Double twins
Feb. 12, 2012
Walking into the stable the past few weeks, my ears have been tuned to hear the tiny bleats of young goats, but to no avail. While it had been a long wait since we first saw signs of our dwarf nigerians does going into labor, we were rewarded on Saturday, Feb. 11. Of course, it was one of the few nights I was zoning out and in a hurry entering the stable.
I gave the piglets water and was going to leave the barn when I noticed a small goat in the pen with the ladies. Everything else was quite silent, a state amongst the nigerians that should have been cause for pause as they usually bleat to no end when someone enters the barn.
Upon investigation of their pen, I found three little goats wandering around, and a fourth one still covered in fluid in the hay. I quickly moved that one under the heat lamp and ran to get Emma and the kids. Of course my first guess was what I broadcast to Emma: Blackie had kidded and given us quadruplets. How wrong I was.
Upon closer inspection when we got back to the pen, there were four kids, but both Blackie and Moxie had given birth. That led to a more awkward situation, as we now couldn't tell whose babies were whose.
Emma came up with the brilliant idea to look at their eye color. Both our buck, Emmett, and Moxie have brown eyes, while Bubbles and Blackie both have blue eyes. If any kids had brown eyes, they were surely Moxie's. In fact, one of them does have brown eyes, and together with the fact that that one was still covered in birthing fluid we figured that Blackie must have gone a few hours before Moxie, and that the more recent babies were Moxies. So that's what we're going with now, meaning Moxie kidded almost the same configuration as last time, one large golden colored kid and a much smaller multi-colored kid.
Blackie's both look very similar to her last kid, Eveline and were quite healthy, walking around and nursing like it was no thing. Moxie's, however, are having more trouble. The bigger of the two seems to have joint issues in his back legs, while the littlest one was being ignored and has since come into the house as a bottle baby. You can only imagine the looks we got at Sam's cheer-leading competition today when we had to bring a bottle baby with us to the Augusta Civic Center.
So that's where we're at. Enjoy the photos, and as always, you can view more in the gallery Goat Kidding Redux at One Cardinal Photography.
