Friday, May 30, 2008

Oh, What a Morning

The shearer arrived at 8:30 this morning to take the wool off the sheep. After all was done and cleaned up, and one of the twins put down for a nap, I fed the goats and Flicker didn't come down.

Yesterday she didn't come down because she had her head stuck in the fence so after I extracted her I pulled all the goats into the front pasture for the day as we knew she was getting close to her date. After we had all the sheep caught for shearing last night we put the goats back in the woods again.

So Jeff checked on her today about 11 or so, and she had delivered a healthy baby girl. I went up and clamped the navel as it was long. Also gave the baby and mom some goat drench and mom some feed. Baby is up and wobbling around, nursing and getting cleaned off by mom. She is all black with a white top knot like her sire.


Saturday, May 3, 2008

Udder Up

While visiting with the goats this evening, I was pleased to notice that Flicker, the white/black doe, had developed her udder seemingly all of a sudden. She is normally the most skittish but was wanting to be friendly this evening so we'll be starting to check her more often now and be more observant for signs of labor. Her likely breeding date was around 1/05/2008 or 1/27/2008 so at this point we're assuming she was bred around January 5th and would be due around June 3, 2008. Three more weeks.

Her sire, a 2003 VA State Fair Champion, is of similar mixed coloring but the sire of her kids is all black with a white toupe on his head and the sire's dam is all black. We are hoping Flicker gives us a nice buckling to breed to the 2 white does. If by chance she has twins, a boy and girl combo would be ideal. The farm that she came from carried a lot of black does with brown cashmere.

The 2 white does are twins from a different farm and had a black brown dam with a black maternal line. Their sire is white and has a white sire and a black with light brown dam. The twins' dam, sire, sire's sire, and sire's dam all placed as various champions at ECA shows from 2002-2006. Milly and Molly were both bred to a 2007 VA State Fair Champion that is white with silver grey streaks.

Almost as good as a box of chocolates.