Stubs Piglets!

Stub in her nest with her piglets and the kids and Papa looking on!

Well I wrote that last post in the morning and that early afternoon Stub started making a nest. She worked on it for hours and when Papa got home she had a large area sprinkled with straw and twigs so Papa brought her a load of straw and she made an even better nest. That night before bed I headed out to see if anything was happening yet and found her in labor with 2 piglets already born. I watched for a bit but nothing was happening so I went inside for 20 minutes and sure enough when I got back out there she'd had 2 more! So I found a semi comfortable place to sit and watched her give birth to the last 4!! Very cool. I'm totally amazed at how vigorous piglets are at birth! She would push one out and it would get up and start looking for a teat... and find it and drink and crawl all over her in the process. She didn't get up once the whole time. After watching for over an hour I realized there was something wrong with one of the piglets. He couldn't get up, wouldn't drink (I tried to get him too) and kept making a funny GAK GAK noise. The other piglets all had mini pig noises; grunts and squeals. I had not brought a flashlight or anything so I headed to the house and woke up Papa and he came out, with a flashlight, to take a look. Well we still don't know what was wrong with him but the flashlight showed a raw spot on his forehead that took up about half of it and was raw and bleeding. I think he got that after he was born from Stubs back feet.. Anyway Papa and I decided he was 'not quite right in the head' for whatever reason and so Papa took him away and took 'care' of him. It was really too bad as he was a nice sized piglet and it seemed a shame after all Stubs hard work. I found it very interesting that the other two Momma pigs came to 'talk' to Stub several times each while I was there. They didn't come close but came and grunted at her for a bit and then went back to their own babies. Sort of an encouragement party. The other 7 piglets are doing wonderful and she hasn't even noticed that the 8th is gone. She is VERY happy now and no longer lonely. Yesterday she left her nest only once and that was for a quick drink of water.

So to sum up. We bred 3 Berkshire gilts to a Berkshire boar, got 7, 8, and 8 piglets born. One piglet was born dead 24 hours after the rest which gave 6 pigger her 6, she had them early in the am (before 5:30). 8 pigger had 8 and they all lived and she had them at noon 5 days after 6 pigger. Stub had 8, lost 1, and had them between 9:30 and 10:30 pm 5 days after 8 pigger!! So we got 21 piglets total, 11 are females and 10 are males. If that last one would have lived we would have had even numbers males to females. I find it fascinating to see the patterns..