Back Valley Ranch

First I would like to start with an update on little Tinker. I’m happy to report that Tinker is still alive and doing very well. For the first 48 hours she would barely raise her head and she looked like she was going to die at any second. Then she suddenly started jumping up and running all over the place. We just put her back with her mom Peanut today and we’re working on reuniting them. We got Tinker on Peanut and she had a real good suck. Tinker is definitely a miracle baby and I’ll continue giving you updates on her.

Speaking of miracles, I have another one of those stories. Let me introduce you to Ducky our lucky little cow. Last spring Jerry was walking around our yearlings and noticed that Ducky, who was one of the smallest and youngest yearlings out of the bunch, was getting not just fat, but really really wide. Like pregnant belly wide. This was very bad. Here we had a 500lb year and a half old heifer that was about to have a baby. Jerry figures she must of been bred by about 7 or 8 months old, this is highly unusual; especially for a small heifer.

Either way, we found ourselves in a situation. Ducky is so small, how was she going to have a baby herself. We brought her into the front yard, got the calf pullers ready and prepared ourselves for a very difficult birth. We just hoped that Ducky would survive but we were a little sceptical. Ducky kept us up for 2 weeks thinking that she was going to calve at any minute.

Now here’s the interesting part…not only did Ducky have the baby. She had it without assistance and didn’t require us to show her how to nurse the baby. Usually heifers need help when they first nurse because they don’t really know what to do. But not Ducky, she was an instant mother. We named the calf Lucky because he sure was a lucky boy to be alive. She’s done an awesome job at raising Lucky and he’s turned out to be a nice looking boy.

Despite her small size and the fact that she will remain stunted, we decided to keep breeding her. She obviously loves being a mom and she does such a good job. Needless to say we had our eye on Ducky this week knowing she was going to birth soon. Last year she had a small Hereford baby, but this year she was bred to an Angus which would mean a bigger baby. Ducky gave birth today to a healthy baby boy who we called Lotto. May as well continue with the lucky names.

We now have 16 babies born in just 6 days. That’s quite a few. Jerry and I are looking forward to things slowing down a little and maybe getting some sleep. But we love having all the babies around.