First time mum serves up her kids

According to the goat gestation calendar, Lily was due to kid on 4th May. In reality though, it could have been any time from 28th of April to 8th of May as these dates were 145-155 days from the time she met with the billy.  In fact she met with 2 billy goats, we were hedging our bets.

We moved her out of the pen away from the other goats, particularly Anastasia who is a bit of a thug, into her own personal birthing suite.  She seemed relieved and soon relaxed into her new domain.  We kept a close eye on her, counting down the days until the morning of the first of May when she was acting a little oddly.  By the afternoon we were certain she was in labour and at around 6pm she laid down on her deluxe straw bed, made a noise like someone throwing up and produced 2 tiny kids, easy as pie.

We had just spent weeks ewe watching, seeing them pacing, panting and groaning, thinking any minute they were about to give birth, then spending the night checking them every two hours, only for them to finally lamb at 9am the following morning.  The quick and stress-free birth of the kids was like a breath of fresh air.  We didn’t even need the rubber gloves!

Although very small, they seemed healthy and lively and she was keen to clean them up, which meant hopefully, that she would be a good mother.  Since this was her first time we had no idea how she would take to it.

Strangely, the female kid was black with distinct white markings and pricked ears, the image of one of the beaus that Lily had met with, but the male kid was golden brown with floppy ears and looked eerily like the other billy she had a liaison with on the same day.  Neither took after their pure white mother.  We wondered if it was possible that there could be two different fathers.  I guess we will never know unless they do DNA tests for goats!