Bucked Over

Guess what Edina produced today?

Now, Eddie, Patsy, I want you to attend to the weather this week. Not the wether -- there are going to be three more of those here soon enough. You know, the stuff coming out of the sky and sideways on the wind that you have been screaming at me about?


What did Noah bring onto the ark?

Was it all the animals after their kinds, in large male-only herds?

Work it out, ladies.

Photo Good Phriday: Eoster Greetings

This weekend we will search the farm for hidden nests of eggs, and the leporaria for more nests of new rabbits.

We will eat flesh and candy and drink wine.

There will be fire.

There will likely be some new additions to our herds and flocks.

The pear tree will burst into flower.

Nothing to see here. No Goddess arising. Move along, return to your churches, have a cracker, and feel sorry for all the sins you've done while all around you Nature is flowering, fucking, hatching, kindling, kidding and generally bursting forth without apologies, restraint, or any sense of decency. Remind yourself relentlessly that it's a Very Solemn Father and Son thing. No Girls Allowed.

I feel compassion around now for browbeaten "Christians" who work so hard to avoid being Pagan that they forbid themselves to be Human.

But She is there for you, anyway.

Sneaky Kidder

My best guess last fall about the goatgirls' due date was today. I suggested to PC last week that he schedule the monthly AMRG training for the farm, so I could possibly participate in training while on birthwatch.

Yesterday I put the girls in the birthing stall and checked for signs of imminent kidding. Edina lost her mucus plug (I know, lovely image, eh?), but that can happen days or a week before labor starts. I felt their tailheads and pelvic tendons; Patsy's was looser. First in line.

Last night Cole and I slept on a cot in the barn, with barn kitty Smeagol. Other than the discovery that ducks never sleep, and a closer-than-normal experience of Son of Domingo's 0330 daily crow, it was a quiet night.

This morning it was clear that Patsy was imminent. Her udder was "strutted" -- not just bagged up, but shiny, tight, and with her teats pointing outwards.

Patsy, left -- strutted. Edina, right -- not yet strutted.

All day long I hung around the barn while teammates and their human kids came and went, sure that earnest labor was going to start any minute. Zilch. No hard contractions, water hadn't broken.

Around six, we zipped out to our favorite local little rib joint, just up the road, because clearly nothing was going to happen in the next few hours.

One hour later I came home to a very smug Patsy. Despite the fact that she had spent the day bleating and complaining whenever I left her stall, she vanted to be alone.


The yellowish-tannish-white kid is a buck. The pure white one is, finally, a little doe. Both have had a nice drink of colostrum and are doing well. She's accepted them both and, contrary to a common pattern, seems to be favoring the doeling a bit. I was particularly anxious to monitor Patsy's kidding because last year, her first kids, she would have rejected her second-born if not forced. No problems this year.

Cleaned up the placentas, tied off the kids' umbilicals and dipped 'em in iodine, made sure everybody was dry, gave Mom a bucket of grain, made some introductions


And put the little family to bed.

Now the Edina vigil begins.

Photo Phriday: Another Fine Pickle

Secundus is an idiot.

This is how I found him this afternoon, at least 50' from the shed where this panel had been propped up overnight during renovations.

There was nothing on the other side of it that he needed to get at.

As I was packing up my tools this evening, I caught his brother trying the same trick.

Twitterpated

What? Walt Disney got the biology of critters wrong? Say it ain't so!

Spring is not the season of twitterpated. At least it isn't around here.

As the plant world and the invertebrates* die or tuck themselves in for the year in the forest and farm, the local tetrapods are getting busy. Late fall is the time for making babies. When I say you can smell the sex on the air, I'm not being hyperbolic or metaphorical. I'm hoping the wind doesn't shift from the goat pasture towards the house.

Rosie is in season, which makes her pushier, snarkier, cuddlier, and generally underfoot. She harasses the eunuchs and has her way with them. Neither Moe nor Cole got the memo about their testes, so they are happy to oblige. It's hazardous to turn a corner suddenly around here -- always a little disconcerting to walk in on a couple of dogs in flagrante delicto.

I've had bitches who became uncharacteristically stupid or wacky when they came into season, and were unreliable in their work. Pip and Rosie just add energy and intensity to their already driven performances. Rose has done a bang-up job on her last two trails; her estrus is a good time to throw extra distractions and new challenges her way. Canine sublimation?

Next estrus is put up or shut up time; we'll be deciding soon whether she will be a mother.

The deer rut means that I see more of them, as caution takes a back seat to libido. Six paraded through the south pasture at dusk; I think it was five does and a buck, but there may have been two bucks. Their rubs are particularly shreddy this year.

Our new rabbit herd got off to a slow start. The first doe that my original buck bred, back in September, did not "take," though she seemed to have. It's likely that his swimmers' soup was overcooked by the summer heat. The second doe had a litter of six, around the same time that the buck sadly succumbed to (what turned out to be) a urinary blockage. I got a new unrelated young buck from a different breeder, and have just integrated him and a new doe in the colony. Within two minutes of being released, New Guy had scent marked ten places in the stall, bred one of the younger does, and gotten his ass kicked by the dominant doe. With five does in the colony, I expect an early winter population explosion.

Gollum the barn cat, fearsome slayer of mice, voles, rats and chipmunks, has taken to sleeping amongst the rabbits. No shit. He ignores the babies, which are hardly larger than a large rat, and I've spotted him nuzzling with more than one of the does. Gollum said buh-bye to his little friends at a tender age, so I don't think he's joined in any Samhain barncat orgies, but he did get into a fight recently, which for a cat is much the same thing. His face wounds healed up fine, and he kept claiming that I shoulda seen the other guy. His sister does not corroborate his account, however.


It's not just dogs who can† discriminate between "ours" and "other" without explicit instruction and control their predatory impulses accordingly.

Meanwhile, I have to remind myself that our baby chicks and turkey poults were also freaking adorable, and grew up to be delicious.

Speaking of bucks, and urine.


Jefferson the he-goat is visiting from Rachel and Stan's farm.

He's got a lovely calm temperament. Pity about his personal habits. I do everything I can not to touch him. There's burdock in his beard and on his rump, and he's just going to have to cope, because there is no way I'm combing him out. Also, I know just how far backwards he can reach; he could groom that burdock out if it was a priority for him.

His job here is to settle Patsy and Edina. Lovely term that. Knock them up.** We'll know in a couple of weeks whether he's succeeded.

He courts the ladies by applying Capraxxe body spray, waggling his tongue, blubbering, flaunting his flehmen, and -- well, now I know what inspired the odd-looking phalli on all those vases depicting Bacchanals.



The wethers swear that he's been hanging around the playground wearing a trenchcoat and talking about a lost puppy. I'm monitoring the situation.

Jefferson gave me some crap about the gate his third morning here. Cole, who is deathly afraid of the electric fence around the goat pasture and never willingly approaches it, came flying off the back porch, through the gate, and straight at the he-goat's nose. Cole doesn't think much of visiting he-goat, and he interpreted a little stroppiness as a genuine threat. And now I know what he does when he thinks I'm threatened.

Good to know.

Finally, a weirdly untimely ray of hope in our disappointing heritage turkey breeding season.

Three or four weeks ago I noticed that the Bourbon red hen who had not succeeded with a clutch this year was not coming in to roost or running with the flock. But I would sometimes spot her for a few minutes in the morning around the feed trough before she would dematerialize.

Far too late in the year to be setting a nest, but the signs were unmistakable.


I finally found her Tuesday morning, close to the barn and setting a dozen eggs. She'd already pushed out three eggs -- a good sign, actually, indicating that she was paying attention to their viability and keeping the live eggs protected -- and this nest and eggs were clean, unlike her previous nests.

It is now far too cold and snotty for her to set outside, and I lost two shrubbery-setting hens this year to a raccoon, so in she came, whether she wanted to or not. The answer was Not. A twelve-pound bird can be surprisingly strong when she Does Not Want, but in she came with her eggs to a private stall. I candled them Thursday, and found squirming embryos in seven of them. Fingers crossed. It's a ridiculous time to raise turkeys, but I cannot say no to her.


The broody hens work so hard. It breaks my heart when things don't go well for them. Such devotion demands fulfillment. The only thing harder than brooding a clutch is the hero's journey of hatching out of an egg. It's hatch or die, and if anyone takes pity and helps the little warrior, it's likely to kill or cripple him. We mammals know nothing of birth struggle.

Spring may be the time of vegetative abundance and enthusiasm, but as the death and dormancy of Winter looms, the animals flaunt their eternal optimism. Snow all you want, we'll make more.

******************

* Including the hornets, wasps and bees that make life exciting and possibly brief, and the $#@^$ stink bugs that make it annoying.

** For the dairy-animal uninformed: A goat (or cow) can produce milk for about a year after giving birth (kidding or calving), provided she is nursing offspring and/or milked regularly. To continue to get milk, the farmer must breed her every year. The onset or resumption of lactation is called freshening. She'll lactate just fine while pregnant. It's the usual practice to dry her off a couple of months before she's due again. So I'll stop milking the girls, and wean their 2010 kids, in February in preparation for April kidding.

None of this applies to the "Happy California Cows" of agribusiness fairy tales who calve and freshen, then receive hormone injections to keep them continuously lactating until their udders break down and they become hamburger. (The cows. Come to think, the udders, too, both metaphorically and probably literally.)

† Can. Can. Not necessarily will. And an absence of formal, or even conscious, training does not equate to a guidance vacuum or magical thinking.

Tightwad's Goat Hay Rack

How cheap am I?

Apparently, cheap enough, and mouthy enough about it, that there is now a snarky betting pool based on my skinflint evangelism.

A colleague once credited me with imbuing her with the ethic "Never spend more than a buck for a dog toy." Which is not exactly accurate. We've got a couple of nineteen-year-old Kong toys rolling around here. Something that durable and dog-popular is well worth six or ten bucks.

And the farm itself fulfills all the in jokes among stockdog folk about quarter-million-dollar dog toys.

But seriously, I'm going to spend north of $20 for one of these --



When the world is already littered with these


for the sum of $0?

And when it's played, I can toss it in the recycling bin having already accomplished the "re-use" portion of the three R's.

We do a lot of re-using around the farm. The junk and discards of previous owners have outlived their tenancies. Half of getting any repair or improvement done around here is remembering where I saw that perfect-sized board or strange metal bracket or honk of chain.

The hens pay their rent in a rusty but still serviceable 8-hole galvanized nest box that I found behind the pole barn when we moved in. Savings over $100 right there. The sheet metal from the defunct above-ground pool is being portioned off as roofing for animal housing, while the pool cover makes a dandy woodpile tarp and the steel side braces are the perfect size for meat bird feed troughs when outfitted with end caps/legs made from the sound bits of roofing that we cut off with the rotted parts from the barn last fall.

One leftover that I've found rather unsatisfactory is the hay rack in the goats' barn stall. It was designed for horses, and allows the persnickety goats to waste a lot of hay. And it's not really big enough for our current caprine population of six.

Anyway, the herd is summering in the northeast pasture, well away from the barn. They have a portion of the woodshed for shelter, and I've commandeered another section as an open-air milking shed, adding some wire shelves (one recycled, one liberated from a failed video store's dumpster) and a sturdy closed cupboard, bought for about six bucks at the coolest store ever.

The milking stand, which appears quite ancient, served the last owners as the step-in platform for the defunct above-ground pool. Before it was that, it was ... a milking stand. I had to improvise a new headstall for it, but there was plenty of scrap plywood from our barn roof renovations.

The goats now needed a hayrack for their portion of the shed.

So I looked online for plans for a home-made hay rack, and didn't find anything that appealed. Most of the plans seemed excessively fussy. I really don't expect the hay rack to function, say, 5,000 feet below the ocean surface. Dovetailed joints are nice in a dresser drawer, but really I was just hoping it would be sturdy, resist goat abuse, and minimize gratuitous hay waste. (Goats like to cherry-pick their roughage, and are afraid that once the hay touches the ground, it is rendered inedible.)

So I went out and wandered around the woodshed, pole barn, and both levels of the real barn. Also behind the pole barn and in the basement. Looking for materials that might say "hayrack" to me.

Came up with a small section of semi-rigid welded-wire cattle panel left over from construction of the foster kennel last year. A selection of scrap 2x4. And some paneling scraps apparently left over from the construction of the pole barn itself.

Actually, there was a lot of other junk to choose from, but this is the stuff that made the final cut.

Here's the finished rack, installed in the woodshed:



Note that the horizontal wire spacing is much closer on the edge of the panel that I have placed downward in the finished rack. This is perfect for hay conservation. Hog panel, with its small square openings, would also have worked very well for the face of the rack.

The cut piece of panel had 8" lengths of the horizontal cross-wires on both ends. This was perfect for my plan to over-engineer the beast for enhanced goat-resistance. I started by taking two lengths of 2x4 that were a little longer than the cattle panel was high. I lined up each 2x4 with the jabby ends, marked where each wire lined up, and drilled what, eleven holes along the midline of each 2x4, corresponding to each wire end.

Then I jammed and whacked and cajoled each 2x4 onto the cattle panel.

I leaned the panel with its stabilizing wooden ends against the wall of the barn until the angle looked about right to me. Measured the height and the depth at the top end.

Cut the appropriately-sized rectangle out of the soundest part of the scrap paneling, then cut it into two triangles, corner to corner.

Marked the location of each pokey horizontal wire on the hypotenuse of each triangular panel, and drilled holes. Jammed and whacked and cajoled each end panel onto the cattle panel. I also reinforced the longer leg of one triangle with a length of scrap because the panel was chipping there.

Then I hammered the the living crap out of the cross wires so they flattened out to hold the end panels and the structural 2x4's onto the cattle panel


Trimmed the squared-off bottom ends of the 2x4's to follow the angle of the end panels.

Trimmed two 2x4's and screwed them on to the hypotenuse 2x4's as structural components of the top, the short leg of the right triangle.

Grabbed two more scrap ends of 2x4 and carted the whole assembly over to the woodshed.

Eyeballed how high I wanted the rack. Goats like to eat "up," and they will squander more hay if the rack is low, so I mounted it pretty high. (Note: Don't do this if you have goats or sheep with horns. That's a good way to hang an animal and kill it. In fact, if your stock has horns, don't use a rack design that has horizontal elements at all -- use vertical slats positioned such that your shortest horned animal could stand flat-footed with its head caught in the rack. And buy a disbudding tool, seriously.) I screwed one of the 2x4's onto the wall where I wanted the bottom of the rack, leveled it, and added more screws. This made it possible to mount the rather heavy rack without help -- just rested the bottom of the wire on the 2x4 and propped a shepherd's crook to hold the rack against the wall.

Screwed the rack on with deck brackets at the top, angled 3" screws at the bottom.

I added the second piece of scrap about 8" below the bottom of the feeder, so the kids would have something solid to brace on when they stand up to feed.




Purchased parts for this project -- approximately 20 screws and two right-angle brackets. Maybe $1.00 worth of hardware. It was all stuff I had in the workshop already, but not recycled or repurposed.

Construction time about 90 minutes. Took me longer to take the pictures, download them, and write this.

Retail cost of a commercially-made large, abuse-resistant, wall-mounted hay rack designed to prevent petulant goats from indulging in hay tantrums?

I dunno. I could find no such animal for sale.

Goat Day 2010

By popular demand, photos of Goat Day 2010



If you have trouble viewing the slideshow, you can check the Picasa album here

Sangria was consumed, mostly by the hostess, and a couple of last year's McNuggets returned from freezer camp for their charcoal debut. There was much pie.

Small goats provided entertainment.

And young Cole began his progression from poultry-herding hound to real stockdog.

He has so far hung back from the goats, because (unwitnessed, but easily surmised) encounters with their electric fence has convinced him that all goats come with a painful force-field.

So we put him in the x-pen with the kids, and when we let the kids out to romp some more, we put Rosie and Sophia in the house so they wouldn't bogart the goatiness.

Cole decided that since the goatboys had been in the x-pen for a while, they were supposed to stay there. So he started penning them -- with very appropriate gentleness.

We closed the pen, let the kids wander a little further, and he started (spontaneously) to gather them to me. Clearly was concerned about keeping them grouped, and stopped to think when they split. (Goats flock poorly; sheep are much better for training dogs. But goats is what I gots.)

I got two (self-directed) pens, two gathers, a snappy down when he got too excited, and a look-back when he lost one kid on the second gather. And then we stopped for the day. Asking for anything more would be unconscionably greedy, and court disaster.

Surprise!

Yesterday I finished cleaning and bedding a kidding stall in the barn. Due date estimated this Saturday at the earliest. I've had my kidding kit all made up in modular units and stored in a bucket for a week. Been reading my books and this website. Ready to play goat midwife.

Checked Patsy and Edina last night, and while their pinbone ligaments were getting soft on palpation, they had not "disappeared" yet.

This afternoon, I went out to get some firewood and was greeted by Edina with this:

Obviously my obstetrical assistance was not required. I tied, cut, and Betadine-swabbed their umbilicals, so that made me feel all useful. And Edina got a glop of calcium paste, which she did not appreciate.

Both healthy, vigorous kids who found their own ways to a teat. Alas, they are bucks.

We will wether them and offer them as pets/pack/cart goats when they are weaned. Or perhaps keep them around until they are more mature, to help with pasture maintenance. They'll be handled a lot --

And be dog-broke, after a fashion --

Moe is by far the most engaged of the dogs. He got that very serious attitude when his baby brothers and sisters were born, too -- protective and solicitous. Sophia was curious, then went away satisfied and rather miffed that I wouldn't let her eat the placenta while it was still mostly in Edina. Pip is unconcerned, Rosie a bit too keen, and Cole still suspicious that all goats have secret electric fences around them.

Patsy could blow any time now; she's enormous and her ligaments are definitely getting soft. Let's hope she got the memo about having girls.

Question for the goat gurus: The larger of the boys has a wattle in the wrong place. It is just below the corner of his ear. The other wattle is in the usual place. Do I need to do anything about this?

Update: Patsy had twin bucklings the next day -- both pure white.

Sigh.

Sunday, May 30 is our Goat Day party at Brandywine Farm. If you haven't received an invite and want to come, drop me a line. Flame, sangria, and play with the goatniks.

Photo Phriday: Hot Date

Patsy and Edina are off on what, in the goat world, is considered a double date.

They don't mind the young fellow they went off to meet, but the inlaws are beastly.

I'm glad they still fit in the car, which saved me the trouble of building a stock box onto my trailer. I'm even gladder that neither decided to profane the (tarp covered) car.

Foster dog Barry White helped me load them.

Photo Phriday: Pasture

Goat tractor -- from concept to full execution in like two weeks!

Thanks, Sarah!


And I did tell you that the Princesses were well-schooled in the ballet, did I not?

BTW, they've earned the non-fairy-princess names of Patsy and Edina.

The 100 McNuggets, the four Cartmans, and the replacement layers have moved out of the barn and onto "range." AKA, the very legume-heavy patch of pasture just south of the barn.


The fence is electro-net. Its main purpose is not to keep the birds in, but to keep everyone who thinks they taste like chicken out. Later, if the birds figure out about going home to roost in the evening, I'll open it up during the day and only charge it and close it up at night. The lump on the right is an over-engineered range shelter/chicken tractor, which I haven't actually used yet. Their main shelter is the easily-moved 10x10 picnic canopy. Since taking the picture, I've dropped it as low as it can go.


I thought the birds would be frightened by the move into the big wide open, but not a bit! They immediately checked out their perimeter.


And went to work emulating wild jungle fowl. They eat a lot of grass and clover. Feed consumption has been just about halved in the few days they've been out.

At night they make a chicken carpet.


They don't seem to get the concept of getting under cover at night, and just plop down in a mass at some random spot. We've moved the canopy to them, which worked, but is kind of stupid. The weather has been fine, the electro-net is good ground security, but we worry about owls.

Last night we heard a shrieking and carrying-on outside, probably about three in the morning. The dogs went straight to DEFCON 1. I jumped up and ran to the chicken pen -- the three English shepherds all charged down into the buttcrack. (Spike and Sophia sleep in crates at night, so they weren't there for the charge out the door, and I didn't go back up to let them out.)

The chooks were fine -- miffed at me for waking them up. The shrieking was raccoons down by our creek. Pip and Rosie stayed down there barking at them -- at getting shrieked at -- for some time. Moe came up and patrolled around the duck house, then the barnyard, then waited with me on the deck for the girls to come up.

I didn't call them in for some time, since it was obvious they had the coons treed, and I figure a thorough hazing would get our point across. We have a lot of foxes on the farm, but I've never seen raccoon sign. Our little spring-fed creek is too small for fish or crayfish, so there isn't a lot to draw them out of the valley lower down. They may be here going after turkey eggs, since we have a lot of wild turkeys, and they'll be laying now.

If they've come for our chickens, they are in for a shock.

Spoke too soon

Correction.

They are not goats.

They are pretty, pretty princesses who have fallen under the spell of an evil enchantress, and cursed to caprine form.

Things I learned today about goats fairy princesses:

They are made of delicate spun sugar, and will surely melt if touched by vulgar raindrops.

Their tender hoovesies silken slippers are defiled if they touch dirt, shavings, straw, or a thick bedding of fresh wood chips. Fortunately, all fairy princesses are well-schooled in the ballet, so dancing along on the edges of landscape timbers, tops of doghouses, etc. is no problem.

Similarly, princesses can feel a dead mouse the cat buried single pea under a ten inch layer of soft clean shavings, so it is much more satisfactory to sleep in a miserable curled ball on the bare concrete in front of the stall door.

One does not touch a princess without permission. Permission is not forthcoming. One also does not turn one's back on a princess and walk away without being given leave. The princess will bleat most plaintively and stamp her foot if one is so indecorous to attempt this.

Things goats princesses do not eat:

Grass
Dandelions
Ground ivy
Anything growing close to the nasty dirty ground
Anything that has fallen, been dropped, or pulled down onto the nasty dirty ground
Anything that has been stomped with delicate hoovesies ballet slippers
Wholesome fresh goat feed coated in molasses
Fritos

Things goats princesses do eat:

Fresh wood chips
Sawdust, as long as it is adhering to the side of the stall and not on the nasty dirty ground
Hay that I thought was only suitable as bedding hay, but what do I know
Mineral block
Russian olive (maybe)
Raspberry bramble
Multiflora rose

Given these last two items, I can tolerate everything else about them.

Could they come along on SAR tasks, munching a swath ahead of us?