NOT SO LUCKY THIS TIME

It's spring in Saskatchewan - the wind is howling in from the west and what snow we have is disappearing fast under the combined power of sun and warm winds. I hung clothes out on the line to dry today - that's a rite of spring for sure - and when I went out to bring them in later on in the afternoon I heard a Meadow Lark singing. There is sleet coming down tonight, but the prairie people know - the worst is behind us now.

Not that we wouldn't love at least a foot of wet, heavy snow before the final melt. It's only with snow melt and runoff that we will fill up the dugouts. They are pretty low already after a dry fall last year, and if the spring runoff doesn't fill them up now, it's going to take a lot of rain to bring the water table up to replenish them through the summer. Something that's not liable to happen in this neck of the woods.

We spent the afternoon out trying to fill up the bale feeders and spread straw for bedding before the ground gets too muddy for the tractor to be able to move the bales around. It rained and snowed all day Good Friday so Glen has already had to go out and give the open shed extra bedding to keep the little calves warm and dry - we don't want to lose any of them to pneumonia, we're having bad enough luck with this year's new babies as it is.

This will not go down in history as a good calving spring - although we are hoping that the worst is behind us now. So far we have lost two cows and seven calves and we can only blame one of those losses on a coyote; all the rest were physical problems with birthing. The two cows had such hard times that they prolapsed their uteruses. It never should have happened but we weren't expecting any babies for another two weeks. We're not really sure why, but a lot of our neighbors have reported the same thing - that their cows are early this year. Does a really cold winter stress them into shortening their gestation? Who knows, but by the time we clued into their revised timetable, we had lost two cows and their calves.

The next biggest problem is that the first to calve are our heifers - first time mothers. Last year not one of them had any problems and this year it seems like they all are. They are not too sure what's going on, or how to take care of the little darlings once they're born - hence the coyote treating himself to an uninvited breakfast.

Yesterday was the worst though. We had been away the day before so the evening check was done in the dark. Glen saw that there was one Mama starting to calve but thought she was an older cow and left her to do her own thing. Come morning he discovered that it was a heifer and that she certainly needed help if she hadn't got anywhere on her own in 10 hours. We caught her, tied her up, and Glen investigated to see what the trouble was. It was a complete breach - they are supposed to come front feet first, right side up, with the noses laying on their knees. All Glen could feel was the tail so he had to work the back feet out, attach the puller and we delivered a dead calf. Poor little guy had been too long without oxygen. We left the mother to recooperate and went back to the house. A few hours later Glen returned to find her still in labor - here it had been twins all along, which would have been a contributing factor to why the first baby was backwards - but we never even thought of it. We helped the poor thing with the second delivery but it was dead too. Could we have saved it if we had known it was there? Who knows, but we sure weren't feeling very competent by this stage of the game.

We decided that we were going to skip Easter dinner at my sister's place and stay home to intervene in one more heifer birth. It didn't seem to be a big deal - she was just taking a little too long and we were pretty gun shy by this time. There's no explaining what went wrong with her - the calf wasn't overly big, she had only shown signs of labor for a short while, and baby was pointed the right direction, but it was just as dead as the other two. What a sad, frustrating day! As we were cleaning up after this last episode Glen turned to me and said "I'm going for a drink! How about you?" Glen is not a drinker; I didn't quite know what to make of that.

What he meant was enough was enough - let's head into town and visit with the relatives after all. I was glad we did - at least the day ended with good company and dessert. It sure as heck beat staying home and going over and over the "what if's" all night.

There is at least one bright spot in this calving season so far - I wish this picture was a little brighter, but you can see that we do have one set of twins - alive and enjoying life. Hopefully everybody born from now on will follow suit.

JUST PLAIN LUCKY

I hadn't realized that I hadn't put a footnote onto my last entry announcing the happy news that we had solved our water problems. After a mere two days of hauling water to the feeders Glen decided that he had nothing to lose if he should take a few old flax straw bales down to the dugout, position them over where the pipes are and set the straw on fire. If the heat actually made its way down into the ground and thawed the pipes out he would be the happiest farmer in the country, if it didn't he was out a few old, crumbling bales.

It was kind of tricky getting the bales to where they needed to be - he even had to drive the tractor (weighed down with the extra 1200 pounds of bale) out on the ice of the dugout to position it on the bank where the heat was needed. I didn't go down to watch that operation - I'm a scaredy-cat - but I kept telling myself that with the intense cold we've had this winter, surely the ice was a foot thick, at least. He burned the first two during the day, put two more down there to burn through the night and called me the next morning when I was at work to announce that it had worked and we had water again!

Then he went back down to the dugout, kicked all the smoldering straw away until he was sure that the fire was out and spread some more straw on top to act as insulation for the pipes for the rest of the winter. He acted a little too quickly, though. The wind picked up, unseen sparks were fanned to flames, and just for a little extra insurance those bales burnt as well. The whole area is now covered with straw and everything seems to be fine. I know we talked about doing that last winter, but we didn't give it a try. I asked Glen why that was, and he said "Someone told me it wouldn't work." Glad we didn't rely on that advice two years in a row.

The sun is shining bright this afternoon, and the sky above is a brilliant blue, but horizontally speaking, you can't see a thing. We received a few inches of snow late last week and Mother Nature has been blowing it around ever since. The wind came up last night and it's been howling around the house all day long. The yard was a little hard to get out of this morning when I went in to church, and harder still to get through the snow banks when I came back home. I almost side-swiped the gate sign on the way in - that would have been a pity! I've told Glen he'll be clearing a path for me so I can go to work tomorrow morning but there is no use to do anything now - it would just blow back in again.

There seems to be a general countdown going on these days as to how many days there are left before spring. I don't think there is an area of Canada that doesn't feel like enough is enough this year. I sat down and filled out my seed and nursery order yesterday - it's just time to think about things that are green. I also have to get planning what will go where to spiff the place up with Jesse and Andrew's wedding coming closer every day. It's just been this past week or so that I've begun to get excited about seeing everyone who will be coming to help us celebrate.