Calf 14 - Panda's

Panda had her calf around 9 am this morning.  Everything went well.  The timing was perfect as the sun was shining, little to no wind, and the temperature was rising.  Panda had given birth in the corral.  When I first saw her and her calf, the calf was trying to drink.  With Toby checking things out, and other cows in the corral, sometimes the calf got confused and tried to drink from someone other than his mother.  Panda was on top of things and would get her calf back over to her.

The calf is male.

Sunny Thursday, cattle, and repair work

Thursday afternoon was a sunny and warm day.  Finally!    Friday was a cloudy day but almost as warm.  Tonight an artic front is predicted to arrive and stay the weekend.  Weather forecast is not good.  I still have 5 cows left to have calves.

From the livestock auction's market summary it appears I did well considering the market this Spring.  My calf weighed 905 pounds, about what I predicted.  My cow was the heaviest cow sold at the auction.  She weighed 1810 pounds.  I knew she was large, but she weighed more than I expected.


Here are some photos from Thursday afternoon of Speckles, Red's calf, their calves and last year's calves back in the corral.  Most were sleeping until my hammering repair work woke them up.

Yes, she is still alive.  She is just sleeping really hard.

Even the mother cow is sleeping.

Now that I woke the mother and calf it is time to drink.

Do you have to stand in the feeder?

Both of her calves are drinking at the same time.

A corral fence board was knocked off Thursday afternoon.  I imagine Toby the bull did it in order to check on one of the cows in the corral.  Last year he did something similar.  To the right of the opening you can see where I nailed wire fencing to the corral fence where he had pushed the board off last year.  If Toby is going to do this again I guess I will have get more wire fencing and nail it to the corral fence.

I also pounded a few steel posts in the ground by the salt feeder.   The cattle have gotten into a habit of tipping and flipping the wooden feeder over.  Often they flip it over and on top of the salt block.  The cattle have gotten into the habit of doing this every few days.  So maybe these posts will stop the wooden feeder from being flipped.

Two for the sale

This morning I took several of my cattle to the livestock auction to sell.  I took cow #80, the cow that lost her calf last month.  She was one of the three cows I had planned to sell last Fall before my accident put the selling plans on hold.  Since 80 lost her calf last month there is no reason to wait to sell her.  The other two cows I plan on selling recently had calves so their sale will wait till later this year once their calves get bigger.

Since I had some extra room in the stock trailer, and since this sale was a cow and feeder cattle sale, I took one of the steers.  Steer #55.    The next cow and feeder cattle sale is in two weeks and I plan to take the rest of last years calves to that sale.

Usually I take the calves a day before the auction and pay the auction to store and feed the cattle overnight.  This time I took the cattle the morning of the auction as the auction doesn't start the sale now until 11 am.   To make the cattle loading quicker I prepared mostly the night before.  I put the cattle in the loading ramp part of the corral the night before.  I hooked up the trailer to the pickup, tested the lights and checked the tires' pressure.  This morning at 6:30 am all I had to do was drive the trailer into the corral, back it up to the loading ramp, and load the cattle.

The loading went smooth and quick.  I put the cow in the front half of the trailer, closed the dividing gate, and put the calf in the back of the trailer.  I was on the road by 7:08 am.  I was down to the auction in Missoula by 9:30 am.  Since the auction was a feeder sale in addition to a cattle sale, and the auction claimed some people said they were going to bring a few hundred head of cattle, I expected that I would have to wait in line to unload my cattle.  But there was no other stock trailers when I arrived.  By the time I finished unloading my cattle there were two stock trailers waiting to unload their cattle next.

I didn't see or hear many cattle in the holding pens so maybe the sellers didn't bring their hundred of calves to sell.  I'll find out once I later get the auction listing of what cattle were sold.  Once I unloaded my cattle I headed back home.  Even though I only had two cattle in my trailer on the drive to Missoula I could feel the weight I pulled.  Driving home the trailer felt light and the driving went quicker.  I was home by noon.

My pickup was the cleanest I can remember.  Donna helped me load the cattle and then rode with me to Missoula and back.  She wanted to ride in a clean pickup, not a dirty and dust covered inside-and-out pickup.  The previous day she spent quite a bit of effort and cleaned my pickup inside and out.

I am happy to get rid of cow 80 as, since she was one of the larger cows, she was a bully to many of the other cattle. Also she wanted to eat the hay chaff and seeds over the hay itself.  She figured out which feeder I swept the remaining hay into and always she would initially go to that feeder.  To get to the chaff and fine stuff cow 80 would use her head to push out the hay from the feeder so she could lick all the chaff from the feeder.  This annoyed the heck out of me, especially when the ground was wet and mud.  That hay would somewhat get ruined and uneaten by getting wet and muddy.

Calf 55 was also annoying at times.  Instead of just standing at a feeder to eat hay, he preferred to stand with his front legs in the feeder and on the hay to eat the hay.  Muddy hooves made muddy hay.

Now in a few days I will find out how much my cattle weighed and how much they sold for.

Once I got home I washed the manure out of the trailer and cleaned it and the trailer's floor mats.

I forgot to take photos of cow 80 and calf 55.  I did take photos of the mountains and lake seen during the drive.

Mission Mountains

Mission Mountains

Looking north towards Flathead Lake on the drive home.

Swan Mountain range getting closer to home.

Calf 13 - Red's calf

Red's calf - who doesn't have a unique number id or a name - had her first born calf this afternoon.  While she didn't have her calf when I checked a few hours before hay eating time at 6:30 pm, she had the calf a little before hay eating time.

A heifer.

While Red's calf is a Red Angus calf the newborn calf is black, like Toby.

The calf appear to be drinking from her mother and is doing well.  Again, another strong calf when it came time to ear tag her.

I put Red's calf and her calf into the south corral to be with Speckles and her calves and the steers.  That is because Red's calf is a first time mother and being separated from all the other cows probably would let Red's calf bond with her calf better.  While Red's calf seems to be bonding with her calf ("Yes, this is my calf."), at times it seems like she trying to understand that she is a mother ("Is that really my calf?").   So I put a few corral panels around the barn's roofed area so Red's calf and her calf can be alone together and not be interrupted by Speckles or the steers tonight.

A few hours old and already Red's calf's calf is much larger than Speckle's twin calves, Maude and Sally.

Red's calf was eating hay when I took the following photos.  It is Speckles and one of last year's heifers (Mama's) checking out the newborn calf.

Today I did not fall out of the pickup when I tossed hay into the cattle's metal feeder.

Calf 12 - 40's

Calf 12 was born this afternoon to cow 40.  A heifer.  The calf looks just like her mother.  No problems with the calf.  The calf was drinking from her mother when I found her late afternoon.   The calf is already getting strong as I had to make some effort to hold the calf down when I tagged her ear.

The calf got a blue (boy) ear tag even though it is a female.  Last year the tag pulled off the ear of 40's calf - a boy.  40 also had a 12th born calf last year.  So I decided to re-use the tag even though the sex is wrong.  I'll just have to remember the tag's color is wrong.  Good luck with that.

After tagging the calf I fed hay to the cattle.   As I was tossing a heavy amount of hay out of the pickup and into the metal hay feeder I lost my balance. Then slipping on the hay in the pickup's bed I fell out of the pickup and down to the ground. Fortunately I didn't hit the pickup or the metal feeder.  I landed on my back on the hard ground and had the wind knocked out of me.  As I fell I tried to make sure my head didn't hit the ground as naturally I wasn't wearing my bicycle helmet as I tossed hay.  And you know what happens when I hit my head on the ground.  My head didn't hit the ground but my upper back did.  I will be black and blue tomorrow.

Earlier I had spent the afternoon cutting a number of lower and dead branches off a few trees in the south pasture, so I was already probably was going to feel a little tired tonight.  I most certainly feel sore now.  I'm going to sleep hard and long tonight.

Calf 11 - Beulah's

Friday morning around 10:30 am Beulah had her calf.  A heifer.  I had checked on the cattle a little earlier that morning and they were all fine.  A short time later I remembered that I forgot to top off the cattle's water trough.  That is when I saw that Beulah was starting to deliver her calf.  So I pretty much witnessed the birth, the calf being cleaned off by Beulah, and the calf minutes later learning to stand up and then how to drink milk.  It is amazing how quickly the calves learn to start doing things.

Here is a 3:54 minute video of the calf just after he was born, being cleaned by this mother, then walking and drink to figure out how to drink milk: https://youtu.be/pFyXWSySof0

The calf is doing well today.  He got through another cold night.

Photos of calf 10

A few photos of calf 10 walking around the corral checking things out.  Otherwise he had mostly stayed and slept on the straw under the barn's roofed area.   Amazing that almost two days earlier the calf was near death.

Mama following her calf around the corral.

Calf 10 -90's

I had another calf born early yesterday afternoon.  Another bull calf.  A big calf.   But I almost lost this calf.  It snowed much of April 1 and the temperatures in the afternoon was 25 to 28 degrees.  Plus wind. More January weather on April 1.

The following photo was taken on the afternoon of March 31.  April 1 had more snow.

I found the calf at 4 pm.  I hadn't checked on the cows since noon.  The calf was laying stretched out on the snow with his mother standing over him mooing and all concerned.  The calf could barely move.  It was freezing to death.

I go the calf into the house and called Donna for help.  I do not have a bathtub, only a shower. When Donna arrived we put the calf in the shower and ran warm water on him.  I slowed the drain so the calf would also lay in warm water. After a long time we got the calf out of the shower and I pulled it to lay on a rug in front of the wood stove.  We dried off the calf and massaged it with towels to get activity from it.

It was almost 7 pm when we decided to give the calf some milk supplement to drink.  Then we were going to go outside and see if we could milk the mother cow.  We had to tube the liquid to get into the calf's stomach as it was too weak to suck.

We got the cow into the loading ramp and its head into the head gate so she couldn't move. She could still kick though if she wanted.  I haven't learned how milk a cow so I couldn't get any milk to come out of the cow's udder.  Donna can easily milk a cow as she had learned and done it when growing up and quickly got milk to come out.  I put a board in the fence panels to try to limit how the cow could kick.  If the cow really wanted to lift her leg high she could get it over the board, but she didn't do that too often.

The amount of milk Donna got from the cow.

Before going outside to milk the mother cow I moved the calf away from the wood stove.  When we got back into the house the calf was laying strangely.  He wanted to arch his head back as far as he could.  When we moved the head back down he would move it back up.  Occasionally he would move his legs.  He was breathing fast and his heartbeat was fast.  Even though he was warm his back half was shivering.

He was not normal.   It was like he had suffered a brain injury due to a lack of oxygen from almost dying.  I imagine if I found the calf less than up to a half hour later it would have been dead.  Or the calf was having a seizure.    I called the vet and she had no idea why the calf would arch his head so severely.  I called Chris who has 70 cows.  Once he had a calf kind of like this and the vet (who is now retired) took the calf and cared for it and a day and a half later the calf returned to normal.  No idea why his calf was that way for a while.  I called Joyce and their family never had a calf like this.

The only thing to do was wait and see if the calf recovered and survived.

Here is a 1:13 minute video of the calf spasming: https://youtu.be/xt43Vdnu_hM


Around 11 pm Donna came back and we tubed the calf to give it some of his mother's milk.  Once he got his mother's milk he stopped arching his head and moving his legs.  He laid quietly and was now recovering.   It was only now that I realized that I hadn't given the calf a milk supplement.  I had given him an electrolyte supplement.  I had this supplement back when I had the calf who had scours and was dehydrating.  Well.. this electrolyte mixture overwhelmed my calf as he hadn't had any milk yet.  Once he had some milk he started to slowly recover.

A little after 4 am the calf tried to stand up.  The sound of his hooves on the plastic tarp woke me up.  Donna came over and we gave the calf the rest of his mother's milk.  Then I moved the calf to the entryway.  This way he couldn't hurt himself standing up or damage anything else.

Almost 9 am and I took the calf out to the corral to reunite him with his mother.  I wondered after being apart for so long, and having the scent of humans on the calf, if the mother would accept or reject the calf.  The mother immediately accepted the calf.  (She wasn't too keen on me though for taking her calf all this time.)

The calf stood up and after a few tries figured out how to suck from his mother's udder.  For the day I put up corral panels around the barn's roofed area so it would be only those two together and they could bond and be in a warm place.  The low temperature the past night was 16 degrees.  January temperatures.  And I put some hay in the area for the cow to eat.

The cow and calf are doing well.  Late afternoon I removed the panels so the cow then could eat all the hay she wanted from the bale in the corral. Mother and calf bonded really well.  I took the following photos early evening shortly before sunset.

What an adventure and what a night.  But it was worth it as the calf was saved.  Without Donna's help I don't think I would have saved the calf.