Way back last summer I noted in a post that there were going to be two very busy times on our farm. One was haying season (which we were in the middle of as I wrote the post), and the second is kidding season. Our season started this year on March 10, which was three weeks before I was expecting it to. Last fall I bought a couple of pregnant goats and was told they had been bred at the end of October. Add 5 months – the gestation period for a goat -- to that and you get the end of March. Well, so much for accurate information from goat sellers. One of the goats failed to show up for evening roll call after a day in the pasture, and was nowhere to be found, despite a search that lasted until after dark. Although we have not had problems with coyotes, they are around and you can hear them gabbling most nights, up along the ridges. A lone goat wandering in the woods would not stand much of a chance. Reluctantly, I had to write her off.
The next morning when I went out for morning chores, there Clara was, standing in the barnyard looking anxious. The day before she had been very pregnant, and now she clearly wasn’t, but alas, she was alone. Another search ensued, this time for the kid or kids, but was as much a failure as the one the night before. The first batter of the season strikes out! After that fiasco I kept a closer eye on the other doe I got with her, and sure enough, within a day or two she started acting strange, so I put her in one of our kidding stalls. Within a day she had given birth to two kids: a doeling and a buckling. She was a very attentive mother, but soon the kids were looking as if something was wrong. They were not thriving (‘Thrive’ is a very useful agricultural verb that covers a multitude of vague and unspecified ailments, as in ‘that little buckling just ain’t thriving the way he ought.’) In the middle of the night, Max the dog (another story there) began barking incessantly, enough to wake me up and force me outside. I decided to visit the new babies in the barn since I was already out and enjoying the stars. What I saw was not a happy sight. I picked the doeling up and she was cold. A quick thermometer check confirmed she was way below optimum temperature. Another quick internet search provided some suggestions, so starting at 1 am we began giving the little girl hot baths in the sink to raise her body temperature. We would soak her, then blow her dry, then soak her again. Son Zach had drunk all the Gatorade, so I found a recipe for electrolytes that we had the ingredients for, and we began to force that down her. In between, she fell asleep on Kathleen, who was falling asleep herself.
Just about the time the doeling (now named Daisy) was starting to respond to our emergency efforts, I went out to check on her brother, who was now in the same state. At least we now knew what to do. By dawn we had two little babies who were improving and could be put back with their mother, who was herself frantic at losing her kids. A thorough check of her revealed a defective udder which was not producing milk Everything added up: an attentive mother, who let her kids nurse from her even when nothing was there; no milk from the mama; apparently healthy kids who were effectively starving to death. In farming it’s nice to be able to learn something without having death result.
Daisy is now the biggest of the kids in our bursting kid pen. Duke, her brother, has gone off to be the future buck at another farm in the county. Ciara, the mother, will not be again; I never made up the lost night’s sleep, but who cares.