Newborns and an ATV

Tuesdays are quickly becoming the most demanding day of the week.  We start picking bright and early for the Bozeman market and for Crazy View's online orders.  That means picking, cleaning, bagging, packing the truck and, for Laurie and Sara, a long night at the market.


By the time we finished, we had the most spicy salad mix we've ever picked - nearly 40 1/2lb bags, bags of spinach and arugula and a dozen each of the four kinds of head lettuce.  We also had a few dozen fresh eggs care of Dave, who risked pecking to fetch them from the coop.

After Laurie and Sara set off for Bozeman around 3, Billy invited us over to Muddy Creek Ranch to bottle feed a calf and meet the newest colt, born today.

The colt was born just eight hours before.  The momma was a wild horse that the folks at Muddy Creek bought at auction when a nearby ranch with 800 horses went into foreclosure.  She was pregnant at the time and they really didn't know when she would birth - horse gestation is just over 11 months.

Since she's wild, she's never been broke and probably has never been touched.  But they had to keep tabs on the baby colt.  She delivered sometime around 7am.  The colt must stand up and walk within 20 minutes of birth or else it's in trouble and needs to be helped up so they've been keeping close watch. Billy told us that if the colt doesn't stand by then, it'll be behind in development most of it's life and many ranchers will give up or shoot it.

After seeing the baby, we headed over to the barn to help feed the calf.  The calf's mom, according to Billy, is a nutbag.  She's gone crazy and has been trying to kill the calf by headbutting it and hasn't been nursing it.  So they got the calf out of the pen and have taken to bottle feeding it.  Apparently that's not uncommon behavior from a mom that loses it but they can often figure out a way that she can still feed by putting her in a shoot so the baby can still milk or by milking another mom.

When we got back to the farm, we whipped up dinner and then went for a ride on the ATV!  Billy brought the ATV over from Muddy Creek because one of the calves jumped over a fence at Crazy View and was separated from it's mom (there's about 50 head of MC cattle in the pasture here).  So after they did the hard work of wrangling the calf, we got all the fun of driving it around the fields.

We ended the longest day of the year with a lovely sunset over the Bridgers and called it a day.  Happy Summer Solstice!