Tag Archives: cattle

Ranch Wife Musings | Cow-Calling

Posted on by under Agriculture and Ranching, country life, Writing

Originally printed in the Custer County Chronicle on April 3, 2024

The miracle of life is front and center during calving season. It is amazing to watch a heifer birth her first baby, looking in vague confusion at the squirming, slimy creature that made its sudden, un-asked-for appearance, and then, prompted by God-given instinct, begin to clean the baby off. The baby is up off the ground in a matter of minutes, his little legs wobbly and knock-kneed, and then he finds the life-giving udder and his little tail goes to wagging, just like a dog. What a sight to see.

The excitement of the first calf of the season is followed by weeks and weeks of chaos, confused young mother cows learning the ropes, babies everywhere, unmixing mixups, and the satisfaction of watching maternal older cows do everything on their own.

It isn’t just instinct that drives a cow, but a fascinating melding of instinct and education, and the first-time mamas are kept under pretty close watch for the first few days, and kept in the nearest pasture for the first month or so. These first-time mamas are prone to wandering off and leaving their calves, forgetting they have calves, forgetting which calf is theirs, forgetting where they left their calves, and can often be seen chasing helplessly after a sprightly baby, entirely unsure how to control the unruly child.

The second-time mamas are a little less helpless, instinct and education both more fully developed, but there still is a tendency towards some of those pitfalls of early motherhood. They are given a little more freedom than the first-timers, but are still able to be supervised. Eventually, cows figure out the concept of nursery groups, where one or three mothers are left in charge of a dozen or so babies, giving the other mothers a chance to go in to water or eat. I don’t know how they figure out shifts, but somehow they do, but early on they forget about the need for a babysitter and just wander off, until something jogs their bovine memories.

And nothing jogs the bovine memory like the sound of a calf bawling. Nothing reminds a mama cow of her maternal responsibility like the sound of the baby she forgot about or misplaced. Some calves are obliging, squealing like stuck pigs if you just look at them wrong, let alone if they are being sat on by a wiry rancher, but other calves are stoics, and won’t make a peep, which is inconvenient if you’re trying to identify them.

Thus, the necessity of the fine art of cow-calling. Although ranching is a lot of science, there are a number of things that definitely fall into the “art” category, and cow-calling is one of those things.

I remember being seated behind my now husband, bundled up against the cold, enjoying the view as we bounced around the hayfield on the ATV, looking for unmarked calves to ear tag and vaccinate. The ear tag given matches the one in the mother’s ear, so they can be easily paired up later on and a good inventory kept. The frozen hayfield wasn’t much fun to drive over, but I was having a dandy time, my arms wrapped snugly around my handsome not-quite-husband, and having been granted the official role of keeper of the vaccine gun and ear tagger. Without warning, an absolutely uncanny sound issued from my not-quite-husband’s lips. Seated as I was right behind him, arms wrapped around him as stated, I experienced the full force of this incredible and unearthly sound. It was truly awe-inspiring, unlike anything I had ever heard before.

And I burst out laughing.

I honestly thought the demonstration was for comic effect. Until I saw fifteen mother cows practically stand to attention, heads flying up from complacent grazing like they’d been stung by wasps, then leave their breakfast and take off in all different directions, whichever direction they thought they remembered having left their calves. For the record, they don’t always remember, the telltale sign being a mother cow walking around bawling until she stumbles across her baby, which is (almost) always right where she had left it.

Anyway, the cow-calling had the intended effect and the mother of the baby in question presented herself, the calf was identified, tagged and vaccinated, and we went on our merry way.

Such was my introduction to the fine art of cow-calling.

I have since had my education on this topic broadened and have learned that this useful skill can be employed not only to quickly identify an unmarked calf, but to mostly accurately separate the cows that have calved from those that have not, to bluff a cow into looking around for the purpose of reading her ear tag, or to keep a flighty cow from running off without her young baby. I’m sure there are other uses for it, but those are the main ones I have identified.

Calving season. By turns hilarious or heartbreaking. Life and death are often juxtaposed. It is the sweetness of new life and baby animals that know no fear, the enjoyment of watching them learn to play and take their first running steps in the wide open, crow-hopping on their spindly legs. It is incredible to see a cow looking for somewhere to calve, and twenty minutes later to find not only that she has had the calf but that it is up and nursing already. It is miracle after miracle after miracle.

But cow-calling still makes me laugh.

Ranch Wife Musings | March Madness

Posted on by under Agriculture and Ranching, country life, gardening

So I really don’t know what March Madness is, other than it has something to do with sports, I think. But March is a crazy month. The winter sleepiness is shaken off and everything wakes up. All at the same time. The garden, the cows, the weather, the schedule, the chickens, everything.

There are babies everywhere, and I mean everywhere.

A little cold snap over this last weekend accentuated that, with little baby calves and their irritable mamas stuffed in every corner of the yard, with all available indoor space occupied by doubles and triples, and cows with slightly older calves getting shuffled into sheltered corners of the yard to keep them out of the wind and driving snow.

So far there have been two sets of twins, and both extra babies were shuffled successfully onto two cows who had lost calves–Good saves, on both counts, and the two lost calves were just part of the percentage of unavoidable losses, rather than the rather staggering losses of last spring, due to a collision of weather and luck of the draw. Posey got to try being a nurse cow for a week with one of the extra twins, until a mother needing a calf turned up. Posey was not impressed. Some nurse cow. We’ll see how she does when she calves, I guess.

Seedlings are going nuts in the brightest window in the house, around 120 tomato seedlings, some herbs and greens, and of course my elderberry cuttings. Bread baking and some jelly making and some sewing projects and some continuing ed for my paramedic license and a dive into spring cleaning have kept the days full. They seem to end as quickly as they start. And yes, that is a seed starting mat under that bowl of dough! Another use for those handy things, especially when you keep the temps low in the house!

And then yesterday happened. Or rather, Yellow Cat happened yesterday. We knew she was ready to have kittens at any time, and I complacently assumed, this being her second litter, that she would be competent. Boy, was I wrong. I went down to do chores yesterday morning and found a pile of three kittens that appeared dead, in just about the worst place Yellow Cat could have had them. She was unconcerned. I honestly thought they were dead and rigored, and when I picked up the two that looked the most dead, they were unresponsive and stiff and cold to the touch. She didn’t appear to have really cleaned them, their fur was matted down, and I really mean it when I say they appeared dead, and I have seen plenty of dead animals to know what I’m talking about. This isn’t an “I’ve never had chicks before and one is stretched out luxuriously under the heat lamp and I think it is dead” situation. They looked dead. Very dead. One of the kittens, though, moved a little and made the tiniest sound. It looked pretty hopeless, but I can’t stand to walk away from something like that. I almost left the two most dead looking, but gathered all three up, stuffed them inside my vest and ran up to the house with them. In the back of my mind was the paramedic mantra, “They aren’t dead until they are warm and dead,” and after a mere few minutes under a heat lamp and on top of a (you guessed it) seed starting mat, they came alive.

Baby animals are incredibly resilient but also incredibly fragile, a strange dichotomy, and even as they warmed up I felt that it was probably futile, but I gave them a little milk replacer laced with corn syrup, enough to wet their dried mouths, and two of them did try sucking it off the cloth I was using. I finally rounded up Yellow Cat from down by the barn, who was sauntering around like she hadn’t a care in the world, and locked her up with them. Long story short, the three kittens all nursed, she had two more, and all five survived the night with their mother in the bathtub and are doing just fine. I am still pretty mad at that cat, though.

It is hard to believe that April is just around the corner. April, the first month of long days in the saddle pairing out the calving pasture, the first real month of springtime although snow is always a possibility. There is always something going on!

These Winter Days

Posted on by under Agriculture and Ranching, country life, Photography

Winter has been very good to us. Or more accurately, God has been very good to us in the winter He has given us. We were talking over lunch today about how different this winter is from last, how good – just good – things have been this year compared with last year, without the struggles and sense of futility of this time a year ago.

When cold snaps last for weeks, with water freezing over multiple times in a day, when snow comes and then doesn’t melt, it is hard on everything, human and animal alike. Calves struggle, cows struggle, we struggle. But when cold snaps hardly last long enough to fully unpack one’s collection of serious winter gear, when the snow comes and goes in the span of a few days, when storms are the punctuation rather than the paragraphs, everyone is happier. Chilly mornings warm to balmy afternoons, heavy jackets and gloves becoming unnecessary and getting cast aside. Critters of all sizes sack out in the sunlight, the black ones especially enjoying the ritual.

Calving has begun in earnest, without the weather-related losses we had a year ago. There is still time for calf-killing storms, but everything is better equipped to handle what weather we may get, having not been suffering in the cold for weeks on end. Cows are heavy with calf, fat with grass and hay, their summer stores still sleek on them, unlike last winter. And Posey, maternal thing that she is, is crazy for a calf, wanting to mother all the little calves that have come along so far. Just wait, little cow. You’ll have one soon enough!

The short-lived bursts of winter we have had have almost been a relief, in a strange way. Little bursts of cold and snow and seasonalness that spice things up, change the pace, bringing that fiery vigor that a good snowstorm brings, and followed closely by stretches of 40 and 50 degree days. Wonderful. Glorious, even.

And when things are well fed and fattened for winter, a little snow is hardly enough to matter. I love watching the critters, all of them, in the bit of snow we have had. Not cold enough to be miserable, not enough snow to be dangerous, and everything feels good. Nothing like a little bit of snow to get the cows and horses “feeling their oats.” The horses race around in a fiery, wintery fit, kicking up snow, sending it frothing and surging up from around their hooves. Cows, hairy backs covered with a glaze of ice, are plenty warm enough, their natural furnaces keeping up, fueled by plenty of good pasture and hay.

And the dogs – Oh, the dogs! Their antics keep us laughing. Enough said.

What a winter we have had!

Ranch Wife Musings | Autumn Joys

Posted on by under country life, Photography, Writing

Summer fades away and autumn rushes in with foretastes of winter, bringing the community together around this livelihood we share. Neighbors jump in to help neighbors in work trade relationships that go back decades in some cases. Slow, autumnal days are followed by long days of hard work, up doing chores with a flashlight before riding out to gather cattle, ours or a neighbor’s, building and maintaining those partnerships between rancher and rancher, family and family, neighbor and neighbor, and between people and their animal partners, whether dog or horse.

There is the excitement of seeing the beautiful fall calf crop, the satisfaction of working healthy calves, or of having the cow herd preg test well. There is the anticipation of selling, the relief of getting calves sold, and a bittersweet sense of completion when they’re loaded onto a truck. And yet the sense of contented completion is marred by the question everyone is asking right now, which is how to keep everything fed and watered over winter. But all of that is a part of this season, this beautiful, paradox of a season.

And what a paradox, what a season of contrasts and change. Weeks of summery weather, followed by weeks of chilly mornings and warm middays, and then the downright cold nights that put ice on absolutely everything. Balmy breezes one day, and biting, cutting, gnawing winds the next. Starting the day bundled in coveralls and a scarf, yet somehow managing to get down to a T-shirt or tank top by afternoon. Autumn gold that makes the trees almost hard to look at, and the next day the gold is gone and the trees are bare.

Butterflies and bumblebees did their summery work as long as the flowers bloomed, which was much longer than usual this year. Snow fells on the still-blooming flowers, blooming into the first week of November, to my bewilderment, in spite of freezing temperatures. There were those frost-less, yet icy mornings, and then days of nothing but ice and frost, with the sudden change of autumn to the winter weather we’ve been bracing for, where everything is frozen and the thermometer doesn’t register above freezing.

Sometimes there would seem to be a shortage of things to keep one busy, when all that is on the to-do list is usual chores, and “seeing what else needs to be done.” There is never any shortage of something else needing to be done! Days so full you wonder how they can hold anymore, yet with that fallish sense of slowness and peace, unique to this season. I can’t really explain it. Unplanned projects take up unanticipated time, such as mending corral fences mangled by freshly-weaned calves in a nightly tirade, or spending a morning gathering them back up from multiple pastures after they manage to break out in a hunt for their mamas. Everyone is thankful when a group of calves is successfully weaned. And there really is always something going on, something to fix, an animal to doctor, something to do in preparation for something else. And then on rare days when there really isn’t anything going on, you enjoy it.

Around and amongst the busyness of the fall season, I love those rare times when I really can take it all in, the beauty of those daily, mundane moments. A day can be so full that I don’t stop to really see those things that infuse living with so much joy.

A quick smile from my handsome rancher.

My critters. All of them.

The steady gaze of a horse.

The timid gaze of a calf.

My daily basket of beautiful, brown eggs from my hard-working girls.

Sunlight illuminating flowers (I can’t believe how late they bloomed!) so they appear like stained glass, or snow-clad, weighed-down flowers.

And so many other things.

And all that within the beautiful paradox of autumn’s joys.

Glimpse of History

Posted on by under country life, Photography

There is something haunting about the beauty of these creatures. It is strange to see animals so muscled and powerful bedded down quietly in the tall grass, blinking sleepily in the bright sunlight, staring curiously at the intruders then losing interest, their massive horns spread broadly beyond the width of their shoulders. Only their horns are visible when they hunker down in the warm grass. IMG_4069IMG_3982IMG_3957IMG_3978Perhaps what is haunting is the feeling that even a barbed wire fence is no match for their strength. Or, perhaps it is the feeling that I’m staring into their eyes and getting a glimpse of history. Perhaps both.

Laura Elizabeth

Relics of the West

Posted on by under Pets/Domestic/Farm Animals, Photography

It is impossible to study the history of the American West without being impressed with two things: barbed wire and the Texas longhorn.
IMG_3631The longhorn is a breed of Spanish origin that was widespread in the American south. During the Civil War, ranches in Texas were shorthanded and consequently the herds of cattle on the open ranges were unmanaged and essentially went wild. The cattle reproduced prolifically for years. After the war, then, these wild, unbranded cattle were free for the taking, and were rounded up by gutsy cowboys and driven north, to the goldfields and boom towns in the West, along well-worn, legendary cattle trails, and were also sold in eastern markets. IMG_3534The invention of barbed wire in the 1860s and the widespread use of it in the 1880s changed the landscape of ranching, putting an end to the days of the open range. Violent feuds and range wars raged throughout the West as a result, and a series of conflicts known as the Fence Cutting Wars were a last-ditch effort to preserve the open range. IMG_3626The barbed wire has stayed and has become a necessary part of ranching, though the longhorns haven’t. There are a number of ranchers out here who keep small herds of these beautiful creatures, and it is always a delight to see them. Such magnificent animals.

Laura Elizabeth

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