Animals

Baby the goat had her babies today!

Male: 9 lbs
Male: 8.5 lbs

They are cleaned and separated from her, and walking around and bleating. :) I’ll give her another 40 minutes or so before I go out and milk her for the first time, and feed the boys.

Update!

Cream has twin doe’s Feb 27th around noon. Birth was easy and the kids cleaned up very well. They are learning to walk and I’ll get them weighed and fed in a couple of hours.

This brings the total up to 6 babies so far for 2007!

Cream went into labor today while I was at the grocery store, somewhere between 11 and noon. I got back around a quarter after noon, and 3 kids had been born! While I dried them, sexed them, weighed them, and swabbed their belly buttons with iodine, she had a fourth!

Andrew tells me it’s really unusual for a dairy goat to have quadruplets, but Cream has done it for the second year in a row!

Here are the weights, and then the pictures.

Doe: 6 lb 12 oz
Buck: 8 lb 8 oz
Buck: 6 lb 10 oz
Buck: 10 lb 10 oz(!)

I weighed that second buck again, and got the same weight. He’s a little chunk!

They have all taken at least some colostrum. Three of them really latched on and got quite a bit, but one of them hasn’t quite figured it out yet, and only could manage a couple sips. The bottle was cooling down, so I will feed them some more during the evening chores.

They are under a heat lamp within sight of Cream, and she is staring at them and talking to them. She has not passed the afterbirth yet, but I went ahead and milked her. I got 1 lb 8 oz of colostrum in the first milking.

Edit to add: Cream has passed the afterbirth. I’ve fed the kids again, and they almost finished the entire bottle! The 10lb buck was the last one born and seems a little slower to catch on than the others. They have already been sucking my fingers like crazy, but he’s not too interested yet. He got a few more swallows and that’s it.

For more pics go to the gallery.