Thursday and Friday brought new life on the farm.  Kids were born in all their tiny wonderment.  Today brought sadness as a first time calver had problems birthing and the calf passed despite our best efforts.  Fortunately we were home to assist.  Now we can only hope and pray that the cow survives the ordeal and heals properly.  We’ve been raising cattle for about 14 years and we’ve only lost a couple of calves.  It doesn’t get any easier.  We’ve had much worse happen to us, but it still makes me emotional.  I know some people believe that animals don’t have feelings, but I know deep in my heart that they do.  Our other cows were gathering around the cow that was down and in their own way comforting her.  The bull was trying to charge us to protect her and came up to her and rubbed heads with her.  The others lowered their head to hers as if to say, I’m here with you, everything will be ok.  I know it sounds crazy, I guess you had to be there.

Buck and Doe kids born 4/10/2008

And his twin.

And their half sister born just hours ago on 4/11/2008.

But here she is.  Number 1 calf of the season.  I have better ones of her, but I just thought that tongue sticking out was so cute!  We’re still waiting for the rest. 

He was on the outside looking in yesterday and the kids were the only ones home to put him back! He can be quite grumpy too. All ended well though, thank goodness!

Mr. Bird cut a small field next door to us on Tuesday. There’s a threat of rain today, or we would have square baled the field today. Instead, since Mr. Bird now works full time, he round baled yesterday. He got 4 round bales, which would have given us about 80 square bales. Excellent hay though. Fresh and smells fantastic .

This working full time for him is going to really mess up hay season!

Our lower field is relatively small, but we should get over 100 square bales off of it because it is so thick this year. Last year wasn’t so good. We definitely need square bales. It’s just harder for us to do them because of the time constraint and lack of help. We try to put up about 500 bales a year. We only got around 300 last year. Hopefully we’ll do better this year.

Count is currently 4 bull calves and 1 heifer calf. Today’s calf is a bull (for now) and we’re naming him Tucker.

It’s calving season. 4 down and 4 to go.