Maia!

It hasn’t taken me this long to name her, I promise,
it’s just taken me this long to write about it.

Way back when I first posted about this calf, a brilliant commenter left the suggestion to name her after a star, apropos of Star Brand.

I loved this idea and looked up a bunch of star names, and wrote them down along with some other suggested names. I went out and sat about fifteen feet from where this little calf was lying and started reading the names out loud.

When I said “Maia,” she raised her head and looked at me. I kept reading through the names and she went back to ignoring me, but when I said “Maia” again, she got up and trotted over to me. So Maia is quite certainly her name! It’s a star in the constellation Taurus (the bull), which is also rather fitting.

She’s feisty and sweet and has seamlessly integrated into the Farmily.
♥

The OK Corral

The last I wrote about the Farmily was the tragic loss of Daisy’s newborn calf. Thank you to everyone who expressed concern for Daisy ~ I didn’t even address that side of things because it was too sad for me to write about ~ Daisy loves being a mother. I did what I could to minimize her loss by making sure she had companionship ~ Sir Baby has been in one section of the corral since his injury, as confinement is an important part of his healing process, and I had Daisy in another section of the corral for the week leading up to her due date so I could keep a close eye on her. Since I wanted to continue to monitor Daisy and since Baby is healing so well, I opened up the two sections in the corral so that Daisy and Baby were together, and we brought in the ancient matriarch cow, who is over 20 years old and a total badass, and one orphaned calf, whose mother died this spring, to join Daisy and Sir Baby in the corral.

The Matriarch was part of the Special Project cows who roamed the home place, but since it’s been so dry, we moved the Special Project bunch, including Fiona and Frisco, to grassier pastures just down the road. Though the matriarch can get around surprisingly well, trailing her to the new pasture with the rest of the group seemed a bit much. She has been a strong, gentle presence in the corrals with Daisy. The orphan calf has been weaned for two months since he lost his mother, but I had hopes that he and Daisy might connect. Unfortunately, he wasn’t at all interested in milk anymore. The most essential part of making an unmatched cow-calf pair is the calf’s drive to nurse. You can help manipulate all the other elements, but you can’t force that. When I saw that connection was futile, I told my vet that I was looking for a bum calf ~ it’s not the season for calves, but one never knows what might pop up and my vet is hooked into everything.

But back to Sir Baby and Daisy for a moment. For new readers, I bought Daisy from a dairy. She’d calved about three months before I got her, so she was in milk, and she was bred back (pregnant with Frisco). Cows are mammals, not machines, and must have a calf annually in order to make milk. Dairy protocol is to remove the calves from their mothers immediately (veal is a “by-product” of the dairy industry), so Daisy had never raised a calf when I got her. I was pretty overwhelmed with milking when I got Daisy, and I wanted a bum calf to help me with the excess milk. A neighbor happened to have a freakish love triangle occur with some of his cows ~ one cow had a calf, and all was normal. Then another cow had twins and accepted one of them, which is also normal. The first cow abandoned her calf and adopted the other twin! Very weird. But it was fate. That abandoned calf was Sir Baby. I still remember going to pick him up and sitting with him in the backseat of Mike’s truck on the ride home. Daisy was NOT interested in being a mother when I introduced them; she didn’t know, she had only been milked by machines, and then by me. But baby Sir Baby was determined to nurse, and after about a week, Daisy clicked into motherhood and she and Sir Baby still have an incredible bond to this day ~ they are family. In the days following her calf’s death, I’d often find Daisy licking Sir Baby’s neck and shoulders, tending to him as her first son, and the connection they share seemed to really help Daisy with the absence of her newest calf.

My vet called me on Thursday afternoon announcing he had a calf waiting for me to pick up. Buying bum calves at the sale ring is risky business because you generally don’t know what their first hours and days were like ~ how was the birth? Did they get colostrum? So many factors can affect whether a calf becomes a strong, healthy youngster or expires early, as proven with Daisy’s calf. But the stars aligned in this case ~ a rancher brought two dozen “cull cows” to the sale barn on Wednesday night for Thursday’s sale. Some of these cows were pregnant, and one of them had her baby that night, between midnight and 6 am. Cull cows are generally fine cows, just older ~ as I’ve written before, most ranchers sell their cows when they reach a certain age. Older cows are generally excellent mothers, so it’s likely this calf nursed and got her first dose of colostrum right after the birth. My vet bought the calf for me before the sale began, and I’m grateful beyond words that this cow’s last act was to provide Daisy and me with her beautiful baby. I had given my vet a gallon of Daisy’s colostrum as a thank you for coming out in the middle of the night to help with Daisy’s breech birth, so she was bottle fed Daisy’s colostrum throughout the day until Mike and I got there to pick her up.

Daisy was less than thrilled. Cows have very strong instincts to not allow any calf but their own to nurse ~ doing so would jeopardize their own baby, and this instinct carries even when that baby dies. So, twice a day, I put Daisy in the head catch with a bunk full of gourmet hay and let the calf drink her fill before I milked. A head catch is not a torture device ~ it’s a levered metal apparatus that closes around a cow’s neck but doesn’t actually touch her. Cow’s necks are wide when viewed from the side but incredibly narrow when viewed from above. The head catch has two curved panels that close around the cow’s neck but leave a hole ~ if you touch your pointer fingers together and your thumbs together, this is the shape of the hole it leaves. It’s not tight against the cow’s narrow neck but she can’t pull her wide head through the opening. I use this every day when I milk; it keeps Daisy comfortable but relatively still.

I wasn’t worried about this routine lasting forever, as Daisy and I went through this exact process with Sir Baby when he was a calf ~ at first, Daisy would only stand for him in the head catch, but after about a week, something switched inside Daisy and he was HERS. And today, that switch happened again. I went to the corral this morning and saw that one of Daisy’s teats was already pulled down (all the milk in that quarter had been drunk) and the calf was full and dozing. We have a love match! The calf is amazing ~ she adored Daisy from the start ~ and she’s huge. At one day old she looked like she was a month old, and now at a week old she looks three months old. She has her health, she has a new mother, and now all she needs is a name!

You Win Some. You Lose Some.

Daisy calved Saturday night ~ she had a breech birth and it was hard and horrible and I thought I might lose her. My vet came out to assist and, against all odds, the calf was born alive.

He was up and nursing after the birth, and bouncing around the next morning, nursing on one of Daisy’s front teats as I milked the back ones. But he started failing that evening, and though we did everything we could, he died two days later.

What can you say about a baby calf who died? {Who knows the book whose first line I just slightly altered?} I can’t really scream and cry about things being unfair, because in the last six weeks, Sir Baby and Daisy have been thisclose to death and pulled through beautifully. But it’s still terribly sad.

Nobody Puts Baby In The Corner

Tweet from July 15: Sir Baby is feeling better ~ he gently tossed Mike into the water tank tonight. SO FUNNY.

Why did Sir Baby toss Mike into the water tank? Because he could! I took it as an enormous compliment, because Baby never pulls that kind of stunt with me. And he could, if he wanted to. And it shows, yet again, just how intelligent and clever these animals are. It was SO deliberate. A gentle plop. God, I love him, and Mike, too, for being such a good sport.

He didn’t hurt Mike at all (except for a bruised ego); he simply hooked his head under Mike’s left ass cheek, lifted him up – ever so slightly – then tilted his head and Mike was in the water tank. And I burst out laughing. And Baby calmly looked at me to say, “Who’s your Baby? Who’s your Number 1?”

Baby is healing well. Part two of my homemade hoof treatment is a salve ~ I’d never made a salve before, but once Sir Baby’s infection finished draining, I wanted something else to put on the wound to keep it soft and protected and to aid in healing. Back to the internet to learn from the masters.

I infused cold pressed organic olive oil with comfrey and calendula, then strained the oil and mixed it with beeswax and added a little lavender oil and calendula blossoms. I slather this on Baby’s wound twice a day. It has kept the cut from scabbing, allowing him to heal from the inside out ~ a slow process but far better in the long run.

I dabbed some on a nasty barb wire cut I had on my hand (that had already scabbed over), and the next day, the scab fell off, and the day after that, the cut was closed and pink. Now I can’t even find a scar. Miraculous stuff. And it smells DIVINE.

HOLY COW!

We did it!!! The first year of Star Brand Beef is sold out! Wow and yeehaw and thank you! This is really profound and exciting. I have a few unpaid invoices (everyone has until Monday) so if you were hoping to get in on it, email me and I’ll put you on a wait list in case any of the remaining orders fall through.

Other tidbits ~ Sir Baby is improving daily. His wound is still in the healing process and, with this kind of injury, it’s a long process. But I see daily improvement and he’s in great spirits. Thanks so much for your well wishes!

There was a fire here, though nothing remotely close to what’s going on in Colorado, and I do have pics and a post written but haven’t had a moment to
type it up (I hand write everything). Coming soon…..

AND: I’ll be doing some behind the scenes work on the Daily Coyote blog so it will be down for a period of time over the weekend ~ not to worry! My computer genius web man is fixing up some back end stuff and we’ll have it up again asap.