Cows and calves in Upper Big Gulch
Tag Archives: calves
Calves after snow
Cows and calves with Battle Mountain
Calf, posing
Sheep Mountain with a frost of snow
Lucky Butte over the Little Snake
Cowboy crew–Rhen, Eamon, Cody, Brittany, Brenden, Amy, McCoy, Megan, Amy
First calves
Baby calf on the ground
Well, we weren’t quite expecting two new calves just yet. It might have something to do with those enterprising bulls that kept getting out last summer.
Heading for the trees
Shipping the steer calves
Calves, heading to the scales
Once a cook told me, “When Sharon said things would slow down after the summer, I didn’t realize that summer lasted until November!”. Well, it’s true–in my mind, the busy season begins when we start the sheep on the trail in mid-April and comes to an end when we ship the calves in the fall. The work doesn’t really end then–we still have to pregnancy-test the cows and trail the sheep to their winter country, but it really does slow down a lot. By now, all but the most die-hard hunters have gone, the sheepherders have gone back to their camps after a month or so around the ranch headquarters, and the cows are settling into their winter pastures. We still have some heifer calves to sell, but we have just put the steer calves on a truck. Their buyer is feeding them in Nebraska this winter. This means that we listen to several nights of mama cows calling for their babies, although the older cows know their calves are gone, and that their job is to nurture the calves in their bellies. We have few quiet nights this time of year, as we wean first the lambs, then the calves. We have a lot of guard dogs around until the winter bunches are settled in, so lots of barking accompanies the night song. Often the coyotes will taunt them, setting off a chorus of barking and howling that would put the Hound of the Baskervilles to shame. Soon enough, winter’s quiet will set in, with only the creaking of the ice and the caw of crows to break the cold silence.
Calves waiting to be weighed
Cows, separated
Where ARE those calves?!
Slim, Pat and Eamon at the scales
McCoy double-checking the weights
Rhen and McCoy supervising
Brittany and Sadie working the cows
Cows with Flattop
Calves: summertime, and the livin’ is easy
Pairs grazing on the Routt National Forest
Cow with her AI calf
Happy calves
Spring calves under three mountains
Keeping an eye on the babies
The baby calves continue to arrive, keeping us and their moms busy. We have had, blessedly, a wet spring. We’ve gotten lots of wet overnight snows which melt into the ground the next day. As one of our irrigators said, “God gets all the high spots.”
Luckily, this weather has not been to stormy or windy, so it hasn’t hurt our calving. We did get a really wet snow today. It closed Interstate 80, but aminly gave us more water in the ground and in the streams. Our friends on down the Colorado River should be happy. It was this time last year that we had a killer storm that killed both calves and lambs, so we are grateful for wet weather that’s not too severe.
We are enjoying the return of the birds. Some are migrating through and some are coming to spend the summer. When we check the cows, lots of birds are in attendance. The cry of the Sand Hill cranes accompanies the calls of the mama cows and the baby calves.
in the Lemmons meadow
Baldie calf with Sheep Mountain
Cows and calves under Battle Mountain
Squaw Mountain
Steers in the morning, heifers in the afternoon
Cows at Elephant corrals
When the cows and their calves come off of the summer National Forest grazing permits, it is time to sort them. We pregnancy test the cows, and sort out the opens, and the cows who won’t make it another year at our high altitude. Some will go on to slaughter, and some will go on to homes where the wintering conditions are easier. We sort the heifers from the steers. The steers are all sold, and go on to feed and eventually become steaks. The heifers are sorted into replacement heifers for us, replacement heifers for other ranchers, and fed heifers.
Cows with Squaw Mountain
Eamon sorting
Seamus and Maeve, helping
Sharon and Siobhan, with extra horsepower
Jim, Tiarnan, Clyde and his mom Peanut
Cows coming into the Home Ranch corral
Eamon and McCoy looking through Dirte’s ears
April is (again!) the cruelest month
Our prayers were answered, and April has brought us showers, sort of. A week and a half of blizzards, wind and freezing weather has brought us blessed moisture, but at a terrible cost. We know–really we do–that a foot of wet snow will bring us green grass in a few weeks. We had begun to despair of much-needed moisture, and were trying to figure out how to get through the summer with dry conditions and no feed left over from last year.
While these storms have brought us up to above 100 per cent on our snowpack, they came while many of our neighbors were calving on the open range. We are calving some of our cows and heifers, and shed lambing our purebred sheep, Hampshire and Rambouillet, which we raise our own bucks from. The winds were so high, and variable that it crept in every crack in the lambing sheds. The oldest shed has a lot of cracks, which we usually figure are good for air circulation (less respiratory ills). This time, for the first time I can remember, lambs actually died from the weather, in the shed.
On the Red Desert we were getting ready to trail out, but the high winds caused the sheep to blow out, and mix with a neighboring herd. It took a few days to gather them up and sort them out, but they were finally able to “hit the trail” for the lambing ground.
We also lost several calves to the severe weather, but again, we had shelter nearby and I know that our losses were not nearly as bad as some of our neighbors who range calve. Several of them said that they won’t know their losses until they gather the cows for branding.
The storms have done us more good than harm, because no moisture means no summer feed. Some nice warm rains would be nice.
dead lamb in the lambing shed
Cows and sheep huddled against the fences
Snow-covered dead lamb
Live (!) calf in the calving barn
Loader with dead lambs (wrong date on Richar’s camera!)
Pregnant ewes sheltering in front of the lambing shed
Ladder Ranch
