Carol Burke is farm manager at Almond Valley in Livingston. She tells Scottish Field readers about life on the farm.
Spring really is the best time to visit any farm and Almond Valley is no exception.
Even with the frosty weather we’ve been having, new life can’t be stopped and the air is filled with the sounds of cheeps, bleats and baaas of the chicks, goats and lambs.
Just in time for Mother’s Day, one of our pygmy goats, Horrendous (Horrendous by name, not nature), gave birth to two gorgeous kids.
The two have amazing black markings across their eyes that looks like masks so we decided to reach out to visitors to help choose a superhero name and the response was huge. The final names chosen were Flash and Storm which fits their personalities perfectly – they have certainly both been going down a storm with guests!
So far, we’ve had a lot of chicks hatched that our guests can stroke in our animal encounter sessions. We have chickens in all different shapes, sizes and colours and so the chicks are all different too.
We have some brown speckled, dark yellow and yellow speckled chicks. The British public associate chickens as being white (as that’s the kind we eat) and having bright yellow chicks but we’re colourblind here at Almond Valley and all chickens are welcome.
We have taken in some lambs who’ve had been abandoned by their mum to bottle feed. Lambs are incredibly cute and we always get a lot of visitors who want to feed them. The thing that people don’t realise though is that lambs have to be bottle fed for a reason.
They have either been abandoned by their mum or are in ill-health. We would never take a healthy lamb away from its mum.
At the moment, guest are able to bottle feed two of our lambs are various points throughout the day.
For information on how to visit, click HERE.
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