New Babies on the Ranch

We have a new orphan at the ranch, a 4 day-old preemie whose mother died during childbirth from dystocia. Penny brought “Lil Orphan Annie” to work with her because she requires constant attention and hourly feedings, day and night.

Dr. Chris inserted a feeding tube and she is getting Foallac, an artificial mare’s milk.



Annie was born a month early and Penny is nursing her back to health, but she is not out-of-the-woods yet. Poor Penny is bleary-eyed from waking-up every hour day-and-night to feed her and I’m very impressed with her dedication to saving the life of this helpless baby.



Here is the whole story: Saving Lil Orphan Annie

The next step is to get her nursing, and we are considering using Bluebell, a crippled dwarf with a heart of gold, who will bag-up and nurse any orphan baby:



Here is Bluebell’s story: Bluebell the crippled dwarf

We also have new chicklets hatching by the hour. The hen nested in Sara’s feeding trough, and the sweet mare carefully ate around the hen for two weeks so as not to disturb her nesting.

Sara is a Bask granddaughter with high-action, lot’s of chrome and a really sweet disposition:



Chicks rarely survive here because of the predators. We are going to cage the chicks and hope that the snakes don’t get them. We have hawks, owls, and Irwin spotted a Coyote yesterday on the back 40.

I was surprised to find-out that some genius has been re-establishing coyotes and releasing them by the dozen in Warren County. What was he thinking? Coyotes used to be classified as vermin, and even though I love animals, I have no qualms about killing any critter that threatens our ponies, so Mr. Coyote had best stay out of our pastures.