Problem birth?

News of an addition to the herd here in Patouland. Coolaroo Judah, Judy, the horse, gave birth in splendid fashion this morning to a healthy light fawn male. His sire is Wessex Cosmos from up the road.
Judy, as I might have mentioned is our 'problem birther'. Well not today! She might as well have been reading the 'How to give birth by the book' textbook as it was just about spot on.


He is also the strongest cria I have seen. He was up on his feet, without falling over, within 5 minutes and was under having his first drink within 15 minutes. Top notch. The rest of the herd were surrounding her throughout and took a very keen interest in the proceedings. What a splendid start to the day.

He was so strong that when he wandered over to the feeder I thought he was going to tuck in to the hay! He is unnamed at the moment but I think he needs a big strong name to match his early behaviour.

Other news here is that Columbus seems to have the hang of this mating malarkey at last.
Here he is pictured smooching Priscilla with her cria Minnie the Minstrel watching on. Priscilla was the perfect way to get Columbus going. He looked at her from afar, there was a dull thud as her knees buckled and hit the baked mud and he wandered over to carry on at his leisure. She is a complete tart our Priscilla, one of our originals, lovely, lovely, lovely.

Since then he has been in our top paddock with two lovely ladies from Tisbury Alpacas, Alice and Dilly. He pretty much ignores them during daylight hours but when night falls he's off. Three nights this week we have been woken up to the gentle noise of Columbus orgling away in the darkness. He is still working on his orgling, at the moment he sounds like an angry bumble bee
in a jam jar, it's rather endearing and when I hear him it makes me smile. He's going to be just fine my boy, just fine.