Introducing our newest baby goat!

I wasn't certain he was going to make it, but he pulled through

Well, this little fella certainly didn’t have an “ideal” start. I’m happy to say we got him and his momma back to health, though they didn’t make it easy for us.

Before diving into his story, welcome to my first substack! Often times I want to tell more stories about these critters than I have room to post on social media, so a fair amount of my substack will be about the critters, their personalities, why they earned the names they have, and much more.

Anyway, back to this little guy.

For the first 4-6 weeks, I keep the babies and their mommas under lock and key. From coyotes and vultures killing baby goats to our donkeys not yet familiar with them, a lot can go wrong. While our donkeys protect the herd, they sometimes “forget” that new babies are friends as they don’t yet know them. It can take a donkey about 4-6 weeks to really get used to a new critter.

I arrive at the goat barn in the morning as per usual, however I do one thing that I don’t usually do: I don’t go inside the barn, I bypass it to release the other not-a-parent goats out into the field. Once I lock them out of the Goat Yard, I walk back to the Goat Barn.

Lo and behold one of our babies seemingly escaped their pen! “How in the world did you get out of there?” I ask him, only to realize that the pen has our goat, Nubi, and her two kids already in there. It was then I realized that this was a new baby and I just released the mother out to the field!

After calling the goats back to the yard, I looked around but couldn’t tell who the mother was. Normally you can see some afterbirth on their tail, but everything looked normal. An uncle came over so I put down the baby as I go talk to him. We were finding bottles and colostrum (baby goats need this special milk for their first 48 hours).

But way off in the distance, I see one of our nannies nursing the baby! Turns out, the mother was Nanny Wynette — our very first born-on-the-ranch goat!

I penned them up and kept them penned up together for nearly a week for them to bond. I’ve heard first-time/young goat mommas can struggle with kids, so I figured locking them up would be good.

And now? Nanny is doing great and her baby boy is beautiful.

Her baby discovered our goat teeter-totter where another adolescent goat was playing. Nanny was having none of it and told that other goat to move along lol

All in all, I was pretty concerned the little fella wasn’t going to make it, but things are looking up for him!