As usual, the weather down here in NC has been crazy, up until sometime last week we have had. Lots. Of. Rain. The whole year has been wet and recently it has been raining non stop leaving the farm a big muddy mess! It was also really warm for December, but that isn't exactly strange seeing as we live in North Carolina. We see a lot of warmer winters. But with the New Year came the cold! I think we finally caught up with the season...Now all of our lovely mud is frozen every morning. It's nice not to have to wade through inches of mud soup to feed the goats every morning(and the goats hated it too!) But it's kind of cold! And now looking at the forecast it seems as though it's going to warm up a bit and dump MORE rain on us. Yay. Don't we love rain?
On a more exciting note, we are starting to get ready for our first group of kids!! Both of my sister's adult Nigerian does will be kidding in around 2 weeks. I'm starting to see udders filling, and both does are enormous! We cleaned out all pens and stalls and are in the process of removing all the junk that has built up in our barn over the last couple of months.
And we FINALLY got our new Alpine buck, Google.
January isn't usually when people buy new herdsires, but we couldn't get him until our premium checks came in from the State Fair. We eventually got them and so we hooked up the trailer and went to pick him up. It seemed a little silly to hook up our big goose neck trailer just for one goat, especially when we only have a 15 minute drive or less...but I couldn't see how putting him in the back of the van would have been a good idea. So into the trailer he went!
He's big and strong but a bit of a baby so it's not that hard to control him. Which I'm happy about because this is the first time I've owned a full grown Alpine buck. My younger bucks(Adonis and Taxman) have both gone out of rut but Google is still quite fragrant. It's rather amusing to see the little icicles hanging off of him and his frozen beard, he has a LOT of hair and it quickly freezes when he pees on himself. I wasn't able to get a good picture of him as we got home right before feeding time but I did manage to get this...
He's hairy, stinky and yellow but he seems to have nice conformation under all his hair. He's a very long level buck, a lot more level than he appears in the picture. I guess we'll see what he really looks like when I clip him down in May for the Spring Show. The real test though will be what kind of kids he throws. He is bred to 2 yearling FFs, Bam and Tokyo so hoping to get some doe kids from them.
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