Wally Walnut took a little while to get the hang of his great long legs, but he was out in the paddock hooning around on day 3, already bigger than Georgia’s girls despite being a fortnight younger.

And then along came Wally Walnut.

The group settled into a routine, with Merida and the two wethers keeping to themselves while the does with kids dealt with their rowdy children. Lucy and her adopted brother Eric, a snatched kid from the nearby commercial dairy, spent fine days out with the others, retreating to their private pen at night since the big goats wouldn’t let them sleep in their house.

Lily, Daphne and Wally go exploring.

Merida kidded on December 14th, and my apprehension at the possible ramifications of her offspring’s limited pedigree proved unfounded. Her two doe kids tried to come out at the same time, one head first with a front leg back, the other backwards. There’s always a moment when you encounter three feet in the birth canal where none of the previously invented swear words quite seem appropriate, so you come up with some new ones. I decided there was room to get the first kid out without bringing the second leg forward, and I was right. After that both kids were out so quick I didn’t even have time to unfold the towels.

Merida with her newborn kids.

Merida wasn’t quite sure what to do with her kids, and had quite a ticklish udder. It was day 5 before she finally decided to let them feed, which meant five days of three-hourly visits from me to help the kids feed. The smaller kid, Marigold, was a bit slow for a day or two, but soon figured out that me turning up meant mum would be held still and she would get a chance to feed. Long-legged Magnolia, with black face and ears and lots of spots over her body, was a bit more steady on her feet and able to chase the doe around.

It seems kind of fitting that now I am no longer showing, I have does with the best udders I have ever owned. All perfectly even, well attached, and with decent volume for such young does. Merida has the greatest capacity, easily feeding her two doe kids and still sometimes needs a milk out in the morning in cooler weather. Georgia’s teats and fore attachment are even better than Merida’s, and while it looks like her volume is not as great, she is feeding two doe kids who are doing very well. Although I do suspect that Lily sneaks a feed from Peanut when she gets a chance. If the size of Peanut’s kid is anything to go by, she is also making plenty of milk. She has high, wide attachment and soft texture like her grandmother Rianna, and teats the perfect size for hand milking.

Merida’s udder

Georgia’s udder

Angus the buck and the three big wethers have been moved into the old buck paddock, where they have plenty to eat and live a quiet existence. The three milkers and seven kids reside with Boo the Maremma in the big paddock. Everyone is healthy. I have made a few successful batches of yogurt from the early milk, although I haven’t been able to put aside enough to try a cheese yet.

The boys in the buck paddock.

Yogurt success!

Seeing my little herd, happy and healthy, kids with their mothers, is really a sight for sore eyes. This is what all the sacrifice was for. The war appears to have been won. Once these dam-raised kids start to pass 12 weeks of age with no symptoms of illness I will consider the whole process a success. Then once they are old enough to wean I can commence daily milking, get back into cheesemaking, and do what I set out to do – breed Anglo Nubians who milk, and make food for my family.

Saving Georgia

The next morning I expected to find Rosanna either dead in her pen or with a prolapsed uterus or both, but she was at the gate ready to go out and spend the day in the paddock with her sisters. She asserted her position with headbutts to a few key players, and marched down the paddock with the other does who had kidded, who were all still calling out for their kids.

Rosanna’s doe kid, Georgia, would not take a bottle. She made a strange ‘mah’ sound that was not like the normal bleat of a newborn kid, and she walked slowly, falling down often. In stark contrast, her brother was hungry, talkative, and would not stay in one spot for a second. I kept them together in the house for the first couple of days, hoping that Johnny’s activity and contact would help Georgia’s little body figure out what to do.

Georgia and Johnny

It took ages to get Georgia dry, due to all of the lubricant and detergent that had been used to facilitate her birth. We had been tube feeding her each time her brother had a bottle, offering the teat first to no avail. By the afternoon she was bloated, seemed to be in pain, and I decided to take her to the vet to see if anything could be done.

The vet asked about my tubing techniques and gave some suggestions as to how to avoid getting air in Georgia’s stomach during tube feeding. She also diagnosed her as a ‘dummy kid’ based on her odd walk, odd voice and inability to suck. She sent us home with advice to keep tube feeding until Georgia could take a bottle and hope for the best.

The next morning I found Rosanna dead in the goat shed, curled up as though asleep. Presumably the drugs she had been given after her difficult birth kept her comfortable for long enough for her to lie down with her sisters and previous year’s kids, and quietly succumb to internal bleeding. I had never lost a doe at kidding before, despite assisting several. In a normal year it would have been a disaster, but under the circumstances it was just another drop in the bucket.

I put Georgia and Johnny out with the other kids, hoping that the throng of little bodies would help Georgia’s systems come online. In dummy kids, as with dummy foals, it is believed that a failure of the newborn’s body to respond to the prompts of birth to switch to ‘outside mode’ is the cause of the syndrome. Newborns are inactive with poor muscle tone and absent suck reflex. In foals there has been dramatic success with simulating the pressures of the journey through the birth canal using ropes. I read all I could find about dummy foals and dummy kids. One goat breeder told a story of a dummy kid she had who was ‘cured’ by an unrelated doe licking her like a newborn. But the likely outcome was that I would have to get milk into Georgia by any means possible until she was able to move onto solid food, if I was to keep her alive.

Kiddie pile – find all nine

After four days of tube feeding, Georgia was behind in her milk consumption and starting to look skinny compared to the others. She was doing okay, but slow, weak and unsteady on her feet. Continued tube feeding irritates the throat, and there was the concern that if she did try to suck and swallow she would find it painful, which would deter her from trying. At the end of day five, she finally took milk from a bottle. Only 150ml at first and her throat did seem sore, but over the next few days I kept her on four feeds a day and she started to catch up to the others. She had another visit to the vet that week to rule out joint ill, but her lameness was deemed to be related to her brain injury, and it resolved on its own.

It probably took a month before Georgia was 100%. She is still bottle fed, as there are only eight spots on the lamb feeders and nine kids, but she can drop 900ml at a feed, and leaps, climbs and bounces like all the others.

Lamb bar madness

The kids are now nine weeks old, and living full time in a small paddock in the back corner of the house yard. My other goats are all gone, except for two special goatlings, Dutch the buck, and Cosmo, a wether who keeps Dutch company. Those four are kept in the small paddocks at the front of the property, where nobody goes except me to check them. The hope is that I can get some kids from the two goatlings, who are daughters of my foundation buck Tazzy, and add them to the current nine to keep my herd viable for the future.

In the next few weeks we will find out if the kidsnatch has been successful. Previous kids started showing symptoms from 10-12 weeks. If we can get through to December without any signs of respiratory illness, we can start to look towards the future. Otherwise there will be more questions, more tests, and likely the end of my goat breeding enterprise.

 

#kidsnatch2018

Any doubts I had about whether I wanted to continue with goats at all quickly evaporated the moment Merida was born. A single doe kid, heavily mottled, from my big, spotty doe known as Katie. Katie’s mother, Elcarim Meredith Q*, was the first Elcarim Doe to be awarded a Q* and also my first doe to win a Best Udder Overall sash. Katie was the best of her five daughters. She was also potentially my highest volume milker ever, having twice produced over 5lt in 24hrs in herd recording on her first lactation. Believing I had more time, though, I planned to wait until her second lactation to try for a Q* award for her.

We snatched Merida from her mother at birth, as planned, and Matt cleaned her up while I milked off some colostrum, of which Katie had plenty. It then took me over an hour to heat the colostrum to a temperature that would kill any pathogens without destroying too many antibodies and hold it there for the required 60 minutes. My many hours of standing over a pot of milk with a thermometer while making cheese was good preparation for this. We had more than enough colostrum for one kid, so I was able to keep some in the fridge in case we needed it later.

Merida

Merida was a quiet house guest, and she was bopping around the lounge room within a few hours. She would make a little bit of noise early in the morning but then go back to sleep until it was time to feed her again. She made the transition to milk replacer without any problems, and we were on our way. That was Thursday.

Titania was acting strangely a couple of days later, but had zero udder development. Juliet was enormous, and I had been penning her by herself at night for a few weeks to give her a chance to rest in her own space without all her relatives crowding around her. Saturday night I put Titania in the pen with Juliet.

Titania was my favourite doe, a daughter of my foundation doe Traybonne Rianna DM. She was Rianna’s 15th and very last kid. Even as a two year old she was a powerful, capacious doe who I had high hopes for in the show ring as a milker. As a goatling she was shown under four different judges, three of whom sashed her Champion goatling, including Murray Grills who described her as ‘a freak of nature’.

I almost didn’t check the shed camera at 11.30pm, having checked it half an hour earlier, but I was anxious and worried about missing a kidding. The 11.30pm check revealed kids had been born, and I rushed out to the shed, mobilising the rest of the household to prepare the towels and cleaning gear and meet in the shed.

When I arrived on the scene it was obvious that the kids were Titania’s. Three of them, two standing, one just born, with Juliet working on cleaning one of them. I grabbed them one by one and plopped them over into the next pen to get them away from the does. The words of the breeder in Queensland who had undertaken a similar operation were ringing in my ears – ‘I didn’t let the does clean them up, if they hit the ground I left them’. I thought about leaving Titania’s kids there, worried that being licked clean by the other doe could be enough to infect them. But Titania still had no udder development and no milk at all. If I left her kids with her they would starve.

Rohan arrived with a big plastic tub and I put all three kids in it and sent him off to the garage to help Matt clean them up. I then went into the laundry, put all the clothes I was wearing into the washing machine, scrubbed my hands, put on clean clothes and went out to inspect the new arrivals.

Two enormous bucks and a little doe. And boy were they noisy. They yelled the house down all night. The leftover colostrum from the previous kidding came in handy, they all had a feed. By now it was well after midnight.

Those three kids bleated their little heads off all night. Nobody got much sleep. The next morning I set about creating a pen in the garage where the kids could live for a few weeks until they were big enough to move outside.

Titan, Antonio and Portia

Titania was named after the Shakespeare’s Queen of the Fairies from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. So two of her kids got their names from Shakespeare characters, Portia for the doe and Antonio for the buck with the big white body patch. The other buck I named Titan, after his mother.

That night Matt volunteered to keep an eye on the camera while I got some sleep. Juliet was very close to kidding, and a little after midnight she was in full labour, so I went out to supervise. Things didn’t seem to be moving along, so I scrubbed my hands and went in to assist. I found a kid presenting spine first.

Juliet was enormous from about halfway through her pregnancy, and I had helped her birth quads the previous year. I was expecting to have to help her out again. She was Titania’s older full sister, and had achieved her Q* the previous year. She was also a Best Udder and Best of Breed winner, who achieved a classification score of 85 on her first lactation. She was not a very big doe, but a very hard worker. I was very keen for a doe kid from her.

I managed to figure out which end of the first kid was the front and got one front leg and a head pointing in the right direction, but I could not for the life of me find the other front leg. I warned Rohan, who was once again waiting with the plastic tub, that the kid was in a funny position and might not be alive when I got it out. I took the head and one leg and decided to see if the kid would come out with the other leg still back. Thankfully he did, and he was very much alive. I pulled out another two kids and sent Rohan over to the cleanup crew while I milked Juliet, who had loads of colostrum.

Three bucks. Not exactly what I was hoping for to carry on the legacy of my best doe. But all alive and vigorous. And thankfully not as noisy as Titania’s kids. I processed the colostrum, fed the kids and got to bed somewhere around 3am. Sticking with the Shakespeare theme, they all got names from Macbeth. Angus for the tall, rangy red buck who came out first, Banquo for the leggy but skinny red kid with a white stripe down his face, and Duncan for the big black and tan kid with the curly tail.

Juliet’s triplet bucks

By now I was sleep deprived an pretty emotionally drained as well. While Katie had kidded several days late, Titania and Juliet were four and five days early. I had only Rosanna left to kid, and by the following afternoon it was clear I would not have to wait long for her.

Rosanna was the only daughter I had of Elcarim Sienna F115. Sienna was the doe who pioneered long lactations in my herd, milking for 643 days on her second lactation. I did not milk test Rosanna on her first lactation, but she raised an enormous set of twins which would have taken a good 4lt per day. She was given a classification score of 83, and was a best udder winner and Best of Breed winner. But as well as all that she was a sturdy, healthy doe who ate well and never seemed to get sick.

She laboured for a few hours with little progress. Around 7pm I decided it was time to intervene. I managed to locate a couple of little feet, but there was not much room to move. I had hold of two feet but could not find a head, and I wasn’t sure if those two feet both belonged to the same kid. After some time I was able to establish that there was a kid presenting with two feet forward and the head was right there, but I could not get the head through. After about an hour of trying to deliver the kid, I was exhausted, and had to admit that I was out of my depth. We called the vet to assist.

It was 9pm by the time the vet arrived. And very soon it became evident that it wasn’t any lack of skill or effort on my part that prevented me from delivering Rosanna’s kid. The vet worked for what seemed like ages, and eventually pulled out a bloodied and mostly inactive kid. He confirmed that it was alive, then put her into the tub for Rohan to take over to the garage. The second kid came out much more easily, a little buck. The vet gave Rosanna painkillers, anti-inflammatories and antibiotics before heading off.

I was shaken and upset by the events of the evening, but relieved that kidding was over. Rosanna’s first kid was a doe, the image of her mother, who we named Georgia after the song by Vance Joy. I tasked the boys with naming the buck, the only proviso that it had to be the name of a song, and they came up with Johnny B Goode.

So now we had nine kids to go on with, three does and six bucks. No more does to kid, no more sleepless nights. But that didn’t mean that the hard part was over.

 

Kids For Days…

After last year’s cascade of disasters, I was pretty apprehensive about this year’s kidding season. But it seems that this year the wheel of fortune has swung back in our favour.

I intended to kid eight does this year, and bred the first couple before Australia Day. I was all set up to hand-raise kids from my quarantine does, expecting around half a dozen kids from that group. Sienna kidded first, big twin bucks by Toggalong FitzWilliam, and I waited and waited for the other two to kid… but they did not. Meredith had come into season repeatedly and at irregular intervals, but despite being bred about five times, including the time the buck broke the gate open and spent the night with her, she did not get in kid. Maia did not cycle at all, and I suspected that she had been bred when the buck got out, but no such luck. My first round of kidding netted me two buck kids, and a long wait before the next ones were due.

So I was left with five does to kid, three first kidders and two second kidders. Everyone in the main group cycled late this year, and a couple had to be re-bred after missing on the first cycle. Juliet was huge from about halfway through her pregnancy, and we speculated that she might give us our first set of quads, a prospect that was as exciting as it was daunting. Rosanna and Elaine were bred to Buddy, the buck whose kids all died last year. Katie was bred to Tazzy, whose fertility could reasonably be suspected to be waning now that he is eight years old. It took three cycles to get her in kid, on the last cycle she was bred four times over two days, but it worked.

I am very lucky to have a flexible and understanding workplace, as most of those five does kidded at times when I should have been at work. I went out on a Tuesday morning the day before Juliet was due to kid and found her in labour. She looked like she had been at it for a little while, so I kept a close eye on her and set a time limit for her to start birthing kids before I went in to investigate. That time came and went, with Juliet sat on the floor looking quite worn-out, so I soaped up and put my hand in to investigate.

There was a kid clearly quite close to being born, but I couldn’t feel any feet. I thought I had a face but it didn’t feel right, and there was a weird floppy thing coming out first. After a few moments I realised that what I was feeling was a tail, and the kid was trying to come out literally bum first. I had to push it back in to find the hind legs and pull it out. Juliet was still lying down, which helped, and there was plenty of space to manipulate the kid. I went in again, found another pair of legs and pulled out another kid, placing it next to the first on the straw. These were not especially small kids. I reached in again and pulled out another, hoping to have the all the kids out before the first ones started making too much noise and prompted the doe to get up to investigate. Juliet lay there patiently while I reached in again and found a fourth kid. Two legs in my hand and out she came, a bit smaller than the others but otherwise fine. I felt around for any more just in case, but four was it. I got up and stood out of the way while Juliet hoisted her significantly-reduced self up out of the straw and set to work cleaning her four absolutely perfect kids.

I managed to get them all to have a feed before I headed into work for the afternoon. I weighed them first and they ranged from 2.8kg to 3.5kg, adding up to over 12kg of kids between them and beating Sienna’s record of 10.5kg of kids (triplets) in a single kidding. Juliet’s kids are now a month old, and while my plan was to remove the two buck kids and let her raise the does, she insisted on feeding all four and refuses to let her milk down for either myself of the machine. I offer her kids a bottle twice a day, and Juliet was tested last week and found to be producing around 5lt of milk per day.

Rosanna kidded the next night, and since I was concerned that she might have deformed kids I waited until she was ready and then went in after the kids. I found a huge pair of front hooves, and it seemed impossible that the kid attached to them could possibly come out of that little two-year-old doe. It took an awful lot of pulling to get that kid out and I was surprised and very relieved to find a great, strong, and otherwise perfectly normal buck kid. A doe kid followed and I was elated. A pair of perfect healthy kids by my lovely young buck Anara Eclipse. They were up and feeding from their cheerful little first time mother without help by morning and have gone from strength to strength.

Ten days later it was Elaine’s turn. After kidding as a goatling and then having a year off, she had got way too fat and had suffered from laminitis earlier in her pregnancy. I had to keep her penned with only hay for several weeks while I worked on her feet which had started to get deformed. She didn’t develop an udder until the day before she kidded, and I was not certain that she was in kid at all until the last couple of days. She had a nice, medium-sized single doe kid, meaning that all three of Buddy’s kids this year are normal and healthy.

After a couple of weeks it was Delilah’s turn. Being school holidays I left the rest of the family to keep an eye on her and went to work. Around 1pm I was summoned home as the first kid was presenting with only one foot forward and Matt’s hands were too big to be able to offer much assistance. I drove home envisaging a bad malpresentation with a small doe, reminiscent of Elise’s vet-assisted arrival last year, but found a fairly easy fix with the second foot tucked under the kid’s chin. It was a big kid though, and she was meconium-stained and more than ready to come out. Another fairly big kid followed, and when I checked for any more all I could feel was a handful of placentas. The kids were a good size and Delilah looked sufficiently deflated, so I helped the kids get a feed and stood by as the doe lay down presumably to pass the afterbirth.

And out came another kid. Smaller, and looking like she’d been dragged from a stagnant swamp. She was floppy and I had to give her a bit of a rev-up to get her breathing reliably. I parked her in front of the doe, who was happy enough to clean her up while the other two kids lurched around the pen trying to find their feet. The third little doe had no suck reflex and could not stand, so once I was sure she was warm enough I stomach tubed her with some colostrum and left her under the heat lamp.

I tube fed the little doe again before I went to bed, and checked her at 3am after the Barncam revealed that she had wriggled out from under the heat lamp. I expected to find her dead in the morning, but she was able to stand with help and I got her to feed straight from the doe. She gained her strength that day, but did not take up feeding on her own and cuddling up with her mother like the other two kids did. The next morning it was evident that her mother did not want to raise her, and since two kids are plenty for a maiden doe, I took the tiny kid and moved her to a neighbouring pen to hand raise. She has made plenty of progress in the last few days, and is feeding well from a bottle and bopping about like a normal kid.

That left Katie, who was showing signs of kidding on Friday morning. I opted to work from home rather than risk having to make a mad dash from the office later in the day, so predictably she waited all day and kidded at around 5pm when I would have already got home from the office had I gone in. She had a nice pair of twins without any assistance, and apart from needing a bit of coaching to feed them she is doing very well with them.

So at this stage we have fourteen healthy kids – seven does and seven bucks – from six healthy does. And we have plenty of milk for everyone.

So to sum up, we have six kids by Tazzy, my supposedly sub-fertile buck they are:

Chris, Alf, Sophia and Odessa, from Elcarim Juliet, and

Trinity and Neo, from Elcarim Gloria (aka Katie).

By Toggalong FitzWilliam we have five kids:

Romulus and Remus, from Elcarim Sienna, and

Florence, Mac and Devika from Elcarim Delilah.

And finally, by Anara Eclipse we have:

Luna and Cosmo, from Elcarim Rosanna, and

Celeste, from Elcarim Elaine.

We’ll register seven doe kids, including Florence who has already been sold and will go to her new home when she is weaned. Cosmo was sold as a buck, but when we discovered that he has a hernia I wethered him, and he will stay on as a pet. The other six buck kids either have been or will be wethered and also have homes to go to.

Staring Down the Barrel

Sienna, Maia and Meredith, expanding rapidly.

Three weeks until the first does are due to kid.

I haven’t had does due this early before. It feels like it is still Autumn, with a whole winter to get through before Spring returns. Spring didn’t really start until November last year, when the rain finally stopped after a miserable two and a half months, so based on that, we have a long, cold, wet half a year ahead of us.

And kids due in three weeks. The first to kid will be the older does in the quarantine paddock. Sienna was bred on consecutive days before Australia day and didn’t come back into season. Meredith seemed to miss on the first cycle and was bred three weeks later, but she showed heat on and off for a couple of months so could be due any time. She is the size of a house, though, so no doubt about her.

Maia seemed to be doing nothing for a very long time, but recently it became apparent that she is already in kid. The only time this could have happened would have been when the bucks first came in rut and Fitz broke the gate latch and got in with the does. Making Maia due a day or two after Sienna.

Sienna and Meredith will both be 7yo this year, and it is my intention that this be their last lactation. They are both residents of the quarantine paddock, so their kids will be hand raised as a biosecurity measure to give them the best chance of not contracting cheesy gland. The plan is to milk them both for a full 365 days and get the highest herd recording result possible for them, as well as a Q* 24 hour production award for Sienna, who has proved her ability to get the butterfat and volume required during previous lactations. Maia is only a fairly young doe, who lacks the production capacity of the other two but has a really nice udder. She had really lovely twins last year, but the doe was lost to joint ill, so another daughter from her would be wonderful.

There are still a few things to do before kidding. The gutters have been installed on the shed, which should solve the problem of water running off the roof and coming in under the back wall during wet weather. The feed area has been cleared out and will be used for raising kids. I’ll need to get a lamb bar or similar for feeding multiple kids.

I’m in the process of acquiring a milking machine. With two high-volume does to milk, and a history of carpal tunnel issues, I’ve had to admit that hand milking more than one or two does is more than I can cope with. I’ve found the make and model I want, now it’s just a matter of having it delivered and figuring out how to work it.

After last year, I am pretty apprehensive about facing another kidding season. After the three older girls kid I’ll get a bit of a break before the other five younger does are due, spread over September and October. Hand raising kids is a lot of work, and very time consuming, even when everything goes well.

For me kidding season is about late nights and early mornings. It’s about the moment when you realise that even if the doe kids right now and with no problems you are still going to be up most of the night. It is huddling under the heat lamp, staring at a glassy-eyed goat who could give birth at literally any moment yet manages to hang on for hours. It is the accumulation of straw on the carpet due to all the washing that has to be dried in front of the fire, and all the straw your clothes pick up from the pens while you are on your knees trying to get frustrating newborns to feed. It is dry, cracked hands, the smell of amniotic fluid and colostrum on the cuffs of your coat, and endless trips back and forth to the shed in the dark.

It’s the feeling of relief when all the kids are out, even if they haven’t all made it. It’s the difficult decision of when to wait and watch and when to help a doe to deliver.

I don’t know how many kids we will get this season. Between none and 24 is the reality of it. Somewhere around 16 is likely if things go well. Inevitably we will lose some, but all I can do is hope that the 50% losses we experienced last year were a one-off.

For now I will enjoy the good nights of sleep and the relatively quick morning and evening routines milking just one doe. The calm before the storm. But before long I’ll be under pressure to get up at 6am, fit in feeding kids three times a day and go to bed early. I’ll be working out how to fit in evening milking with footy training. Checking the online camera every hour when there are does in the kidding pen.

There is no going back now. This will happen, soon.

Nothing Like Christmas

After the last post we had two does with live, healthy kids on the ground and one who had lost her twins. Gaia was being treated for an infection in her joint, and the next doe due to kid was Meredith.

Gaia hung on bravely, hopping about on three legs, feeding and growing, but the antibiotics didn’t work. She was put down at 23 days and buried behind the barn.

Meredith kidded unexpectedly a week early. Her big buck kid was a beautiful mottle, but despite two days of nursing he didn’t make it. He was buried next to Gaia.

At this stage I had four does kidded and only three kids running around. The next three due were maiden does and I wasn’t completely sure when Juliet’s due date was.

Lizzie kidded on a Saturday afternoon at 150 days on the dot. We were out shopping when I checked the barncam and saw that she was getting very close. We rushed home and I watched for a while. After about half an hour, with only the kid’s nose visible and not a lot of progress being made, I decided it was time to investigate. I found that only one front leg had come forward. I dragged Lizzie up onto the head bail, thinking ‘I just need to push the kid back, find the other leg, and it will slip out no worries – I’ll look like a hero’.

Nope.

Being such a small doe, Lizzie, as it turns out, has a fairly small pelvis. I was able to push the kid back a bit and feel about for the other front leg but what I found was more like three or four legs and I had no way of knowing which one belonged to the halfway-born kid.

I called the vet and got Anna, his wife, who I had not met before but who is also a vet. She was in town but came straight out to my place. She had a poke around and discovered what I had – a stuck kid with a leg back and whole lot of legs to choose from. After much pushing and manoeuvring the second leg of the first kid appeared, and with considerable traction she was removed.

The second kid followed hot on the heels of the first. A doe and a buck, both big-boned and rowdy. They were on their feet within an hour and after a little bit of encouragement Lizzie was happily feeding them. I paid the Saturday call-out fee with a smile on my face, relieved to have healthy kids on the ground and a healthy doe to feed them.

Juliet started to make her udder and I was apprehensive, with no way of knowing what stage her kids were at or what to expect when they were born. She laboured all day Wednesday with no visible goo, which also had me spooked. Just after dark I checked the barncam to see that she had produced a very interesting little kid. I put on my outside gear and rushed out to the shed.

The first kid was a boldly marked dark brown and black with loads of white, black ears with a white border, a big white top-knot and a white dot on her otherwise black face. Very cute. I left Juliet with this kid for a while, as they were both lying down peacefully after the effort of birth But after a while I moved it to where Juliet could more easily clean it without getting up and took a look under the tail – a little doe. Juliet cleaned her up very well and after about 45 minutes lay down again and produced two more kids, both bucks. The kids were small, but clearly fully-cooked, they were up and feeding before I got around to weighing them.

My kid population had grown to eight from six does and things were starting to look up. Maude was due a few days after Juliet kidded, but the date came and went. At 154 days she started to make an udder. At 157 days I was due to make a trip to Melbourne for a two-day Radical Feminist conference.

When I bought the ticket for this conference my calendar showed that the dates were in the middle of a 23-day window between Maude’s due date and Hera’s. I should have been fine to leave the farm. Matt assured me everything would be fine, so I left everyone in his capable hands and headed off to Melbourne.

It turned into the sort of scenario that even Murphy could not have anticipated. At 11pm on Friday night, with me ensconced in a hotel room and the next train home not leaving for 8 hours, Maude went into full labour. She was working very hard, pushing and getting up and down. I messaged Matt to keep an eye on her. I used up my hotel free wifi allowance and had to use my mobile data to keep watching. At about 1am Maude lay down, exhausted. I must have nodded off after that, but when I woke at 4am Maude was still lying in the same place. I rang Matt again and told him something was wrong. ‘Those kids have to come out now’ I told him. He sighed, put on his waterproof gear and headed out.

With Maude up on the bail, Matt quickly identified a hind leg presenting first. I instructed him to find the other one, which he did. ‘Now what?’ he asked. ‘Now you pull’, I said.

The kid was stuck. Really stuck. I suspected that it was probably already dead, but didn’t say so. It still had to come out. I could hear the anguish and rising panic in Matt’s voice as he worked to get the kid out. The geese were squawking in the background. Another doe somewhere was calling out. Poor Maude was silent, she had basically dissociated and gone to her happy place.

Matt got the kid out, but the reason for the obstruction was obvious – it was grossly swollen, big but underdeveloped, mostly hairless and incredibly grotesque. With this kid out, a big gush of fluid followed then another kid, front feet first. Then came the words I was not expecting to hear.

‘This one is alive.’

The third kid was also dead, and mostly normal. But we had one live kid, which meant there was still plenty of work to do.

Maude was not at all interested in her kid, so I instructed Matt to bring the kid inside. I told him to take her temp and not give her any milk unless she was over 37 degrees. I left the hotel at 5.45am and caught the early train home. When I got in just after 9am I found Matt asleep in front of the heater with the kid wearing a heated ICU rug on a towel next to him. I thought she had died, but when I picked her up she opened her eyes. I took her temperature and she was so cold that the electronic thermometer couldn’t get a reading.

I sent Matt to bed and the boys and myself set about warming the kid up. I got the heat lamp from the barn and set it up in the TV room, while Rohan warmed the kid with my hairdryer. I put her in a tub with some straw and towels, the heated rug warming her from one side and the heat lamp warming her from the other. Then I headed out to milk and feed all the healthy crew and clean up the mess from the hours before.

Hera had a bit of goo under her tail and was clearly uncomfortable. ‘Here we go again’ I thought. With two weeks still to go until her due date I knew her kids had probably died. I put her in a pen and got on with my tasks.

I watched Hera through the day and into the night. She did not look distressed, so I left her to it. In the morning I found her lying flat on her side, legs and neck stretched out, with a recently-expelled dead kid behind her. For a moment I thought Hera herself was dead.

I called out to her and she opened her eyes and sat up. A second kid, tiny, was still hanging from her in its sac. It was malformed, as was the bigger one, and neither would have been viable. She seemed much relieved to have that all over with, and after the second kid came out she was up and about, and I let her out to be with the others. She went looking for food and water, and was back to her normal self by the evening.

In total, four does had either dead kids or, in Meredith’s case, a live kid that died soon after birth. From those four does we lost two doe kids; four bucks, one too small to tell and at this stage one doe kid is still alive. Meanwhile four other does had healthy kids. The only link seems to be that all the aborted or unviable kids were by one buck, the healthy kids by my two proven bucks. Whether that is just a coincidence I have no idea. We have run a few tests which have turned up nothing. The only option is to roll the dice again next season, and do a full investigation if we encounter any similar problems.

I used to say that kidding time is like Christmas – you never know what you are going to get. After a couple of bad years I now approach kidding season with trepidation rather than excitement, and when things go well I can hardly believe it. Just when I think I have seen all the problems goats can throw at me, and learned how to deal with them, something comes up that scares me. I am incredibly grateful for my vets who are not far away when I get to a point where the situation has gone beyond what my skill and knowledge level can deal with.

Every now and then you catch a break. A particularly nice kid turns out to be a doe or a first year milker comes in with an especially good udder. The wet weather is making things even more challenging, but with kidding season over and half a dozen does to milk there is plenty of cheese to be made. Show season is around the corner, and that can always go one way or the other.

But when all those Nubian does come screaming into season in Autumn there will be little hesitation in breeding them again. And once the kids are in there, they have to come out eventually. And so it goes again.

 

A Tale of Two Kiddings

Every year kidding brings something new. You think you have seen everything, you think you have a contingency for all possibilities, but every year a new challenge presents itself.

This year our first challenge was hoping that Maia would hold off kidding until we got back from our trip to North Queensland. Our animal carer Mel was glad to be relieved of her duties without having to deal with a birthing goat. As it turned out, Maia waited until we had been back for three days, which was nice of her, but kidded at around midday on Monday while I was at work.

With my mobile data running out fast due to a high volume of Instagram posts during our holiday, my workmate Morgs got me onto the work wifi so I could monitor my labouring goat without leaving my desk via our excellent internet barncam.

Maia’s first kid was a bit stuck, so I had to instruct a somewhat reluctant Matt to don some rubber gloves and apply a bit of traction to help pass the shoulders.

It was a miracle of modern technology… I had Matt on speakerphone, watching events via the barncam, and he assisted Maia with the delivery of a very nice big doe kid. I was then able to send him back to bed to prepare for his upcoming 12-hour night shift while I kept an eye on the new family.

Of course, a few minutes later Maia delivered a second kid. By the time I got home she had cleaned both kids and they were up looking for the udder. The second kid was a buck, and both are absolute rippers.

Maia with her twins

Maia is one of those goats I have had a complicated relationship with. An only kid, she was big and flash and went to a few shows. She was champion kid at Geelong Royal, and from five shows as a kid she won three championships, one reserve and was only unplaced once. As a goatling she decided she wasn’t going to walk in the showring. She would lie down, walk sideways, crouch, and generally sulked her way to the bottom end of a lot of line-ups.

As a first lactation doe she was still incredibly stroppy. She took her trick of lying down whenever things got difficult and applied it to milking time. That was once she finally developed an udder – she kidded with almost no udder development and it took a week for her udder to turn into something useful. She would lie down on the milking bail. I was advised to put a bucket under her belly to stop her from lying down, and this often led to me milking with my arm jammed between a tall, crabby red goat and a bucket.

Eventually she became more agreeable, and after a few shows she settled down and was happy to walk. She was also fairly okay with being milked at shows, and as long as I milked from her right side everything was okay. She still will only agree to being milked from the right side. She won a couple of Best of Breed awards as a first-year milker, ending up with 17 points towards an Australian Champion award. She also became my second ever doe to win a Best Udder class.

Maia at Geelong Show

In order to gain an Australian Champion award a doe needs a milk award. And on the two litres a day she gave in her first lactation, that was never going to happen. I decided that no matter how nice her udder was, unless she could do four litres in her second lactation she would not be shown or bred again. We are here to make milk, after all.

Imagine my delight when Maia came in with the same neat, symmetrical and well-attached udder, but this time with much more volume. She is feeding her two big kids and has a little bit left for the house each morning. I’m not sure exactly how much milk she is making, but four litres is a reasonable estimation and enough to attain a production award with a bit of luck. Whether or not she ever makes it to 100 show points, at least we have a chance.

Maia’s udder this year

A couple of days after Maia kidded, my little spotty doe Juno, known as Pud, started to show signs that her unborn kids had died. She was three weeks from her due date, in kid to my new buck Anara Eclipse, known as Buddy. She birthed one dead kid on her own and I had the sad and unpleasant task of going in and removing the second one. Two big spotty buck kids. Nothing evidently wrong with them. I put it down to ‘one of those things’, dosed poor Pud up with antibiotics and buried the unfortunate kids.

Sad Juno after losing her kids

A couple of days after that Matt noted that Maia’s doe kid, Gaia, was unable to walk properly and was drooling. I did a quick Google of what could make a kid drool, and found all sorts of unpleasant possibilities, some of which also mentioned stillborn or aborted kids as their other effects. I called the vet, left work early and arrived home fearing for the health of my entire herd.

Gaia was diagnosed with sepsis, and not expected to live. She was put on twice daily antibiotic injections. My old doe, Rianna, due to kid the next day, was put on a precautionary course of antibiotics and I was left with some extra medication and instructions that if any other pregnant does gave the slightest inclination of being off-colour I should start them on antibiotics too.

Gaia seemed to make a miraculous recovery, and I was relieved to be able to watch her make her first journey out into the farmyard with her mother and brother.

Maia and her kids, Gaia and Reuben, enjoying the outdoors

Rianna kidded that Sunday evening, two days after the vet had been. She asked to be put in the kidding pen when I came out to do the evening feeds and jobs, so I did as she requested and headed off down the paddock to put the horse’s rug back on. When I got back Rianna was in the process of birthing her first kid, so I got a couple more tasks out of the way and then came back to watch.

Rianna was my first registered Anglo Nubian, who I purchased at six months of age. Prior to this season she had given birth to 13 kids and raised nine of them. Every year she has given me one doe kid and one or two bucks. Her udder still looks like it did on her first lactation. She has a lot of what is referred to as ‘dairy quality’ and part of this is that she never carries much condition. Even after a year off, and with an appetite that seems to know no limits, she still looks like a hat rack with a blanket over it. I used to worry, but now I know she is healthy and that is just how she runs.

This year Rianna has produced her 14th and 15th kids, a buck and a doe, and only once needed any intervention, when a kid was partway out with a front leg pointing backwards. As I watched her 15th kid enter the world I had a moment of confusion when it appeared to have two front legs on one side of its body. I thought for a moment that there might be two kids trying to come out at once, but at that stage there could only be room for one in the birth canal.

Rianna with her newborn kids, including a rather floppy Titania

It turned out that the kid had been delivered with its head under one front leg. That was the doe kid who I named Titania. She was quite weak, although very determined, and got around for her first four days as though the ground was a magnet and her nose was made of metal. She did not raise her head like a normal goat until she was nearly a week old. I began to wonder if she ever would. Slowly but surely, with some help to feed, she got stronger and now she looks just like a normal kid.

Titania stared at the floor for a few days, while her brother Oberon bounced around oblivious

Some years you have those kids who worm their way into your heart, and Titania is one of those. She will be Rianna’s last kid, and she has decided that I am her best friend. I can’t photograph her without her trying to climb up my leg. She is just delightful, and I admire her strength, determination and humour.

Four kids from the first round of kidding hanging out with the family. Titania is now as strong and bouncy as the others.

Little Gaia, Maia’s sick kid, has had a setback with an infection setting into one of her joints. She is otherwise healthy, feeding, growing and getting around, but there is a chance that the antibiotics she is now on won’t cure her. So for now we wait.

Meredith and Lizzie are due to kid next, followed shortly after by Maude. Meredith gave me a big fright, doing the sort of uncomfortable shuffle that Pud was doing before she lost her kids, so as the vet suggested Meredith got a course of antibiotics and so far she seems fine. Her belly is enormous, and she is due in another nine days. Hopefully these will be Buddy’s first live kids. Lizzie is Rianna’s great granddaughter, so her kid/s will be Rianna’s great great grandchildren and fourth generation Elcarim goats.

Farm Update

I’ve been finding it hard to find time to write over the past few months, and the simple explanation for that is that I have been working more hours. My job had got to the point where I just couldn’t keep up with everything I had to do in the time I had available, and since so much of what I do is time-critical I spent most of my time feeling like I was chasing my tail. So I put my hand up to do more hours.

This has meant that while work is less stressful because I actually have time to get everything done on time, I have less time at home and I have to go to bed earlier so that I can get up earlier. The rest of the family have had to learn to do more around the house and since I no longer have time to do everything I am also no longer the default person to look after everyone else. We look after each other, we all pitch in, and we all benefit from mum bringing home a bit more money each month.

I took a break from soapmaking and writing just to let everything settle down. Like anything else, it comes down to priorities. You make time for the things that make the most noise. But you also need to make time for the things that you get the most value from, and value can definitely include enjoyment.

When I found myself home alone on Sunday with the sun shining and the birds singing I was almost overwhelmed with excitement and an urge to get as much done as possible while I could. I popped out at 9am to do the milking and ended up having ‘breakfast’ at about 2pm.

Hanging out with my farmyard friends

I sent Maia and her kids out into the world for the first time. Those babies got to feel the sun on their backs and the dirt under their feet, as well as meeting the rest of their family. This was especially sweet since little Gaia had been treated for sepsis two days earlier, and the vet had warned me that he did not expect her to live.

Maia and her kids, Gaia and Reuben

Moving in and out of the house and between the shed and the garden, I got the milking done, cleaned the goat pens and delivered some straw to the garden beds. I did some weeding, thinned the silverbeet, cleared the dead tomato plants from the small greenhouse, baked the sourdough, did four loads of washing, replanted some strawberries, pruned the apple trees and cleaned out the cat litter. It was glorious.

Yay! Sourdough. My lunch for the next fortnight.

The food garden, with the berry nets up to allow for weeding, pruning and planting the strawberries.

None of my winter vegetables sprouted last year, so I cheated this year and used the greenhouse. So far so good, cauliflower, beetroot, cabbage, broccoli and lettuce.

I sat down for a bit around 3pm and ventured out again an hour later when Leo the Italian Greyhound started complaining that it was getting cold and he wanted his coat back on. This seemed like a good time to go around closing up the windows and the big greenhouse door, and put the blanket back on Stella the old Thoroughbred who also got to get her kit off for the day. I was wondering what feat of culinary genius to make for dinner when I found that old Rianna, my boss doe, was about to have her kids.

I popped her in the kidding pen I had prepared earlier and set off to get the furthest away tasks done, which meant wandering down the paddock carrying a Weatherbeeta horse rug trying to find two full-size Thoroughbreds who seemed to have disappeared into the 10 acre paddock. I found them in the back corner behind the dam wall, re-clothed old Stella, took some pictures of the impressively full dams, and headed casually back up to the shed.

Where I found this…

First kid out, nothing to do but keep on with my to-do list and check on Rianna occasionally. I got the goatlings and bucks in the small paddocks fed, put the poultry away, fed the cat and put out the call to Matt to pick up some dinner on his way home from work.

We ended up with a small but nice set of twins from Rianna. They were a little slow to get going, the buck was frustratingly resistant to feeding from his mother, but they are doing well now and feeding themselves.

After such a long dry Autumn, the recent rain has been very welcome, but it is much wetter here than we have seen it previously. The main dam is at its highest level since we moved in after almost drying up completely a few months ago. The interesting bit of earthworks described by the real estate agent as a second dam actually looks like how I imagine the previous owner had intended the water trap on his golf course to look.

The main dam

The back dam, aka hole 3

Days like this give me the enthusiasm to press on through the cold and wet, to make plans for the spring and start thinking about what to plant where. I’m hoping to do a lot more seed propagation this year, rather than buying seedlings, so I’ve got some equipment to use the small greenhouse to start seeds. I’ve started mulching and weeding the vegetable garden and ordered some seeds for the spring and summer crops. I hope to get some peas and beans planted next weekend, and I’m thinking about where I might be able to plant some hazelnut trees.

The daffodils and wattle trees are blooming, the geese are getting aggressive, the ducks are laying and the pregnant does are expanding alarmingly. Spring is on its slow march toward us and will be here before we know it.

Sausage

As we head into another breeding season, it feels like kidding season only just ended. Although, to be fair, with Ambika kidding in December it pretty much did. Yet here we are again, planning matings, thinking about which resulting kids will be the best to keep, which does will be aimed at milk awards and deciding what each first-time milker will have to achieve in order to cement a place on the team.

One of my favourite aspects of kidding season is making new friends. You never know which kids will worm their way into your heart and become special members of the herd. But every  now and then one comes along whose story just about writes itself.

Last kidding season saw me call the vet to assist with a kidding for the first time. Luckily I have a vet who I can call at 11.45 on a Saturday night and who will be there in 15 minutes. I had managed to fairly easily extract two tiny doe kids from my first-timer Hera, but the third kid was a lot bigger and very very stuck. No amount of manipulation on my part could get that third kid’s head around and he was too big to come out otherwise.

I was doing that mental calculation of whether the doe was potentially valuable enough to justify the cost of a cesarean when my wonderful vet managed to rearrange the third kid and get him out in one piece, although very much dead. I had two doe kids, an uninjured doe and we’d avoided surgery, so I was pretty pleased with the outcome. But those two doe kids were tiny, and I knew that being born alive was just the beginning of the battle for them.

Hera with her two doe kids, Layla and Cecilia.

Layla and Cecilia weighed in at 2200g and 1800g respectively. The smallest kid I had bred previously that had lived was Puck, also a triplet, who was a little over 2kg at birth. Hera’s kids were so little that they could simply walk through the bars of the gate and leave the pen, which they did regularly and much to Hera’s distress.

Layla died on her second night after refusing to feed from either a bottle or her mother. Cecilia, however, soon learned to feed herself, standing on tiptoe to reach Hera’s teat and feasting on the ample milk supply. She gained weight so quickly that her skin started to feel tight and her little body felt like an overstuffed sausage. Hence I started calling her ‘my little sausage’ and Sausage became her nickname.

This gives an idea of how tiny Cecilia was.

Sausage was one of six kids born that weekend who lived, all by my sturdy young buck Toggalong FitzWilliam. The others kids were tall and flash, at least twice the size of Cecilia, but she never once backed down to any of them. This was sometimes to her detriment. When she was two weeks old I noticed a lump on her spine and she was walking oddly, dragging a hind leg. She was not her normal cheerful self, and would cry out if you grabbed her. All signs pointed to a back injury. She was a bit slower for a while, but I massaged the swelling either side of her spine twice a day, which she seemed to enjoy, and she spent a couple of nights locked away from the bigger kids. After a while she recovered and now the lump on her back is barely noticeable.

Chilling out on her own at the Geelong Milk Test. Note the lump in the middle of her back.

When she was nine weeks old her mother suffered an injury to her teat, and would not allow Cecilia to feed. While the injury was immediately obvious, it took me a few days to realise that Hera was not letting her kid feed off either side. It took a very hungry Sausage a very short time to learn how to feed from the bottle. After a good few weeks of hand milking Hera from her injured teat, which included lots of stomping from her and swearing from me, the injury healed and Cecilia once again took up feeding from her mother.

When they won’t move over, just climb on top.

Cecilia (3rd from left) with Sienna’s triplets, who were born the same weekend.

 

Later on poor Cecilia was one of a few goats to be infected after one of the show team came home with a respiratory infection. She lost a lot of weight and would stand around panting. She was diagnosed with pneumonia, the vet stating that she was probably down to 25% lung capacity. Bigger, stronger goats have died from pneumonia, but Sausage battled on, recovering over a few weeks after a round of antibiotics and getting back to her rowdy self. I kept her on a bottle during this time to help her gain weight, and after a couple of months she has started to catch up to her bigger peers.

Even now, at over six months of age, my little Sausage is about 2/3 the size of other kids the same age. She will most likely never be shown and may never get to the size she should have been, but she is an exquisite little doe with lovely type and the pedigree to be a handy milker. She uses her size to her advantage, and never lets it disadvantage her. She is boisterous and healthy, and loves attention.

Hera and Cecilia at the feeder. Cecilia is the image of her mother.

After so many setbacks, my tiny kid has never lost her sense of humour or her zest for life. She will have every chance to be a useful dairy goat, and be managed sympathetically to reach her potential.

December Farm Update

I haven’t been very active in here lately, with my activism stuff taking on a life of its own and my other blog getting 600 hits in two days. I actually had to shut The Barefoot Cook down for a little while to make sure none of the ‘wrong’ people found their way here and started causing trouble.

Now that is out of the way, and I have a bit of time up my sleeve over the next few weeks, I’ve got a few ideas for Barefoot Cook posts that should appeal to those who come here for the cooking, farming and cute baby animals.

My first round of kids from the Epic Kidding Weekend are now 18 weeks old. First born (of triplets) Jimmy has recently gone to South Australia where he is to be a stud buck. Bottle baby Katie has won her first show championship. Sienna’s daughters have grown into big fat sassy monsters, with excellent dairy quality and their mother’s awesome rump and hind legs. Victoria’s boy Greg (aka Buckethead) is now a wether and is taller than all the others, with a temperament reminiscent of our beloved Thumper, who we had to have put down earlier in the year.

Rohan with Katie (Elcarim Gloria) at Ballarat Show.

Sienna’s triplets, Ruby, Jimmy and Rosanna. with Cecilia second from right.

Hera’s only surviving triplet, a tiny and exquisite doe named Cecilia, has had a bit of a tough time. She gained the nickname ‘Sausage’ at about a fortnight old, as despite being tiny she put on a lot of weight in a short time and her skin got so tight that she felt like an overstuffed sausage when you picked her up. She somehow hurt her back when she was about a month old, and hobbled around determinedly for a few weeks until with some days in the pen to rest and twice-daily massage from me she came good again. Then her mother suffered a laceration on her teat that took ages to to heal, during which time she would not let the kid feed. Sausage learned to take a bottle, and continued to do so until Hera’s udder finally healed.

Cecilia (aka Sausage) chilling at the Geelong Milk Test in October.

Then a couple of weeks ago Sausage developed a cough. She was seen panting, with a rattly chest and off her feed. The vet diagnosed pneumonia, prescribed antibiotics and said poor Sausage was probably down to about 25% lung function. She is on the mend now, although a long way from fully recovered, but at least she is taking milk again, which is a huge relief.

So we get to the rest of the kidding season. Maia had a big doe kid by Tazzy at the end of August, who we called Maria. She is a complete spoiled brat who gives any smaller kids hell just for sport, and doesn’t like people. She is only now starting to come up and sniff humans of her own accord. Maia has done quite well at shows this season, winning a first lactation Best Udder class (my first doe to win a Best Udder class against other does) and two Best Anglo Nubian sashes. She has chilled out a lot and become quite good to handle and take out, so hopefully her brat child will become a model citizen with maturity as well.

Maia and Maria.

Maia at Geelong Show.

Goatling Elaine had a big buck kid, the biggest we’ve had so far at 4.2kg. He is the last kid by my buck Zeus (also lost to urinary calculi earlier in the year), and while a doe kid would have been nice, a big flash buck is a pretty good outcome too. Elaine has a fabulous udder, with seamless fore attachment. Her kid has been named Ebeneezer Goode, and I’ve nicknamed him Yeezy because he has an ego like Kanye. He is a grandson of foundation animals Rianna, Meredith, Jupiter and Tazzy, with a double cross to Tazzy, and should cross well with my daughters of FitzWilliam to double up on some of my successful female lines.

Elaine with Ebeneezer.

Last of all was Ambika, who kidded for the third time on December 13th. She kept me up until 3am, when I helped her birth impossibly leggy twins. The first was a buck who looked more like a long-eared giraffe than a goat, and the second, much to my delight, was a black and tan doe with dark ears and hardly any white. The doe has been named Delilah, and the buck has gone as a pet to a local family to be hand-raised.

Ambika’s kids.

Ambika didn’t start cycling as early as the others, and once she did get into the swing of it she took four cycles to get in kid. Old Tazzy was just about sick of the sight of her, and the only reason she was bred on her fourth cycle was because Matt was standing right there and offered to go and get the buck. I’m glad he did, because I am very relieved to finally have a daughter from her, and it should give Ambi a bit of status in the herd to have a girl child who is half-sister to some of the higher-ranked does. Ambi is milking really well, giving well over 4 litres a day, which, along with bottle baby Jimmy leaving us, has drastically increased the amount of milk I bring in each day.

Kiddie pile-up.

Now I get a bit of a break from dealing with the sex lives of goats until autumn when I will have to decide which eight does get a chance to kid next year, which bucks they will go to and when I will schedule kidding.

Every year around September, when the poultry start showing signs of breeding behaviour, I think about getting an egg incubator. And every year, a few weeks later when half my birds are broody, I realise that would be a bad idea. I had broody geese, hens and ducks, four ducks wanted to sit at the same time. I am still not really properly set up for birds sitting on nests, and although my Rhode Island Red sat very determinedly, she wasn’t able to hatch any chicks. The geese sat on a few Muscovy eggs and managed not to hatch any.

But my Muscovy girls did a great job, with first-timer Millie hatching all 13 of her eggs in one day like an absolute pro. Martha had a few Pekin/Appleyard eggs, and we had to deal with an exploded rotten egg in the nest around day 25, but she hatched seven ducklings.

Millie with her brand-new ducklings.

All 20 ducklings are growing at a rate that hardly seems possible. They smash down about a kilogram of starter crumble for breakfast, and spend the day chasing flies and swimming in the clamshell pond. Martha took hers down the paddock yesterday, which is a bit of a worry, but she did this last year so hopefully she knows how to keep them safe.

Old Thoroughbreds Red and Stella have their shiny summer coats on and while Stella, at 20yo, is showing signs of her age with her grey patches and swaying back, Red still looks incredible for her 18 years.

Morning milking in Summer, with horses.

I finally got sick of the terribly useless rat traps and finding nests of rat and mouse babies in the drawers in the dairy, so I got a barn cat. Rufus had his first trip to the vet yesterday, where his maleness was confirmed and he got his microchip and first vaccinations. He seems completely happy living outside, and is currently spending his nights in a big cage on his big plush cat cave. Once he is a bit bigger he will be allowed to stay out at night to stalk rats.

Rufus.

That’s probably about enough for one post, except to add that my dear old Rosie dog is still with us, although rather wobbly on her back legs these days. She is 15yo now, and Leo Skinnydog, who was acquired to ‘replace’ Rosie so that Lister (who is still spry, if a little ‘forgetful’ at 14yo) wouldn’t get depressed when she died, is now four years old.

I’ve got plans for a post on the summer garden, how much cheese I can make with over 5lt of milk a day coming into the house, and a Barefoot Cookin’ Chrismas over the next little while, so stay tuned.