SURPRISE!!!

Maggie turned out to be a great 'mother'- ing cow and unfortunately let Bindy's calf nurse this morning! EEK. So little Mr. Calf is no longer in with the milk cows but has his own buddy in a smaller pen. In the picture he is nursing Maggie (who's bag is much easier to get at) while Bindy licks him. Maggie would NOT leave him alone.

Papa got out of bed before me this morning and then came right back and told me I had to come see something. His voice was almost dull and so I got up right away and went and looked. He went to the kitchen window and I saw Chip in the sandbox and noted it.. nothing new there.. then he goes to the living room window.. and there is Bindy and Maggie.. and SURPRISE a little black calf. Maggie was licking him but I knew it was Bindys!! To back track a little bit Papa was not impressed for the same reason I was not. Bindy has a low bag, as you can see, and last week she stepped on her front left teat.. skinning the tip right off it. NASTY!! We've been quite worried that it would not heal in time for her calf.. and with her calf 3 weeks early (possibly our dates are off) it will really not be healed. In fact this morning it split open on the bottom and looks even worse! But it might be a better thing all in all as it can drain now.

Amazingly enough we think her teat will be fine for next year as the middle part where the milk ducts seems to be fine! But for now we will have a 3 teated cow to milk. Poor Papa has to milk her as I can NOT get that low.. he told me this morning that it made his belly sore to lean over that far to milk.. so there IS NO WAY I CAN!! Which means Papa will be getting up at 5ish to milk both cows until we get our milking buckets. They were suppose to be here 10 days ago but they sent the wrong ones so we are still waiting and still milking by hand. Papa says once we get them and he gets a mechanical milking system going I should be able to 'milk' mornings again which will be a great help to him.

SO now we are bucket feeding 2 calves, one we are babysitting for a neighbor who is going away for a month and our own little bull calf who as of yet has no name. He needs a B name and Bindy, Billy and Bobby are all taken.. any ideas??

Stubs Piglets!

Stub in her nest with her piglets and the kids and Papa looking on!

Well I wrote that last post in the morning and that early afternoon Stub started making a nest. She worked on it for hours and when Papa got home she had a large area sprinkled with straw and twigs so Papa brought her a load of straw and she made an even better nest. That night before bed I headed out to see if anything was happening yet and found her in labor with 2 piglets already born. I watched for a bit but nothing was happening so I went inside for 20 minutes and sure enough when I got back out there she'd had 2 more! So I found a semi comfortable place to sit and watched her give birth to the last 4!! Very cool. I'm totally amazed at how vigorous piglets are at birth! She would push one out and it would get up and start looking for a teat... and find it and drink and crawl all over her in the process. She didn't get up once the whole time. After watching for over an hour I realized there was something wrong with one of the piglets. He couldn't get up, wouldn't drink (I tried to get him too) and kept making a funny GAK GAK noise. The other piglets all had mini pig noises; grunts and squeals. I had not brought a flashlight or anything so I headed to the house and woke up Papa and he came out, with a flashlight, to take a look. Well we still don't know what was wrong with him but the flashlight showed a raw spot on his forehead that took up about half of it and was raw and bleeding. I think he got that after he was born from Stubs back feet.. Anyway Papa and I decided he was 'not quite right in the head' for whatever reason and so Papa took him away and took 'care' of him. It was really too bad as he was a nice sized piglet and it seemed a shame after all Stubs hard work. I found it very interesting that the other two Momma pigs came to 'talk' to Stub several times each while I was there. They didn't come close but came and grunted at her for a bit and then went back to their own babies. Sort of an encouragement party. The other 7 piglets are doing wonderful and she hasn't even noticed that the 8th is gone. She is VERY happy now and no longer lonely. Yesterday she left her nest only once and that was for a quick drink of water.

So to sum up. We bred 3 Berkshire gilts to a Berkshire boar, got 7, 8, and 8 piglets born. One piglet was born dead 24 hours after the rest which gave 6 pigger her 6, she had them early in the am (before 5:30). 8 pigger had 8 and they all lived and she had them at noon 5 days after 6 pigger. Stub had 8, lost 1, and had them between 9:30 and 10:30 pm 5 days after 8 pigger!! So we got 21 piglets total, 11 are females and 10 are males. If that last one would have lived we would have had even numbers males to females. I find it fascinating to see the patterns..