Splish Splash, We had a Calf!
Boy Howdee, the Farm Hit Hard This Weekend.
It is exciting to see the land waking up around us, a feature that I never realize I am missing until it is happening. Everything is growing, the days are getting warm enough to work in short sleeves, and while we are about to have a whole lot of little chicks to focus on, the little calf Bella is carrying is the one we are most anxious and excited about.
Speaking of Bella, she is about to POP! I won’t sit here with minor lower back pain on a Wednesday and say that when I pull up to the house from my day job, I swing the truck door wide open, shove my kids out of the way, juke around my wife’s open embrace, and sprint to the Pregnancy Palace to check up on my four-legged queen. That doesn’t happen. I DO spend a lot more time than I ever thought I would staring at her teats and backside, trying to judge if anything has changed.
I swear I see her roll her eyes when she sees me coming.
Honestly, I have very little idea of what to look for other than mucus and swelling, and both of those things are present, so…yeah, it would be cool if she would just pop that little calf out. Two days ago, I thought we had gotten lucky and she had come early because I saw Bella in the PP (Pregnancy Palace) and then I saw movement beside her. I didn’t sprint (it was more of a late 30’s jaunt), but it was all for naught because it was just a stupid chicken who laughed the whole way down the hill she made her escape on.
As this is our first calf that hasn’t been beef, we ended up taking several extra steps that I believe has left us feeling a little more confident as we head into this. One of the things that Kayla and I have always liked to do with anything farm-related is read books. We ended up snagging two books by author Heather Smith Thomas, and while I have only glanced through them and at the gruesome “pregnancy complications” sections, Kayla has consumed the books and marked up different sections about calving and what to do/expect for the first few days.
We were wrong about being prepared.
Freya arrived both quite quickly and to quite the crowd. My in-laws and Kayla were at the top of the hill and saw the whole thing. I was working inside when Ezri came running in and told me that hooves were showing! By the time we both got outside, she was out. It was that quick and easy (said every guy ever).
Bella did her thing and cleaned the calf quickly and efficiently as the slippery brown blessing flopped about and wondered what just happened. We were all in amazement at the beauty of life and congratulated the mama, toasted ourselves on a job well done, and let them be for a few hours before guiding them uphill and securing them into the PP.
Kayla left that evening to fly out to Pennsylvania to see our new nephew and be the first one to “smell his scent." I don't know; it is a weird Carver thing her side of the family does. After she had left, I went and checked on both baby and momma, and they were both lying down. Awesome!
The following morning, I made it outside around 7 a.m. and went to check on Freya and Bella, and as soon as I laid eyes on Bella, I knew something was wrong. Kay and I had planned for if something went wrong, and I had called and talked to a vet a month earlier about our location, the cow, and all that. Phew, okay, crisis averted.
They came out within an hour, IV'd her in the neck after shaving a sick-looking lightning bolt for a clean spot, and fed her body a bunch of calcium, followed by two things they shot down her throat that I don't feel right calling calcium pills. Maybe pillars, but not pills.
She did perk right up. Her eyes went from seeing the ferry man on the river, hand outstretched and asking for payment, to staring at my stupidly grinning bearded face. Milk fever. Her body took all the calcium and dumped it into milk production, causing her to go down to the ground and weakening her severely.
Queue the forehead slap because I had read and read about milk fever, and it had never occurred to me to just give her calcium in anticipation of this problem. I thought she would have looked tired, but not call-the-priest-over-to-her-bedside kind of ill.
The vets left after assuring me that she should be up within a couple of hours. Unfortunately, they were wrong. I called them shortly before noon, and they said that she was being lazy and needed some encouragement to arise, and that getting her down the hill to flat ground was preferable for her footing.
I rolled her down the hill, all 100 feet of it. The INDIGNATION could be seen in her eyes as I would grab one hock and leg and tug to get her positioned where and how I thought I could best get her down hill, and then lever and push her to perform a barrel roll. Once she was down at the bottom of the hill, she started eating any grass that was around her and within reach, so I gave her an hour to get her footing again, put her baby with her, and let her find her land legs.
It was right around this time that Support Team Alpha showed up—the Hyer family. They brought food for us for dinner; I think Ashley might have milked Cozy that evening for me, and all three of us poked, prodded, cussed, begged, petted, slapped, tail pulled, harness tugged, lead rope yanked, and electro-fenced that cow in an attempt to get her up, and yet, down she stayed.
Why all the work? The vet had also told me earlier that a downed cow is a dead cow after 48 hours because of permanent nerve damage to their hind quarters from lack of blood flow. We were probably around hour 12–16 into her being down by the time we called it that evening.
With night falling, I sent the Hyers back home with much thanks and assurances both ways that things would be fine and she would be up in the morning. Ashley would be out first thing in the morning to milk too, which was a relief. I was tired and defeated, but fortunately Support Team Bravo showed up in the form of my mother, who had planned on visiting anyway. The calf ended up spending her second night out of the womb in our laundry room; there was no way I was risking her while momma was down.
The following morning, I got up early with hope that Bella would be up, but she was not. I went down with an extension cord and milking accoutrements to milk her out so we didn't add mastitis to my list of problems and because I wanted to capture as much milk for the baby in the event that things went poorly.
Support Team Alpha was there bright and early with donuts and a willingness to Move! That! Cow!
We needed a way to get her rear legs off the ground and her standing. I don't have a tractor, and it is wet and muddy down at the bottom of the hill, so that meant something we could do by hand. Zach and I went to the stockpile my father-in-law has accrued over his decades of contractor work and found scaffolding, piping, and a plan that began to form.
It started with a hand winch, but that just wasn't quite what we were looking for, nor did it work. Zach had a fall chain, a device that uses gears and chains to allow people to lift very heavy objects in small increments, and he brought that over along with his father. We ended up having to add more height to the scaffolding, and with that, we were finally able to get her standing by supporting her chest and rump while lifting.
In Victoria Sustuli Bovem!
It was terrific! She thirstily drank probably 7 gallons of water, which was the first liquid I hadn't forced into her via a throat tube system called a drench. It didn't last long though; she got rambunctious after being up for about 10 minutes, slipped her rump hoop, and fell back to the soil.
We tried that same method five or more other times, only to eventually have the giant pole we were using as the support beam to pull her up fall down and narrowly miss really hurting Zach, myself, or Bella. It was really close. It is now probably hour 28ish, maybe a bit more, and once again, we are unsure how to get this cow up.
Easy: call in Support Team Charlie, followed by Delta, who has to call in Echo to pull Delta out of the mud.
My friend Derick’s family is historically in dairy cattle on the west side of Modesto. He had texted me earlier that day, offering anything he could get from his dad’s dairy. I took him up on it, and when I called him and described what I was looking for, he was hesitant to say his dad had one because he wasn't familiar with the term, but he would look. An hour later, Derick is coming down the hillside carrying an absolutely medieval-looking device called hip clamps, and he brought me another calcium pillar and the gun that I have stick down Bella’s throat to deliver said pillar.
A LOT of throat stuff this weekend. Fun side note: the inside of a cow’s mouth is not cute and adorable. It is weird and…oh I don’t know, bumpy and tendrily at the same time? It is weird; that suffices, I guess.
My father-in-law called my uncle-in-law (S.T. Delta), who has a Bobcat, a kind heart, and willingness to help people. He showed up not long after Derick, and despite knowing he would most likely get himself into a pickle trying to get to Bella, he tried anyway. He got stuck stuck, which is a term used in my family since I was a kid, and it means that one is more than stuck; they are stuck stuck.
No one ever came back from a stuck stuck stuck.
As everyone dug around the excavator, trying to make some kind of difference other than watching it sink more, Delta reached out to Echo, an old buddy from high school. He brought an excavator out to pull the bobcat out of the mud and also lift Bella, who was sliding further and further away as she tried to eat green grass…yes, I did want to kill her.
I put the hip clamps on her, the words of the sage YouTuber I had just watched advising “tight, because you don’t want to chip her pelvic bone, but not too tight where it breaks one of her hips when she is lifted” echoing in my brain. I was really excited about that vague margin, be assured; however, it was 5:30 p.m. and around hour 40 of her being down, and she either gets up or she doesn’t.
The elation I felt at getting this stupid bovine up and on her feet was underwhelming. I was excited, as you can see in the picture, but I am just now processing through it all as I write this. In my soul I was ready to have to bury that cow. I didn’t sleep much Saturday night, but when she was up and eating Sunday morning, I carried Freya down to her and just sat and watched them nuzzle for a while. It was good. It was really, really good.
I think Derick said it best when he said, “She’s not dairy cow number 9696. That’s Bella, and she’s your sweet dairy cow.”
He’s right. It took the village to raise the cow, and a lot of people worried and prayed right alongside those of us who were physically trying to get her up. I owe a debt of gratitude to the people that came together to make it happen, and I know that they were here because of our relationships and their understanding of our lifestyle and beliefs. Community is a beautiful and wonderful thing.
The next cow is getting two Calcium pillars down the throat AS the calf is making its exit.
She is stinking cute!
What a rivetting and well-related story. Best to Bella and Freya, and high fives to your loving and helpful family and community!