Like Spring

The calf is drinking up healthy colostrum by the half gallon, and feeling fine.
Laura's new hens started laying luxurious dark brown eggs yesterday.
The bitter cold is over for now, and the days, at least, are warming back up.
Now I can believe that spring will come.
Off to order seeds...

Calf Crib

Here's the calf's playpen.
He's on the front porch in a wind-proof corner, with a tarp around three sides and the top. The hay keeps him warm, as do the T-shirt and Becky's windbreaker coat.
Snowflake was in a big hurry to make friends with him.
He downed his second bottle tonight.
After tomorrow morning, if he's still thriving, I'll have no worries about him.
Those first 24 hours, whether dam-raised or bottle-fed, are the toughest.

Superbowl Snow

I know that you can't see it well in the pictures, but it's bright and sunny and snowing hard!
It even stuck in the few minutes that it came down.
This was a very unusual weather event for us.

Bottle Calf

Becky successfully pulled the calf away from Penny and got him on the bottle.
Penny's acting ok with the whole thing. I know she still misses him for now.
He seems to wander back toward his birthplace when we let him on the yard for a potty break, but I don't believe that he has any particular longing for his real mom.
Penny gave about three gallons this evening. Becky brought a gallon and a half up here, and Penny had spilled about the same amount.
Momma would get a little anxious about her son during milking, but Becky would tell her soothingly, "It's ok, Penny." and she would settle right down.
We're not storing any colostrum because we don't have any upcoming babies on the farm. What he doesn't drink, we'll feed to the pigs.
He's taking the bottle like a champ now.
He's been sold to our friends for a beef steer and will leave next week (or the week after.) Becky will have an abundance of milk after he leaves!

Penny's Birth Blog (Finally)

Penny was due in January.
I've spent many hours over the last two weeks down at the barn overnight, in case the calf showed up. The reasons behind my expectations were the show of mucous that she started having in late January and her unbearably tight udder (unbearable for me, but apparently fine for her.)
Becky, who owns the cow and calf, wanted to whisk him away from Penny immediately, before she could lick him, but she was too fast for us! Dan and I didn't have the heart to take him from her after the licking, but Becky did, so he never nursed from Mom, just from the bottle.
We'd been keeping Penny in her stall at night for warmth and easy finding, and letting her graze in the west field all day.
When we got home from church today and she wasn't out in the field, I grabbed the towels from her barn and ran to the woods.
Here is what we found...
I like the second picture of Becky's midwifery because of the trust and friendship that you can see exists between them.
I'd estimate 15 minutes between the first and last pictures.
When I had found her, the tips of his hooves were visible, so a total of about a half hour from my first glimpse of hooves.

He weighed 60 pounds. If she'd had a littler heifer, I think the time would have been much shorter.

In the last photo, Becky isn't pulling, just waiting to receive him.

Woodland Vole Arena

This is "Willy," a woodland vole who was found by Tom and brought almost unscathed to the house.  
The girls kept her indoors overnight for observation.
When I suggested the next morning that maybe the vole would do better without the stress of being played with, Katie answered, "We're just watching her in the arena."
The video shows the vole in her arena, and here is a pretty picture of her munching on a carrot.  
She was released right after this, and we expect her to do fine back in the wild.
Till Tom gets better at hunting.

Classy Kitten

When she was seated in her English class today, Katie told me, "This is Tom's first experience of starting a new chapter with me."
Tom promptly fell into a sleep so deep that it seemed more like a coma.
He's never going to have good grammar.