Relaxed Farming - our farm in your classroom

As you can see from the photos, some of our waiting is over and we have a gorgeous male pygmy goat kid and four baby rabbits! Unfortunately however, the day has not run quite as smoothly as we had hoped.
Our initial checking of Crumpet's hutch this morning found one baby rabbit in a rather scrappy nest, another one part way out of it and a third on the floor of the hutch feeling very cold. As the photos show, rabbits are born blind, hairless and also deaf. They are totally helpless and need 'mum' to keep them warm in a clean, dry nest and feed them with her milk. It is not advisable to disturb a rabbit and her babies when they are first born BUT faced with the sight of these three babies NOT all snuggled up in their nest, we felt we had to intervene. As carefully as possible we built up the nest as best we could and placed all three babies inside. We also removed any straw with blood on it and had a quick check for more babies (none were found). We did however see that one of the babies had a chewed foot!!! Female rabbits will eat their young if they feel threatened or if they detect that something may be wrong with the babies (31st January posting explains more). Unfortunately this rabbit was not meant to be because later Crumpet did indeed start to eat it!! We removed the remains but were then surprised to see two more babies, one of which was very dark!!! They weren't exactly 'in' the nest but they were close enough. For the rest of the day we left well alone and at the last check, all four were still alive and looking okay!!! Fingers crossed for continuing good news tomorrow.
And so to our pygmy goats: the first thing to say is that this gorgeous boy is NOT Onion's. 'She' is still hanging on to her babies. This chap belongs to Sage who went into labour mid-afternoon and after quite a hard (and painful) half hour, gave birth to him without any help needed from us. Unfortunately though, it became obvious that there was a second kid in there but for some reason, he/she was not putting in an appearance. Whilst Sage was very attentive to her son, licking him dry and allowing him to suckle, we could see she was still restless and 'wanting' to lie down and give birth. After an hour or so we had a quick chat with our vet on the phone and asked her if we perhaps needed to see if there was a second kid. The vet said a definite 'Yes'. David dutifully put on gloves and covered his hand with lubricant. He discovered there was indeed a second kid inside Sage and so he pulled it out - unfortunately though it was dead and had probably been dead for a while (hours not days). Why we don't know: these things happen!! The kid we have however seems very healthy and is certainly very handsome and hopefully he will have one of two playmates VERY soon (come on Onion)!!