You had to be there

March 15, 2011

Hey fellow seekers, Calving can be a real adventure sometimes. We can take precautions and review best practices or even past Black Ink columns. But tragic things happen, like when a high-indexing cow calves near a pond and the calf wobbles down the bank to ends its short life (2007), or a coyote awaits like a sinister midwife (2010) during a spring blizzard night. The strangest case ever on Rockytop had a happy ending, some 15 years ago when I had to pull a calf that had been born a couple hours earlier.

How could I pull a calf already born? Well, I said it was strange. Pulled it backwards, too, although I am pretty sure it was born with a normal presentation. At least once a day I “ride” the pastures on the Yamaha, tagging any newborns. That day I saw Twister (of the single, bent scur) off by herself, running up and down along a berm in some agitation.  As I approached, she was literally dancing around what looked like a coyote hole. Incredulous as I noticed two back legs protruding, I hopped off and ran to the hole thinking, there is no way a coyote is involved in this. I was right: apparently, Twister had found the one spot on the farm where she could push her calf out of the birth canal tunnel and right into another. It was a very easy pull, but had I not found it that day, coyotes would certainly have been involved that night. This year I thought again about the luck we can have calving.  One of our more high-headed cows hopped into her own gated community of brome meadow, hay bales, private pond and open barn to find the seclusion she wanted. When I tagged her heifer (already a bit too spunky), I carried her over the saddle of the Yamaha out the gate to the rest of the herd and 704 followed, her stay in luxury over for now. Last week when I checked the heifers at dawn I found 157’s newborn bull on the wrong side of a pretty tight pipe corral, being fussed over by a momma with her own, older calf. As I approached, the new calf stood and teetered after the wrong dam-heifer, though I quickly intervened, tagged and banded it and returned it through the fence. They are doing OK, but that calf is the only one in the herd to develop scours, so he got electrolytes today. The sunny weather will help.

Until next time let’s aim for profit, target the brand and build tomorrow together. ~Steve

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