Bottle feeding

Baby goat count is up to 20. Over all everything is going fairly well. Unfortunately, one of the mom's rejected/neglected a newborn from a triplet birth and we didn't discover it until it was too late. Hard to say what happened (stillbirth? mom too tired? birthed too close together?)

As you can see from the picture on the left, we now are bottle feeding two of the kids. Either the mother of the quads decided that she really only wanted 2 after all or the biggest two prevailed as the smallest of the quads (#18) appearantly was not getting fed. We found her very weak and because she's so small we questioned if she'd even make it. She was brought home and we ended up giving her one tube feed. Having nursed from mom she was not (and still isn't) very atuned to the bottle but is coming along. Hopefully, they'll be able to be transitioned to the farm in a week or two. They'll still need to be bottle fed for a while; just twice a day and not every few hours. They are quite the messy little things. Except for the first night when #18 cried for her momma all night, they haven't been that noisy.

We took both her and her bottle-feeding sister (#17) out to be with the herd for a while today. None of the moms wanted anything to do with them but they hung out with the other babies in the "nursery." While some of the babies now join their moms in the pastuer most will stay back with a babysitter (often the very protective green 17 mom.) Today they were all clustered at the trees near the pond... dubbed the "nursery." The rest of the babies are doing well and getting big... the first few who were born are now two and a half weeks old. They already have little nubbins on their heads where they'll grow horns. Oh, and they are hilarious to watch. Very much into playing 'king of the hill' and "lets butt heads." Our (human) kids just love them.