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.