Cary & Mel

Meet Cary & Mel, twin bucks, and their nanny Dot. Get it “Cary-Mel,” like caramel, like their primary coloring. They arrived about two weeks ago, but Dot has kept them indoors and fairly secluded until the past couple of days. She is introducing them to the rest of the herd slowly and carefully as some of the 1-year-old withers want to be a bit more playful than they can handle right now. Mel is the smaller of the two, with the white blaze on his forehead.

It is probably better that she has kept them inside as our spring weather is more winter like. Yesterday we got about 5″ of new snow and today what hadn’t melted was nicely frozen and crunchy. These guys’ little legs would have had a workout in that much snow.

Twin Doelings

Onion, the alpha doe in our herd, had twin doelings Tuesday, March 6.

What a difference a week or two makes. Two weeks ago we had lost a dozen kids, all either stillborn or too premature to survive and thrive. There didn’t seem to be anything physically wrong with the kids, other than they lacked some developmental markers. We had a warm snap and then the temperatures dipped and we got another week of snow. All the first-time nannies kidded early. Maybe the weather was just a coincidence. Maybe. It had been a sad kidding season for our young goat herders.

But, life marches on and we have to live in the here and now. Over the past week we have welcomed six healthy little kids out in the pasture. Five are in the care of their nanny and one is bottle-fed; two little bucks and three doelings.