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Saturday, 5th July 2014
Parsley has had her kids BUT one of them, the brown kid in the second photo is very weak and we are not sure she is going to make it...
Parsley had been showing signs of starting to give birth all day but it wasn't until this evening that these two appeared. We last checked her at 8pm and when we then went down again at 9pm, it was obvious that the births had just happened. The alpacas were in the barn as well and soooo excited (they love small animals) but we shooed them out to give the new arrivals peace and quiet.
As we have explained before, kids (and lambs) are usually up and about within a few minutes of being born and looking for mum's teat to get their first drink. It was quite clear within 10 minutes or so that there was something not quite right about the brown kid as she showed no sign of wanting any milk (even when we put the nipple directly in her mouth) and after a bit of wobbly walking, she simply lay down. We took some milk from Parsley and dripped some into her mouth and over the next couple of hours managed to get over 20ml in her. Kids need this early milk not so much for the 'food' part of it but for the colostrum in the milk which gives them protection against nasty bacteria and disease!
We are not massively hopeful this kid will survive. She is under a heat lamp, her belly contains some milk and Parsley has licked her dry but her breathing does not seem regular, she is very wobbly on her legs and when we last checked her tonight (around midnight), her lips were VERY cold. Cold lips can be a sign of heart problems. BUT we will give her another feed in the early hours of tomorrow morning and keep our fingers crossed. We checked with the vets if we should be doing anything else and they said we were doing all that we could do at this stage!!!!
The black kid has drunk loads and seems to be doing just fine (although she has very bent ears...)!!
To finish, we'd like to share with you our latest potato success. The photo shows all the potatoes from just one plant which weigh a fabulous 3.8kg!! Incredible!!!
Finally, Onion continues to improve and we have TWO of our three goose eggs pipping...
