Baby Goats!

There hasn't been much activity for the past few months as the goats were no longer milking. But now that winter is coming to a close and all the goats are having their kids, things are starting to pick up. Our first nanny goat to give birth lost all 3 babies. We're not sure what happened as they were found after the fact, but since then there has been much more concern and attentiveness by the group. Over the last 3 weeks, all the pregnant goats have delivered. So we now have 13 baby goats running around.

Here are a couple pictures of the second goat to give birth. It was a regular festival-like atmosphere. She had 3 babies in about 30 minutes. Most of the kids seemed pretty fascinated by the whole process.

Here is the actual birth of the first goat.

The group has been spending a good amount of time with the animals, making sure that they are all ok, feeding well, and just generally having fun with the baby goats. We are hand milking the goat that lost her kids and plan to start weaning all the others in another week or two. We hear that it takes about 2 weeks and then we should be able to move them to a bottle. At approximately 4 weeks they start eating real food, at least that is about how long it took last time. We are still new to this goat ranching stuff, but with 1 year under out belts we are learning.

I'm not looking forward to starting to fully milk them again, but some have been really missing having the fresh, cold, goat milk to drink.