b'Swapped At BirthWritten and Photos by: Cherrie Nolden On July 8th we were graced by the arrival of 2 new Fjord foals. 1dr Koryn had a colt at her side, and VRF Sofia Stjerne Sofia had a filly at her side. As usual, they were born in the herd on pasture with the stallion present, and arrived in the wee hours of the morning with no assistance or witness. Neither mare nor foal had any problems and were doing all the things they should do when I checked theherdafterdaylight.WenamedKoryns colt 1dr Hilder, and Sofias filly 1dr Stenetta. Theyhavebeendoinggreat,growingand learning at their mothers sides in the herd. I happily submitted the usual paperwork for registration and parentage verification. As it turns out, these are adopted mothers.TheNFHRRegistrarcontactedus,saying that the UC-Davis lab that conducts the genetic parentagetestingforNFHRregistration, discoveredthatthemothersofthesetwo foalsdidnotmatchtheDNAresults.Their sire,SOSRurik,wascorrect.Thispuzzled me because I typically am very attentive to which hairs are submitted with each form for registering and verifying our 15-20 Fjord foals each year.Possibilitiesthatflashedthroughmy mind were 1) I put the wrong hairs on the forms,2)thelabmixedupthesamples whenprocessingthem,or3)themares swapped foals at birth time, before I found them that morning. I went out and scanned themicrochipsinbothfoals,whichIhad placed in each foal the day they were born, and verified that the chips matched the foal names and sexes, and the hair sample baggie that I had labeled for each foal. The UC-Davis Lab then verified that the sexes matched the foal names on the paperwork, with Stenetta being a filly and Hilder a colt. When they ran the analysis with Koryn as dam to Stenetta,1dr Hilder and 1dr Koryn and Sofia as dam to Hilder, that parentage 20 Fjord Herald Issue #148Fall 2023 assignment met the verification threshold.'