Our perpetually pregnant goat is….pregnant no more. Last night she delivered – apparently without difficulty – a set of twins. Is there anything cuter than a newborn lamb or kid? If there is, I don’t know what.
We have been on kid watch for weeks now with the doe giving me several “false” signs of early labor. More than once she exhibited with mucus dribbling out of her vulva and I thought “here we go”, only to have it dry up and for life to go on as usual. Meanwhile the goat has grown steadily bigger and her udder became impossibly huge. By the end the poor thing was practically waddling due to the effort of moving her back legs around the basketball between them. Here she was a few days ago:
And this was her udder last night:
As you can see above, she had mucus again last night but like the boy who cried wolf, I was less inclined to think of that as a sign of imminent delivery. A better sign to look for in goats is softening of the tail ligaments. For several weeks I have been feeling daily for signs that the ligaments were softening in preparation for birth. Last night I thought they did feel a little mushier than before but they were definitely still palpatable.
But as the night wore on they apparently softened altogether and by this morning I was greeted by this:
Mom is Savannah and Dad is a Boer. The kids have the coloration of Boers though interestingly they are both dark brown while Dad is light brown. Mom is still recovering from birth so I didn’t want to stress her further by trying to pick the kids up and examine them but after getting a quick glimpse at each rear end I am cautiously hopeful that they are both bucklings.
Self-Sufficiency and Assorted Hijinks 