Washing day

Hamlet and Hal ... or ... maybe Holmes

Emily the Icelandic gave us two more beautiful rams yesterday.

Well, she didn't so much give them, as we (by which I mean the vet) had to go in and take them.

But, whatever.

They're still gorgeous.

Daddy is Johnny Blue Lincoln Longwool. I wasn't sure how this Lincoln-Icelandic cross would turn out. At the time of breeding, I was still thinking Charlotte was the only bred ewe I had and a couple more Lincoln crosses, kind of like Brianna, would be fun. Had I realized I had so many oopsies, I probably would not have encouraged this breeding.

But I'm glad I did.

Just look at them.

H for Hubble stands for trouble

Can I just say,  H is a challenging letter for baby names.

But we're managing.

The goat kids are every bit as adorable as people said they would be -- big, curious, endearing personalities all the way around.

Marthajones, escape artist extraordinaire, gave birth to Hubble, the buckling on the left here. Hubble shares both his namesake and his inquisitive nature with a big telescope. Hubble is all of four and a half weeks old and maybe 12 inches high, but can already jump over 3 foot walls, which he does on his regular explorations.

Ameliapond gave birth to and then rejected, Hippo and Harlow. Hippo, short for Hippocrates, is the buckling in the back and Harlow, named after the ethologist who studied orphaned monkeys, is the doeling on the right. It doesn't hurt that she's movie star beautiful. Hippo and Harlow have thrived as bottle babies. Surrogate mothers rock. Ameliapond couldn't care less.

Once we got on the H roll, I figured it was as good a way as any to track all of this year's babies, not just the Pygoras.

Next up were Hercules, Hobbes, and Hamish, all three little black rams. Hercules is the big one in the front. He's Ladybug's baby. Ladybug's the white Bluefaced Leicester in the middle, making him a Bluefaced Leicester cross. Can't wait to see how his fleece turns out. Hobbes is the guy sitting just behind Hercules, sort of snuggled up with Ladybug. His mom is Mary, the Black Welsh off to the left. And finally Hamish, is the smallest of the three and the son of Jill, whose chin he is tucked up under. These three were born within a day or so of each other and are all the mystery offspring of a big collective ram break last fall, the first week in October. No telling who the dads are, sadly. All three look like typical Black Welsh, well, except that Hercules is huge and polled, which Black Welsh rams are not.

A few days after the three rams were born, Harper arrived. Oh look, another black lamb. She's the daughter of Dolly. Also of unknown fatherage from the same ram escape.

Next came the two little bottle babies who were living in my bathroom until a week ago. They're the last of the unplanned Black Welsh babies. Unlike the previous four, these two were a complete surprise and I'm still not sure how they came about. They seemed too late to be from the big escape, but who knows. Their mother is Eve. She's the oldest of the original Black Welsh ewes -- 7 maybe? She had twins last year as well and it really knocked her down hard. I spent all summer and fall trying to get her back into condition and swore I'd never breed her again. I was very, very careful to keep her away from the rams. Um, right. 

Helenka is the one in the blue sweater. Hamza is the little boy on the right. Hamza probably would have been ok without the bottle, but Helenka and Eve both needed the babies to come inside. It was touch and go with Helenka for a good couple of weeks, but everybody's doing well now.

And for something different -- the next guy to arrive was Houston. He's a twofer, born a week ago. So called, because when I agreed to rescue his Mom last fall, (she's Dallas, yes, see that fiber) I was unaware that she was pregnant. Ugh.

Sigh. For the moment they're living very comfortably at the stables across the road. Lucky them.

And finally, at least for the moment, we have Hiccup, our very first Lincoln baby. Charlotte, for her own stubborn reasons I guess, decided to have her babies in the old barn Monday -- you know, the barn where the foxes live. We found her Monday night just as the sun was setting. There were two lambs.  One was already gone and I have to say, looked wrong. The surviving ram lamb, Hiccup, couldn't have been more than a few minutes old, with the amniotic sac still around his waist, covered in goop and a thick layer of dust and grit. He's still a bit shell shocked, I assume from the stressful birth, but Charlotte is a devoted mom and has plenty of milk. I saw him bounce around yesterday for the first time, so I'm hopeful. I've been waiting a long time for a Lincoln baby and will be disappointed if we end up losing both of these. 

 

And that's it for now.  

Life lessons or . . . Never wrestle a goat

Goats can be hard to contain.

Recently, as the long indoor barn season started to wind down, Cal and Eamon, our two bucks, decided they'd had enough of their stall and took to going over its walls every day.

For lack of a better solution, I took to stalling them in the pen under the stairs to the loft. They didn't really like that and before too long they'd worked out, like Woody, the pen's previous inhabitant, how to get out of the pen, up the stairs and into the loft itself. When Woody first tried this trick, I worried about leaving him up there, but he seemed pretty content and could go up and down at will, so I left him to it. Same thing with Eamon. The most recent addition to the pen, Cal, also figured out pretty quickly how to go up, but unlike Woody and Eamon, was unclear how to come down. I guess the stairs are steep and a little intimidating. Anyway, I noticed over the weekend that Cal was doing a lot of whining at mealtime (not unusual), from up in the loft (a bit unusual), but not actually coming down to eat (very unusual). The notion of a goat unable to traverse stairs seemed unthinkable, so I didn't think about it too much. Until Sunday night when I went out to do the last feeding and checking and tucking in and Cal was still up in the loft and as far as I could tell had not come down all weekend.

Sigh.

I couldn''t leave him there right?

So I went up to get him.

Lesson number 1:  Never wrestle a goat.

At this point, let me point out that Cal is a big, spectacular Pygora buck who weighs, at minimium, 120 pounds and sports a very impressive set of pointy horns at least 2 feet across tip to tip. They make pretty good handles, as long as you hold on tight. Cal also has the sweetest personality ever bestowed on a goat of either gender, so I thought nothing of going up to lead him down myself if need be. What are those horns for after all?

Lesson number 2: Never wrestle a goat on stairs.

We shouldn't have to learn this lesson, right? It should come for free.

I climbed the stairs that are wedged tightly into the corner of the first stall. Did I mention they're pretty steep? And there's no rail of any sort. It's a barn after all. At the bottom of the stairs is a tight little turn in front of the hard oak kickboards of the barn wall. At the top of the stairs was Cal, watching me with a worried little look on his beautiful goat face. I climbed high enough to talk to him, face to face, eye to eye, but even with my encouragement, he was adament. No stairs. I took a deep breathe to clear my late night sleepy brain and thought, "Ok, horns it is. Let's get this done."

I grabbed hold and gave a gentle pull.

No go.

I pulled again.

He put a tentative hoof down a step and stopped.

I set my feet firmly. Yes, I clearly remember thinking, "Get a good foothold," and pulled harder.

He put a second hoof down on the steps.

I must have encouraged him to continue with another tug. Such good horns.

He started to scrabble on the boards.

I stopped pulling.

He started falling.

I pulled up now, instead of down.

Yeah, that's right, at this point I'm still thinking "I can control this."

Ha, I can no more control the descent of 120 pounds of flailing goat from ten feet in the air, than I can fly.

Though fly we did, in a manner of speaking. Together, in perfect unison, the two of us, tumbling through the air, bouncing off the stairs, scrapping along the wall, and finally, landing together in one big heap, wedged up against the hard oak kickboards at the bottom.

Poor sweet Cal on the bottom, with dumb farmer lady on top (who weighs, by the way, considerably more than 120 pounds.) Cal seemed to have landed fairly normally, with all his body parts in the right configuration and orientation. Dumb farmer lady did not.

Cal seemed more confused about having the dumb farmer lady on top of him then anything else. And he definitely didn't understand the screaming.

Lesson number 3: Never go to the barn without your cell phone. 

Let me digress for a second to say, that in the few years that I have been doing this animal husbandry thing, novice that I am,  I have always been serious about keeping my phone with me. Not because I worry about the 120 pound goats really, but we have ponies as well and, well, with an 800 pound pony, you just never know right? So, I always keep my phone on me when I'm in the barn. Always.

Except Easter Sunday 2016.

As I lay scrunched up, screaming, at the bottom of the stairs, with my upper leg going one way and my lower leg going the other, I realized I did not have my phone.

Perfect. Half past ten at night, in the barn, with a busted knee and a poor silly goat struggling to get out from under me. Little faces peered out in concern all around me, but not a single one belonged to a being with opposable thumbs and a cell phone.

Dang my stupid animal-loving heart.

Lesson number 4: Never wrestle with a goat on stairs during lambing season. 

And I still had two bottle babies out in the back barn to feed.

Again, let me digress just to say, "Yippee, it's lambing season." So far, in addition to the three goat kids, we've had 6 little black lambs and our first ever white lamb (double yay - a purebred Lincoln). Unfortunately, babies 5 and 6 were rejected by their mom, so they've been in my bathroom for the past couple of weeks. I wasn't sure they were going to survive at first, but by the weekend they were doing so well that I had taken them out to the barn to live with the other lambs. Except for the constant trips to feed, it's just easier this way.

Feeding them was the last item on my to do list that night. When Cal and I took our trip down the stairs, the bottle babies were still waiting for their dinner.

Once I got my leg straightened out, it was clear I was going nowhere in a hurry. I couldn't stand on the leg at all, never mind walk. I briefly considered staying in the barn until somebody found me, but, realistically, that could have been all night, and like I said, I had those bottle babies to feed. I didn't think they'd survive the night without food.

It's a bit of a blur, but somehow, using a shovel as a crutch, I managed to get back to the house and wake-up the teenager and then somehow with the teenager's help, managed to get out to the back barn, to feed the babies.

I had thought I'd go to the ER, but by the time we were done, it was after midnight and I could tell by then that painful as the knee was, it wasn't broken and I was too exhausted to go through the ordeal of the ER just to have the doctor tell me I had sprained it, so I wrapped it up in ice and went to bed.

Monday afternoon, I did finally get to the doctor and what did he say?

After he got past all the scrapes and cuts on my face, (It's my knee that's a problem,  Doc.)

after he got past the black eye and need for a tetanus booster, (Truly, Doc, the knee?)

after he got over the sight of a woman with a polo wrap wound around her knee,

Doc, "What is that?"

Me, "It's a polo wrap."

Doc, "Huh?"

Me, "It's a horse thing. You wrap their legs with it. It's all we had."

Doc, "Oh. Well, you sprained it."

And, there it was.

A sprain.

Without an MRI, I'll never know exactly what damage I did. The doctor said only serious athletes really need to know exactly what kind of damage they have, so an MRI was out. I can't say I really disagree, although it did cross my mind that he probably has no idea how much physical labor farmers do and how shit-out-of-luck I will be if it doesn't heal well.

Still, it's been a couple of days now, and it's already somewhat better.

For one thing, I'm not screaming.

And I don't need a shovel to walk, though hobbling is a truly inefficient way to distribute hay.

One flake here...hobble hobble hobble; one flake here...hobble hobble hobble; one flack here...hobble hobble hobble.

Ahhhh, feeding goes on for hours.

And, there's a distinct wobble in the joint that was never there before.

Seems like a big price to pay for a lesson I should have had for free.

I mean, honestly, who wrestles goats on stairs?

Dumb. Really dumb.