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Monday, 28th April 2014
No, this is NOT Onion with her kids... this is a picture from! We have been reminiscing about what a fab mum she was, as she took on two kids that were not her own last spring when their mum developed mastitis and so had no milk. Onion ended up feeding Pepper (her own) plus Garlic (pictured here on her back) and Garlic's sister Mustard!! She was an absolute star!!
Anyway, back to today and the visit from the vet. The good news is that everything about Onion was completely normal and fine, all except the fact she has not had her kids, that is. The vet detected one and possibly two kids inside her by scanning and finding the hearts. She picked up one definite heart beat racing along at 148 beats to the minute (normal) and Onion's own heart rate was 70 beats per minute (also normal). She agreed she was looking fine, she felt her udder, listened to her chest and even did a short internal examination which found her starting to 'open up' ready for giving birth!!
The big question though, is why has she NOT yet given birth, and of course the whole query over the dates makes that a very hard question to answer!! IF the date of her mating is correct then Onion is now very overdue but because there is no logical reason why she has not produced, we are thinking maybe the date is NOT correct. The problem we have is that the drug mentioned on 26th that will help her give birth should not really be given unless we know for definite she is overdue but NOT to give it to her might mean the kids die if in fact they ARE ready to come out and we don't help them... We all agreed to give her one more day... (Oh, and no news from Thyme either...)
Another choice today was to decide if we should help three turkey chicks out of their eggs. Sometimes chicks make a small break in the shell but get no further. We usually DO help if we feel enough time has passed (many hours) and the chick has made no more progress. We are happy to report that after carefully breaking away the shells and then putting the chicks back in the incubator to dry out (second picture); two of the three seem to be okay and are now with their brothers and sisters in the aviary. That makes fifteen chicks in total: we are very pleased!!
