coming in….spring weather, supposed to start raining any time and switch to snow this evening and thru’ the night and the wind with gusts up in the 20’s… which ain’t too bad, but this time of the year I don’t trust weather forecasts much… any other time of the year it isn’t such a big deal if they get it wrong, but with these babies coming we need to be prepared…soooo….I fed a bale close to the house this morning to lure all the cows in that were east…Chance and Hope and kids worked on some fences and watched the calves and let cows come back out of the hog pasture that acted like they had calves still out east while I went to Mass… then after lunch I ran the horses in and Chance and i took a bale up west and left a little to those cows that were up there in case they had calves up the creek and choose to stay… left some more of the bale in the lane for the pairs in there and then saddled up fresh horses and rode out and brought all the babies and their mama’s from the east pasture and into the lane with the other pairs. One ol’ cow was storming around wanting a calf, but I decided she was just grannying and was going to calf so we locked her in a dry corral where when she does calve she will have protection and won’t be bothering the other cows and calves… I will go out before dark and roll out some more hay to the drop bunch and then we will just watch them as close as needs be thru’ the night, depending on how tuff the weather gets… should ride up the creek later and make sure any babies up there with their mom’s are okay also…hope we get good moisture out of this… here’s a few photo’s of bringing the pairs in…
UPDATE.. 7 pm…We went out and rode this evening and checked on the cattle up the creek, so far no bad weather at 7 pm.. just look at these goomers I had to ride with… 😉
Then the little one insisted on riding in the tractor with me when I fed the last bale of the day!
Dennisranch 
EVery now and then we get a cow that does that, but we never knew what to call them. Now we do. We had a whole family of them over the years…old 20, Black Berry, then Zinnia, they all stole every calf they could get and pestered calving cows something fierce. We had to keep Zinnia in the barn when any others were calving. Those cows are all gone now, but we have Zinnia’s daughter. Wonder if she will make things difficult this summer.
We always used to calve in a small pasture, maybe 20 acres, right behind the house and fought grannying cows. I have a neighbor who always gave me a hard time and told me if we calved in a larger pasture we would have better luck, with everything to do with calving… problem was, in the pasture with the best protection, there is usually enough water along the creek that you would lose a calf or two or three from being born next to a creek and falling in the water and either drowning or freezing…that is why my father built this small pasture…. when I took over and took in a herd on shares, I ended up going east with cows, which is scary as most of our storms blow from the north west and you have to pay attention to the weather and make sure you have them in close as it is so hard to move babies into a stormy wind…turns out my neighbor was right, cows are meant to be out in larger pastures so they can go off by themselves to calve…as we domesticated them I think we saved calves from cows who “granny” and we’ve bred this into them… a man should cull like Mother Nature and then we’d have quite a few less problems… of course, we would not have any milk cows who give the amount of milk like your cows do and wee would not have range cows that weigh 1500 pounds and wean off 600 pound calves, either… 😉 Oh, and we still have grannying cows, tho we are mostly in larger pastures….but not as many or as bad….