As April comes to a close, May is welcomed with open arms. By the first weekend of May we are well into calving and have had our fair share of excitement in this final week of April, especially with our first time calvers. In this week alone we’ve had three noticeable new calves.

There’s a mystery afoot

The pairs in our heifer field continue to grow as more calves come into the world so we try to sort off pairs and move them into different fields nearby. Earlier this week when I went to check on one of these groups of heifer pairs I happened on a slightly damp calf without a tag. Now the calves of our first timers always get tagged so we can know who belongs to who as heifers are more prone to allowing more than just her calf suck. Finding an untagged calf in with the pairs is very unlikely, finding a slightly damp calf is also very unusual as all the calves in there would be dry as they’d all be more than a week old. 

After a bit of trial and error trying to pair this calf up with a heifer it became glaringly evident that he did not have a mom; it was like he just snapped into existence. Theories were made of how he could’ve got in with the pairs but all were illogical and highly unlikely. He took a bottle of colostrum nicely in the field and after being taken to the barnyard in the side by side, we are currently trying to get our little mystery calf adopted onto a cow that recently lost her calf. He’s doing pretty well for an orphan, almost constantly jumping and playing around and is pretty friendly when I come in (probably because he knows he’s gonna get fed).

Get the chains

The heifer field has a few small birthing pens where we move heifers in labour to so we minimize the chances of their calves being stolen by another heifer. 

On one of the checks for new calves I noticed a heifer with her amniotic sac and some hooves poking out so she was moved to the birthing pens and left to do what nature intends. I returned half an hour later to find that nothing had happened, so again I left and waited a while later. After an hour I came back to find that the only progress made was that the sac broke. That long with next to no progression means a trip over to the chute is in order. Having the heifers near a corral system is just for moments like this. By the chute we leave special chains that are designed to pull calves, they are placed on the ankle in a place where they don’t hurt or damage the leg when the calf is pulled.

Getting the chains on was the easy part, it wasn’t long into pulling when we realized that this mama happened to have a small birthing canal. The most shocking part of it wasn’t the small canal, it was the fact that when all that was left was getting the hips out we found that we needed two of us to pull. Usually when pulling a calf the hardest part is the shoulders as they are the widest part of the calf, this time however we found that it was the hips that were the most difficult part of pulling. Luckily once we were past the hips the calf slid out and the sweet sound of its first breath came. As mom came out of the chute her exhaustion was evident as she laid down beside her calf and sniffed at it. Both calf and heifer were doing well and there is much gratitude to have for a successful pull.

Not always a happy ending

Of course not every newborn calf gets the chance to learn how to stand up, get his first drink, and run around and play with other calves. That’s the sad reality of a very exciting season for ranchers.

A routine check of the cows turned rather interesting as a calf with hydrocephalus. was found. Hydrocephalus is a rare condition where the plates of the skull never fully form and connect, which means fluid gets between them and causes the head to enlarge. Calves with hydrocephalus typically do not live for long (if they live at all) and it is not a pain free existence. There isn’t anything that can be done and it is usual that calves are put down.

When the calf was discovered, it was lucky that the cow was next to it, so both were loaded up and brought back to the yard. It was obvious from the beginning that there was only one thing that could be done for the calf: put it down, which we ended up doing. With more than one orphan calf down at the barn and a mother that has milk it seemed like a fair trade to put one of the orphans (with a new coat) on her as long as she wanted a calf.

While not all stories have the ending we want, we still do get a lot of good endings which are the moments we look forwards to. There’s always something happening on Grant Ranch and during calving that ramps up a handful ad we hope for calving to go well as we enter May.