Chicken Scraps Blog

Here is Bluebell at 7 months of age.  She is recovering from a sudden worm attack, after a very wet summer.  Otherwise she is in good health.  She is not hard to lead, but needs some finishing.  Blossom was walking up and down the fenceline behind me calling her while this video was taken. (Bluebell is sold to Katlin H.)

As any goat-keeper who has disbudded kids knows, disbudding is one of the most disagreeable parts of raising goats.  It is a traumatic experience for everyone involved.  But the benefits outweigh the trauma and pain, at least, in my opinion.  

Wednesday, May 28th, 2014 Around 5 PM, I went out to check on Mabel.  Her due date was May 31st, but her udder had been filling all day, and was now tight and hard.  Now her ligaments were significantly looser, almost "gone".  (For signs of early labor, see this blog post:  Another Day with the Goats Pt. 2: Early Signs of Labor... ) I quietly concluded that we would have kids on the ground in the next day or two, and hurried back into the house. That night, I checked on her at 10:00, 12:30, 2:00, and 3:30.  The last time, I decided to stay out there with her.  (I soon regretted this decision, since the goats were intensely interested by my curling up in a chair in the corner of the stall, and Freda, not being as preoccupied as Mabel,wanted to climb into the chair with me.)  But, believing in all my wisdom that Mabel was very close to kidding, I stuck to my decision, and stayed in the chair. Fast forward to 10:45, when the video begins....

This morning I finally got around to taking some more pictures of the kids.  Some of these are not the best...  It isn't the easiest thing in the world to try to get decent photos of three bouncy little goats, two of which are constantly climbing into one's lap.  They are all quite friendly, especially the doeling and Bramble (the red buckling).  They are growing like weeds, especially the bucklings.  You can see that they are already a good size for 11 days old.

Have you ever seen a kid with legs so bent that it is walking on it's knuckles?  This is usually a condition known as contracted tendons.  Bent legs in newborns are not uncommon, and are not such a very bad thing.  Usually, this condition caused either by improper nutrition (deficiency in vitamins A & D, or selenium) or by crowding in utero , sometimes by both.  This buckling is one of Nelly's triplets .  He and one of his sisters had badly bent legs, the other one also had slightly bent legs.  Good news:  the legs straightened out in just a few days (3 if I remember correctly).  In the video below, I show the kids legs and the treatment.  I hope this helps someone!

Mabel kidded today (May 29th) with triplets.   And, for the first time, I got to be present for the birth!  I am so glad to have finally gotten to be in on it.  And turns out, it was a good thing I was since the first kid was upside down.  It wasn't too much of a problem, but it would have been much harder on Mabel if I hadn't been there.  And we even got the whole thing on video.  (Which means that I will inflict it on my readers as part of the "Another Day with the Goats" series.)

I just got back from a week taking care of my grandparents place, with Mama and seven of my siblings.  We had a nice time, but it felt oh, so good to get back! And when we got back, I had fresh energy to accomplish some annual chores that had been put off for a while, namely, the annual baths and haircuts! This photo is actually a few years old... We didn't take any this year.