Two weeks ago I heard coyotes outside our house and Nan suggested I go out and check on the goats. I went out and found them huddled together up by their sheds, but I couldn’t see Nibbles. I got a flashlight out and walked around the fence and found her body at the end of their pen. She was cold with a little blood on her. The coyotes had gotten to her while she was defending the herd. This was extremely sad, I dug a hole and buried her the next day. Here’s a picture of her with her one kid Nubbin:

Here’s the last picture we have of Nibbles:

Nan took some swift action and found us a guard dog which she picked up a couple days later. Her name is Daisy and she seems to be working out so far. We never want to lose another goat to coyotes again if we can help it.

A few days later our other doe Lilly came into heat, and since we want to have more kids next year, we took her up to a buck to get bred by Nuada. He’s a pretty impressive Nubian buck. We were worried that after the trauma with Nibbles maybe Lilly wouldn’t be in the mood for love, but turns out that wasn’t the case. Here’s them hanging out.

After being bred, Lilly was pretty gross, so Nan gave her a bath.

Since she was nice and clean now, we let her hang out on the couch with me for an hour!

A few days after that Cuzco got very sick. We think it was a combination of the stress of losing Nibbles and getting a guard dog (he hates dogs) and possibly eating too much fruitcake on Christmas.

We took him to the get and got him some meds that helped him feel better, and we took him inside our basement for a few hours to sit by the fire and watch TV with us. He’s been getting better and better, so that’s nice. Losing two goats in a single week would have been too much.

Since we lost our doe Nibbles and we really wanted to breed a couple does this year, we started looking for another alpine doe to replace her. A brief look on Craigslist didn’t find any does, but we found a really nice looking Alpine-Nubian buck for sale. We weren’t really planning on getting a buck anytime soon, but we decided if we got him and bred him to Nubbin and Petunia (our two kids), that would be great, because it would get us a year further ahead in our efforts to breed Alpine-Nubian goat crosses. We picked him up just a few days ago. We named him Pac-Man.

Anyway, the last two weeks have been pretty crazy with all this goat stuff going on. In the meantime I made a game called the Rustic Classics which are 2-4 player local games. I’ve been re-making these games on and off for many years. One of the games in the collection is called Nibbles, which is what we named Nibbles after. So here’s a link to those if you want to play. The Rustic Classics also includes Pac-Man, of course, which is the name of our new buck.

It was definitely a tough ending of the year for us, but it’s also been the most exciting year we’ve had with goats yet. Here’s to 2014!

-Phil

P.S. If you want to read some of these stories in more detail, just poke around on Pack Goat Central where Nan has posted all this stuff too.