Beachcombing

I’m a little bit last with everything this week, I went on a residental at the weekend which was great fun. It was in Wales by a beach, I haven’t been to the beach for ages and I also liked the beach at this time of year.

 

We spent loads of time on the beach and I collected one and a half carrier bags of cuttlefish for the quail. It made me really happy, and the quail love cuttlefish. They were all very sandy and some had bits of ‘meat’ on:

 

On Monday I was given some new quail as well. Someone contacted me about them a few weeks ago from a new quail forum I’ve joined. Any way, they are all lovely and I can’t wait for them to start laying.

 

And my quail eggs started to hatch yesterday. 

When I got home on Sunday night there was some babies in the kitchen:

 

They were born on Saturday night, their mum has been looking like she’s been going to kid any day for a couple of weeks now. I even spent last Thursday night getting up to check on her as she was looking ‘odd’. there really isn’t an easy way to explain how a goat, or anything else, looks before they give birth. There are all the signs you get once they have started but once you’ve lived along side animals for a while you just seem to know. It’s nice, it’s a part of living with animals that I really enjoy being able to communitcate without any sort of noise. And they do it back too, I often use to spend time in the goat pen/houses when I was younger just sitting or reading and they would know if I was up-set about something and always come and sit close and nussle my face. 

Any way, the kids mum wasn’t very good with them and kept knocking them across the house if the stood up so they are in the kitchen. Their mum is very up-set about it and crys everytime you walk past her house or go out to milk her (she’s also started drinking milk from herself) it’s very sad but if she’s going to treat her babies like that than nothing else can be done.