Maternity Ward

Chuck felt like he was in the maternity ward today, with two of the young bred does going into labor and a third looking iffy. The surprise of the day was what Kitty produced. She is a Sports Kat daughter, so I bred her to Boomer to concentrate the Sports Kat genetics. She is one of the youngest bred does, only 14 months old and still growing. She was not very round, so we assumed she was carrying a single. Instead, she presented us with two very tiny black bucklings. The smaller was under 4 lbs and the larger just over, and when I went back and looked at her papers, she was a single and was less than 5 lbs herself at birth. I just can't imagine anything so tiny can possibly thrive, but we have gotten used to some very substantial kids, although to much older and larger mothers. These two tiny packages were up nursing quickly. Now I am probably the only person in the Southeast who can breed does to kid in mid-May (so they don't have to deal with the cold weather my older does have to kid in), that can manage to have those young does pick the very day in May that is below average in temperature and where the night is supposed to be way below average. I have talent that way. Since Kitty, being the smallest of the bunch, often gets shoved out of the sheds, Chuck set up a large dog crate with some straw in the field for the kids and hopefully Kitty doesn't move them out of it. Boy, these guys are tiny.

The next event of the day was 34's labor and delivery. She was such a good first time mother last year, I only had her in with this batch of does because she needed a little less aggressive group of does to be in with than my older mommas. She had a very nice buck and doe by Boomer last year, and I bred her to Ace this year to see what he would produce. I know what she gave me bred to Boomer, so I have something for comparison. Here again we ended up with two bucks. I told Chuck to shove them back in and see if next time they would come out as does, but he didn't seem interested in trying that. I drove up after work to see all the new arrivals, and really enjoyed watching 34 with her kids. She is so attentive, and so available to them. She just seems to do everything per the textbook. Chuck took a sequence of pictures of her laboring, delivering, and attending her kids, and I will have to blog it when I have time to get all the pictures in order. In true Kiko fashion, the kids were up nursing in ten minutes. She delivered, cleaned, and fed like an assembly line. These are Ace's first kids to hit the ground. We'll know more in a few days what they really look like. Right now all we can tell is they are pretty loud in the color department, and that Ace's airplane ears breed true. We hope his growth rate and parasite resistance follows suit.