07/16/2026
Well that was unexpected 😲
We came home from an overnight camping trip and found 2 baby goats out in the field!
What the heck?? Everyone already had their babies for the season!
Daisy, my daughter's goat was protecting them and nursing them, so I figured, she must have come back into heat soon after losing her babies in March (one died and we bottle fed the other) , despite the fact that we have been milking her the whole time.
I had a weird feeling though, so the next day I did a closer scan of all the ladies and low- and- behold the ligaments were loose and the bag was full on a different momma we call Marmalade! Shucks! Daisy stole her babies!
That morning I also happened to get a text about triplet bum dorper lambs. Since Daisy seemed to be doing a pretty good job with the stolen kids, I decided to get the lambs and graft them onto Marmalade.
That was a great plan until later in the evening when I was watering the chickens and heard bleeting in the field...
Turns out Marmalade had actually had triples!!!
I found a little doeling stuck in the cattle squeeze chute!
After a bit of hair pulling (mine not the goats 😂) and a lot of shuffling, we ended up leaving 1 stolen goat kid with Daisy, giving 2 goat kids back to their momma Marmalade, and buying a bucket feeder to now hand rear the triplet lambs 🥴.
My hunch is that one of the older bucklings in the goat pen must have bred Marmalade back in February, even though he was still young enough to be nursing and she was still feeding her own previous set of babies at the time... We will be adjusting our castration schedule next year accordingly 😅
