Hi All-
Sorry I haven't gotten the blog updated yet. We had a pretty busy weekend!
Backstory: For those of you who don't know, my husband's parents live next door and my husband's sister and her family live next door to them. Such a blessing having such wonderful family so close! As part of my personally assigned duties, I help my father-in-law manage the health of his cows (animals are my thing). Right now they are living in the pasture next to ours so that I can make sure all of their calves are born healthy and we can give them medicine right after birth. Once the grass is growing again, we will rotate them to my sister-in-law's pastures--rotating them every couple of weeks until the grass dies again next winter.
Our cows are meat cows. They behave much differently than dairy cows. They do not produce nearly as much milk, they tend to be more skittish by nature (though ours are pretty easy), and they were not trained to walk on a halter and sit nicely tied to a fence for milking. In fact, previous angus cattle have attempted to attack us when we went to handle their babies. Thankfully our current herd is very docile and seem to be okay with us handling them and their babies.
We bred four cows last March/April via artificial insemination. (Well, technically we bred three cows and a heifer...a cow is a female that has had calves previously, a heifer is a cow that is a first time mama). Cows are pregnant for approximately 280 days. Since we bred them via AI, we had approximate due dates for them all. Our first cow was due around Christmas. Unfortunately, she must have miscarried early on since the vet found no signs of a baby 10 days later. So that left three cows. The first delivered her calf last Thursday--a little bull, we are calling Bullie (very creative). The next cow that delivered was our Angus, "Agnus"--she had a little heifer that we are calling Betty (super sweet baby!!). But the third cow took her sweet time!
Friday afternoon/evening, I was CERTAIN that #45 was going to have her calf (normally our animals have names, but we got a few of these cows as adults and so they came with ear tag numbers for names and those "names" stuck...). #45 is my favorite cow because she goes where I want her to go merely by pointing. Makes it super easy when you have a stressed out mama because normally a stressed mama will not do anything you want! #45 let me sit out with her in the field for about an hour, until she decided she was just joking and got up to eat dinner like normal.
I did not sleep well Friday night!
Saturday morning, still no calf. I went ahead and milked my goats like normal, taking time to trim some hooves and check my pregnant mamas. Finally, around 11:30, I walked out to check on 45...and found her water had broken! I was able to watch as she delivered her baby shortly after noon. (see the video below). Animal behavior is one of my favorite things to observe and I was fascinated to watch the herd come and check out the newest member, then stand "guard" as mama cleaned off her little one. The mamas with new calves stayed away with their calves, so only the cows/steers without babies stood guard. If I had to guess, I would say it is instinctual to keep their new babies away from predators while all the blood is there drawing attention to the newest one...but that's just a guess.
Anyway, I noticed that the little heifer wasn't standing as quickly as I'd seen in the past. Also, the baby came out covered in meconium, so I was concerned there might be an issue. My vet is fantastic and thankfully she was on call this Saturday. I texted her and she assured me that the baby had 2 hours to stand before I had to worry. So, I went to eat lunch. I came back at around 2:45 and saw mama and baby resting in the sun. It all seemed very peaceful. However, since I hadn't given the baby her medicine yet and I hadn't seen her nurse on her own yet, I decided to sit outside the fence and observe them for awhile.
After about 10 minutes, #45 decided to stand and nudge her baby to stand. But the baby didn't stand. #45 looked at me and mooed. The other cows also seemed a little distressed. So, I hopped in to make sure everything was okay. It wasn't.
Although the baby was alert and looking around, when I went to pick her up, she couldn't stand. I called my husband to see if he could get her to stand (she weighed about 100 pounds). He could not. We knew we were in trouble.
I immediately called my vet and she agreed to come. In the meantime, my husband and my father-in-law picked up the baby and put her in his golf cart to drive her over to the cow squeeze. (When you need to work on a cow, you put them in a big metal box called a squeeze, so their head is locked in place and they can not kick you). While they were driving her over, I moved #45 over to my sister-in-law's arena where we keep the squeeze. I'm so thankful she is an easy cow! Once #45 was in the squeeze, we placed the baby calf in front of her head (along with alfalfa) and started milking out her colostrum (the first milk of any mammal). Thankfully #45 allowed us to milk her (though we had to be cautious as she attempted to kick us the first few times--she could easily break our arm if we weren't careful).
A baby calf needs to have colostrum within 4 hours of birth or her chances of survival go down significantly. We were at 3 1/2 hours at this time. We attempted to bottlefeed the calf while we waited for our vet, but she was too weak to suck. She was growing weaker by the minute and towards the end, could barely hold up her head. We would need to tubefeed her the colostrum we had milked. Although we have tube fed baby goats before, we have never tubefed a calf and didn't even have the proper equipment to do so.
Thankfully the vet was close. She determined that the calf was healthy (no fever, lungs were good, etc.) and she began showing us how to properly insert the tube. You must make sure that you put the tube down the esophagus and not the trachea, so that the milk gets directly to the stomach and not the lungs. We were able to provide 2 quarts of colostrum directly to the baby's stomach, finishing up around 4:30 pm.
Once finished, we carried the baby into the stall with her mama and let them rest. At 6:30 pm we came back to the stall and attempted to bottle feed the baby again with another quart of colostrum we had milked out earlier. She wouldn't take it, and could barely hold her head up. So we decided to try tube feeding her again. As my husband sat her up and started inserting the tube, she began to fight. We continued to work our way in and were able to get a couple of ounces into her stomach when she began to flail around! This is actually a good thing! We took the tube out and tried the bottle again. She refused to suck still. Thinking her reaction earlier was a fluke, we attempted to tube her again. This time she didn't let us get the tube in past her mouth. She bucked my husband off and stood up as if she had been doing it all day. She wobbled a bit, but within minutes she was walking laps around the stall. Pretty soon, walking turned into leaping as she began to get used to her legs. When she began rooting for her mama's teats, we left the stall. I checked on her every two hours until 11:00. We still hadn't seen her nurse a significant amount, however, we had seen her find the teat a few times and with all the energy she had at 11, we felt confident that all would be well for the evening.
And it was.
Sunday morning, at 6 am, I went to check on the calf and found her running around the stall as happy as could be. I released mama and baby from the stall and finally witnessed baby nursing contentedly on her mama. After church, I was able to walk both mama and baby back to the rest of the herd where they were happily reintegrated. My husband named the baby Bessy. Little Bessy is doing amazing.
And we have another successful calving season under our belt!
Minutes after Bessy's Birth
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