a calf named ruby

All pictures are thanks to Taylor Zeorian Photography.

Palm Sunday brought our family and  Jim’s side of the family together. This is our only link to the farm – a real farm. We visit farms with our business but Harv and Maureen’s farm is the only one left in our family unit. I was excited for Eli to visit the farm and even more excited that it was a beautiful day!

One of the highlights of the day was getting to bottle feed the calf named Ruby.  As long as I’ve known Harv and Maureen (and that’s a long time), they’ve had cattle. They used to have quite a few hogs, too, but sold out after prices went too low to justify keeping them. At least when you visit the farm now, it’s a bit less stinky!  Anyway…back to Ruby. Harvey and Maureen’s grandson, Harvey Jr., has the chore of feeding Ruby every day. So, on this particular day when it was time to feed her, we tagged along.

That’s Harvey. He’s in the process of telling us how we need to hold the bottle so she gets all of the milk. Let me tell ya – it was quite a trick holding Eli, a bottle and balancing everything and everyone while Ruby was pulling the bottle right out of our hands. After we finished, Harvey wanted to show us how Ruby follows him around. So, he proceeded to run circles in Ruby’s pen and Eli laughed and laughed watching Ruby chase after her “mama”.

There is a little something extra special about Ruby. Ruby was a calf that would have been left as dead had it not been for a quick glance in the rear view mirror and the twitching of a leg. When we were there, Ruby was healing from frostbite. She lost part of her tail, her ears were in the process of falling off and part of her nose was gone. I asked Maureen if she would be willing to tell Ruby’s story because it’s one you should hear. She agreed. The following story is of the farmer and their love for what they do and the animals they take care of.  I’m going to throw in the remaining pictures that Taylor took on Palm Sunday throughout the story – in no particular order.

I am so glad Palm Sunday worked out to get the clan together – and glad we could introduce Eli to a little bit of our farm and his chance to feed Ruby, the calf. And I’m extremely proud that he wasn’t afraid of her – or the feedlot calves. Of course, having his big cousin there to coach him and teach him the ropes of bottle feeding as well as feeding some bigger calves. Well, how much better could it be?!!

Now, almost three weeks have gone by and I still haven’t written Ruby’s story! Today is the day! So, here is Ruby’s story and how she ended up as the center of attention on a lovely Palm Sunday!

Red Angus #56 didn’t show any signs of calving at the last cow check on the night of February 25-26. But, at the first check shortly after dawn on February 26, things had changed. 

We were making our first morning rounds with a morning temp of about -5F and hoping maybe the cows were holding off for some warmer daytime temps before having any babies today. But not everyone had waited! #55 had a new calf and it had been up and nursed already. A sigh of relief for a lucky break! Off by herself in another direction was another red cow – #56. She had picked a good spot to have a baby – out of the morning’s breeze and in a grassy waterway. (Don’t let that description lull you into visualizing soft green grass with blue sky above. It was still -5 and barely 6:00 a.m.!!) But as we got closer, we could see the new calf was laying very flat on the ground (not a good sign) and even worse, no movement.

If all had went well for this mom and baby, the baby would have been up on its feet shortly after birth and had its tummy nicely filled with mommy milk. Our baby would have laid down in that same frigid waterway, but would have been toasty warm with her full tummy of milk. No problem! Life would have been good. And for many new baby calves everywhere, this is what happens even on sometimes the worst of days!

But, back to my story. It breaks your heart every time this sad scenario happens and even though it happens one way or another most years even 42 years of having cows doesn’t make you feel any better about it. 

Our usual plan is to leave the calf with mom for at least a day so she can realize it isn’t going to get up. But just as we were driving away, Harv saw the calf move ever so slightly! So, a whole new plan jarred us into action! We already had a calf carrier on the back of the pickup so we loaded our icicle of a calf onto the carrier and headed to the barn with a concerned #56 following close behind.

The barn is not warm. Just -5 with walls around it and out of the breeze. Now, first things first. This baby needs something warm in its tummy. We got #56 in the head gate and Harv milked her into a pop bottle. Then, he poured this much-needed warm mommy milk into our baby’s mouth and helped her swallow it. Mostly, you do what you can and hope. 

Mom gets released from the head gate after Harv milked a couple of extra bottles of milk to get us through the day. 

What next? We have a calf warmer box but seldom had we used it on such a close-to-death calf or on such a terribly cold day. But we decided to try it. 

Imagine a large doghouse made of heavy plastic. There is a hinged top and it has a plastic grid false floor in it and a small electric heater that fits into an opening on the back-end. The floor design allows the heat to get underneath the calf to warm it from all sides. It took longer than usual to get the box temp up around 90 degrees since the outside temp was so cold. But slowly the heat built and we checked on our baby girl every hour. (This barn is not just a stroll across the farmyard from the house. It is a half mile away through a couple of gates.) Harv kept on with other chores outside, but I felt like I hardly got out of all my winter wear and boots and gloves, etc. and it was time to go back and check again.

After several hours, she was getting warmer but not to the point she needed to be. Decision time again. This time, we left mom in the barn and baby came home to the house, draped across my lap in the pickup. 

All this baby moving hasn’t sounded too hard – unless you stop to think that this baby weighed 70 – 80 pounds. It was like trying to get the 50 pound bag (only heavier) of dog food in and out of the shopping cart. Think REALLY heavy, wet noodle. 

So we got home and Harv carries our baby into the kitchen. She is warmer than she was and is somewhat aware of our goings on now. She has had a couple of small meals of milk but it is still just a matter of pouring it down her throat. I start tracking down our really toasty warm couch blankets. I don’t know what these blankets are made of (some acrylic, I think) but they are the best ever to cuddle up with at night when it’s chilly. Anyway, I got three of them rounded up and tucked underneath and around our little house guest. 

By now, it was about 1:00 pm. 

The afternoon goes on mostly uneventfully. But, our baby is beginning to hold her head up and is getting nice and warm. By 3:30 pm, she is starting to want to stand up. This is always when it gets tough to be in a kitchen! The floor is too slick to get traction for little hooves. So now I am searching out some old rubber-backed rugs to help her keep her feet underneath herself. That did the trick! Now I am helping her stand and stay standing for a few minutes at a time. I am bordering on using different adjectives for her now – energetic – exuberant – lively!! She is becoming a handful! The afternoon has gone pretty fast while I make my way around the kitchen with a baby calf in the middle of it. 

At about 5:30, it is time to think about starting evening chores. We have already decided that once chores are finished we will return our thoroughly warmed baby back to her mother over at the barn. But what to do with her while I do my chores? She is a flurry of flailing legs as she tries to stand by herself in the kitchen and doesn’t understand the concept of staying on her rugs and blankets. I’m not trusting her to stay in the kitchen by herself because I can fully imagine her managing to get herself off the slick kitchen floor to the much better traction that is available on the living room carpet!

So I call Jill (Jill is Harv and Maureen’s oldest daughter and mom to Harvey, Jr.) And she came to babysit. 

When we finished up chores, we returned to a now named baby – Ruby – and Jill…on the kitchen floor together having quality time. Jill said all Ruby wanted to do was stand up – unless Jill got down on the floor with her! At this point of the day, we were thrilled to have our little Ruby so nicely warmed and becoming more energetic by the minute. And, we were ready to hand her back off to mom at the barn. So, we loaded the three of ourselves back into the pickup and headed back to the barn to join Ruby’s mom – #56. Mom was glad to see us and now it was time for a new life lesson for Ruby. 

It was back into the head gate for mom and time for Ruby’s first lesson in where milk really comes from!! It didn’t go too well. Ruby’s mom was a trooper and very patient. When you consider that a cow like Ruby’s mom might never have been in a barn before in her whole life, you never know how smooth this process will pan out. But #56 was agreeable to almost all we asked of her. And it never hurts to have a little corn in the pan on the other side of the head gate!

Ruby’s first tutorial in getting her own supper didn’t go well. She didn’t seem to find anything that interested her in that area. But, she had had a rough day and we finally decided to milk mom again and use the pop bottle to feed Ruby. 

Sometimes miracles happen when you just leave a new family alone. We went home knowing Ruby would be fine for the night and just maybe we would have some good news to greet us in the morning. It didn’t exactly turn out that way. #56 went back into the head gate on day two and we reenacted the lesson of yesterday for Ruby. Still no luck. We fed Ruby with the pop bottle again. And, if Ruby isn’t going to take care of her own hungry tummy that means we return to the barn several times a day for more feeding lessons and, in Ruby’s case, then we would feed her. 

This gets old really fast! You really, really want to see this turn into a mother-daughter duo that can be turned out with the other cows and be self-sufficient. But it wasn’t happening and we were all getting impatient. On the second feeding of the second day, we took a calf nursing bottle over and after Ruby again rejected milk straight from the source, we put her lunch in the nursing bottle and she took right off and loved it!!

This was a step in the right direction. Our hope was building!

Because of the terrible cold the morning Ruby was born, we were fully expecting her ears to be frozen to some extent. It isn’t unusual to have the tips of some calves ears get frozen every year due to extreme cold. But with Ruby, we also had noticed that she didn’t seem to have any sight in her left eye and sometimes we even wondered a little about her right eye. 

Day three and day four continued with our constant attention to Ruby’s feedings. She was becoming more and more excited everyday when we showed up at feeding time. She was using the bottle like a pro – but wasn’t making any connection to the similarities between mom and the bottle.

On day five, we were losing patience with the whole situation. We expect to take whatever time necessary this time of year to tend to our cows and calves but there comes a time when you know you have done what you can and it just doesn’t look like things are going to work out as you had hoped. We made a tough decision to move Ruby home with us. If she prefers the bottle, then that’s how we’ll do it. 

And so we did. 

I’ll jump ahead now to the present. Ruby is seven weeks old and thriving. She’ll always bear some scars of that first morning. About 1/3 of the outer ends of her ears did shrivel up and fall off due to freezing. The end of her nose was also frozen and a big chunk of skin fell off. It has healed nicely and if it wasn’t for feeding her up close everyday, we wouldn’t even notice. We are sure now that the left eye is sightless and her tail is only about a third of a normal calf tail (frozen off). Then about a week ago, she lost more of each ear – so she is pretty close to having no ears. 

She still gets a bottle of milk twice a day but she is also eating a little prairie hay and a yummy-to-her calf starter feed. She has been making her home in an open shed with an outside pen. This week I expanded her pen to include more room to run and also some grass to eat. Ruby’s mom (#56) rejoined the rest of the cows and calves. Feeding Ruby is the daily chore for Harvey, the grandson. 

Sometimes, things just work out pretty good afterall.