The Last Little While

 Over the last little while a lot has happened around here. We are down to four heifers to calve! Our cows are pretty much done too. It is very dry here, to the point of being concerning about our entire year. But, we are supposed to get some rain later this week, and are all holding our breathe that it actually comes through. We also got scours in our calves last weekend, which is practically unheard of here. After catching us very off guard, we got on the ball and I have been doctoring and monitoring this week.
My parents, brother and I have purchased a swanky trailer house for my brother and I to live in. I didn't know I could be so excited about a single wide trailer, but I am! The idea of my own bathroom and dedicated office space is something I am very grateful to have in my near future (we all really wish we could just move my Casper home out here). My brother and dad are staying plenty busy getting the water and sewer put in, before the gravel arrives that will elevate the trailer a few inches. We get serious flash floods around here (it's pretty much feast or famine in the rain department), and plan to attempt to divert water around our new home. We aren't looking to be floating down Dogie Creek the next time it does actually rain around here. New house, yes! New house boat, no!

I've been doing some traveling, and the sage grouse, turkeys and various other birds are in full strutting swing! It's like rush hour traffic on some gravel roads around here, and I've been at a complete stop more than once. I'll take this type of early morning traffic any day.

 One trip was to pick up two new Hereford bulls! We will be having a few more cute baldy calves next spring, and are very happy with how the bulls look in general too.

 Not so happy about the "genetic drift" seen in our calf crop this year. We should only have black calves, but have a few red ones that have been showing up. They may be the result of a neighbors bull, or one of our new "Registered Black Angus" bulls not quite being what he seems. I am investigating. Red I can deal with, but that grey one causes my blood pressure to rise. He just came to the feed ground for the first time yesterday, and I was less than impressed to see that one of our cows had managed to find a Charolais bull. Reds will fit on, but that guy is going to stick out that bad his entire life, and will most likely be unwanted by the buyer when we sell these guys in a year and a half.

On a happier note, here is a photo I found of my dad and I in my earlier days. I am using it in an upcoming Farm Bureau presentation, which is another project that has been coming together the last few days. It's always fun to look through old pictures and reminisce (not that I have a great memory of this time in my life).
Other than those few things, in the last month I've sent articles and photos to two new publications, and am working on multiple potential weddings to photograph this summer. Looking forward to meeting with some of the couples during a trip to Laramie for meetings later this week!
Hope all is well in all of your lives!

Treating Scours

Scours are diarrhea in calves, and can be caused by grass, too much milk, or more serious bacterial or viral issues, and are one of the leading health issues in baby calves were my uncle lives. If the bacterial or viral versions are left untreated in young calves, scours can lead to death. We treated several of his calves for scours while branding. Ranchers are always taking advantage of the opportunity to improve the health of their livestock, even if it isn't the primary job of the day.
We give calves a low-grade antibiotic and sulfur pill - think an Imodium AD pill for cattle, to treat this issue.


The process goes like this:

You pull back the cylinder of the pill gun, and put a pill in the end. It kind of sticks in there a little bit - you can just see the end of the pill in the above photo, and that the circle at the end is pulled out.

You want to give the calf the pill when his head is up, so we tip our chute back down after we're done branding the calf. This method works really well for us.

Kyle is our best pill-giver. He sticks a thumb in the corner of the calves mouth to open it. The calf is unaware of the benefits of the pill, and isn't necessarily excited about taking it, much like little kids and medicine.

He holds the calf's mouth open, and inserts the gun into its mouth and down it's throat.

He makes sure he keeps the gun sliding down the esophagus to the stomach, and not into the lungs. This is the tricky part that makes some people nervous, and he feels along the calf's mouth and neck as he guides the gun.

This same approach is used when tubing a calf. Tubing is when you run a special tube down a calf's throat, just like this. The tube is attached to a pouch of milk, and when you get the tube into the stomach, you allow the milk to pour into the calf's stomach. This is only done when the calf is too weak to drink milk, and is a last resort to save it's life. If you put the tube into the calf's lungs instead of his stomach, he will drown. The thought of drowning a calf makes a lot of people (especially ranch wives in my experience) nervous - they don't want to kill the calf. Kyle's level of skill in this area is much appreciated by everyone, and he can tube a calf very fast and efficiently too!



Once the gun is in place, he pushes that circle on the end, which forces the pill out of the gun and into the calf's throat, or stomach. He uses his leg to hold the calf's head still, and prevent it from trashing around. If you just put the pill in the calf's mouth, he would spit it out. We go through this necessary procedure to ensure the calf gets the medication it needs to recover from scours.

The Kyle gently pulls the gun out of the calf's mouth, and off it goes. Sometimes bad cases require multiple treatments, but a lot of times one pill will do the job in mild cases.