There be kids!

Kidding season is well underway, and the first lambs have arrived. 

Thankfully the weather has been very cooperative, with nice warm sunny days - except for this weekend! Practically torrential downpour and a strong wind. The goats hide in their shed, but the sheep remain outside. I worry about the lambs getting wet and getting chilled. But then I have to remind myself, once they go to pasture there isn't much shelter up there either, so they just have to tough it out. 

Fresh babies out in the pasture!

Llama comes to supervise

mom eating the placenta. Not all goats do this but some do.

getting to know her kids

Its hard work being a growing kid!

Kids hanging out in the corral. Where the sheep seem to take their lambs with them wherever they go, the goats tend to leave their kids in the corral. I love the two running in the background!

The bare dirt in the corral is warm and a nice spot to lie in the sun.

Come on mom, get up!

I love the babies and can spend way too much time just sitting and observing them!

Grandma Llama

I wrote about acquiring a llama by the name of Jewel a while back.

Jewel integrated nicely into the flock, but I didnt know how precious she could be until the kids began arriving. Goat kids, that is!

The first set of twins were born on pasture, and while the sheep had gone for water and the goats were lounging in their shed, Jewel stayed with the new mom and her babies. She hummed to them, sniffed them and seemed quite concerned when I picked one up.

Since then, as the kids started coming, Jewel has been looking out for them. A kid will follow its mom out to pasture, fall asleep and miss the herd returning to their loafing shed. But Jewel would be there, comforting the baby. I walked out a couple nights ago to ensure everything is tucked in, and Jewel showed me there was still a kid out in the pasture.
Early this morning, I snapped this photo of Jewel with 4 young kids in the pasture:

And here, Jewel is checking out new arrivals on Earth Day Sunday with mom in close attendance

Jewel making friends

What an amazingly gentle soul. 

Snow geese and shearing sheep

Some snow geese landed on one of Larry's fields the other day and I had the camera handy to take some photos

Closeup of geese

The flock took to the air when they saw me

The Spring flood when the creek overflows with runoff. 

Some geese and ducks enjoying the water

You can see the geese and ducks in the water at the bottom of the photo,

and the snow geese on the hill behind the corrals

Cows enjoying a day at the 'beach' in their bale grazing field

Shearing day dawned cold and with snow in the air, after a warm spell. Kind of reminded me of school - we wore uniforms at school except for the first day of Spring, when we were allowed to wear 'civvies'. Inevitably Spring day would be the coldest day and we would all be shivering in our shorts! I felt sorry for the sheep.

The shearing crew at work

nekkid sheep!

Me trying my hand at it. The shearers make it look so efforless!

It is hard work. Lorrie reckons I did OK and he can have me on the road with the crew in a couple weeks! haha!

Jewel the llama giving me the eye as I hold her still to be clipped

cute photo of Jewel. 

Thanks to Nadine Neuman for taking the shearing photos! :)

First signs of Spring

This has been a pretty mild Prairie winter. And the signs of Spring arrived much earlier than it did last year! Tomorrow is the official First day of Spring. Although some years, that is just a technicality and the temperature could be -20 with 2 feet of snow on the ground. This year, it appears almost spot on.
For a week or so now I have heard and seen the return of the Canada Geese, and even a few ducks. And yesterday, the gophers were out. (Richardson Ground Squirrel). I took a picture of this guy out in the field where the cows were bale grazing.

Another sign we start looking for, is the first real growth of grass. Last year I documented the first weeds at April 17th, and the grass didn't really start until April 20th. But today I saw grass. Grass that wasn't there yesterday. That is pretty exciting. Of course by this afternoon the rain had turned into sleet and by tonight it will be snowing. Spring is fickle and dances just beyond our reach!

So what are we busy with this time of year?

Well let's see:

•  last week I vaccinated all the goats, and dewormed the ones that needed it. I also trimmed  their hooves as needed, and they are now ready for the kidding season that starts in 4 weeks. 
• Next, I am working on getting set up for shearing day for the sheep, which is next week. On shearing day, the sheep will receive their vaccinations too.
• Last year the snow came early, and my yard is still covered in leaves which I would like to tidy up. 
• I have started some veggie and flower seedlings indoors in preparation for the gardening season.
• What I like to do now is prepare lots of easy meals for Spring when I am busy with kidding, lambing, and chicks in the brooder as well as yard work and getting the garden ready, and my day job. So when I cook, I make extra large batches. Extra chili, beef stew, chicken soup, bean soup, butternut soup, cookies and granola bars are processed into meal-size portions and frozen, ready to just heat up after a long day. 
• Then of course there is Spring cleaning, and checking supplies for kidding and lambing season: electrolytes, colostrum, milk replacer and nursing bottles in case they are required, vitamins, a stomach tube to quickly get colostrum in chilled goat kids, ear tags are ready to record births.

A busy time of year! Spring is about rebirth, awakening as the short days of winter give way to longer days, milder weather and the glorious anticipation of the return of Life.

The Guardian

I got a llama yesterday! This is Jewel, she is 10 years old and registered.

It was a bit foggy out this morning, which made for some neat pictures

Jewel with the sheep

Checking out the short fuzzies...

...And the tall majestic ones....

an itchy moment

Jewel seems very alert and curious. She has been handled lots and is halter broke, I still need to remove her halter. The sheep are familiar with llamas so they were not too traumatized. The goats think she's a bit weird but they don't really care. The milk cow - well maybe her eyes got a bit bigger, it's hard to tell, she is a Jersey with pretty big eyes as it is! :) 

The horses weren't really spooked but they thought it was a great excuse to ACT spooked and run around like crazy things! 

I caught Macy and Jack standing still in the fog:

Macy

Jack

The only ones that really noticed the llama, were my dogs. They know to stay out of the pens, but they run around the paddocks. They barked and growled at the strange new creature.

My hopefully future herding dog, Spice

I will monitor Jewel in the next week or so, to make sure she bonds with the flock. It might be a bit of a challenge because the goats come back to the corral to sleep at night, but the sheep prefer to sleep in the pasture. The horses go wherever they feel like it. If it looks like she is not bonding, I might separate the horses out into one camp, and bring the sheep up to the corral at night too.

Predators

Well it finally happened. I have not seen any coyotes around the farm, although one can hear them. Every day, I walk through my animals and check for things out of place. I had been away for a few days to a Holistic Management conference, so at the earliest opportunity on my return, I took a walk. I check fences, look for sick animals, check feed, just... look around. and observe. Well I found a blood spot. Fresh.

My heart raced. I walked more carefully, scanning the ground for more signs. Quickly, I found another spot

And with that spot, a 2" piece of fleece. Soft. Short. LAMB. I knew that some of the sheep might be bred, due to a ram that got out. Rams and bucks and bulls, they always get out. So I was prepared for an early lamb or 2. I was not prepared for a predator that struck so quick and silent. The skin was soft, not frozen. This was an early morning kill. Was the lamb born dead? I don't know. I almost think not, due to the amount of blood I found. The herd didn't really seem too upset. I did a perimeter check and found tracks coming in, and going out of the mesh fence

What was it? A fox? a coyote? I am not sure, but I lean towards coyote. I followed the tracks. They wondered, this way and that. I found a few blood spots next to tracks, but no other evidence of a lamb. Nothing. There was a spot where my unwelcome diner had relieved itself. Eventually my trail ran through one of my camps again and I lost it - too many little hoof prints to distinguish the predator tracks.

The next day, we had a blizzard. Lots of snow covered up the tracks. A day after the blizzard I went to see what else I could find

Fresh tracks! And some scat in one of my pastures

I scanned the places where he had come into the paddocks. Did he jump? Or crawl through? Foxes can fit through some pretty small holes, they will fit through a mesh fence. Some predator specialists say that coyotes don't jump, preferring to crawl under. I found, at long last, a single hair, caught in the mesh, fairly high up. He must have jumped.

His tracks disappeared into the sunset.

But I know he will be back. And I will be ready. I hope to pick up a Llama later this week, and I have managed to obtain 2 adult Livestock Guardian dogs on a loan. I hope that they will serve me until I can get a pup and get the pup trained through the summer for next year.

I don't hate predators. They are only doing what they do best, what they evolved to do over millions of years. Through our meddling in Nature, we have created an abundance of prey. I can just imagine this guy standing outside my fence, staring in wonder at the goats and sheep, all so neatly contained by the fence. All so tempting and edible. But with my Llama and my dogs, I hope to convince him to go dine on rabbits, deer and gophers instead.

We have babies!

I am not advocating winter 'kidding'. I like to try and match my animals up to a more natural time for kidding, such as Spring when the deer are having babies. But the bucks had their own idea. Excitement got the better of them on August 31/11 and they broke out of their pen. One afternoon of frolicking and I have 7 healthy babies from 4 does. When the bucks went out at the appointed time at the end of November, they sported breeding harnesses with color markers, so that I would be able to record which does were covered when. And of course there were a few that, at the end of the 45 day breeding cycle, didn't have any crayon marking on them at all. So towards the middle of January, 2 weeks before these girls were due, I sorted them off and penned them where I could keep an eye on them. Thankfully the weather stayed remarkably mild, and January 25th we welcomed our first 'Pilgrims'. After a week in the pen with their moms, I turned them into a bigger pen

Little girl explores snow

La Mancha with her 2 babies. LaBoer :-)

A very nice little buckling

This is one of Mancha's daughters with her first kids

A nice little doeling explores the ground

These are the first kids from my registered bucks, Balmaur Vincente and Balmaur Sidney, or Bob and Joe as they are known around here. :-) 

If this is a sampling of what's to come in the Spring, I am very excited to meet the rest of their progeny.