Our 3W cow has had a pretty tough calving season so far. At the outset she delivered a set of premature breech twins – well, hubby had to certainly help her along on that. Sadly the first twin out was deceased and the second little fella just took forever to “spunk up”.

His first few days of life were spent inside our cozy barn and then in the “executive suite ” pen….the very same one where my pampered blind calf Ugo used to reside. I came to call his subsequent environments “Wayne’s World” and he then became “Little Wayne” to me.

So Little Wayne would sleep in the straw in a corner in the pen day in and day out. I would bring his mom 3W in at night and let her out in the morning and Wayne would muster enough energy to get up and suck for awhile.

That was pretty much his exciting life and routine until I went away for a few days on the conference and I got the news that Little Wayne had died while I was away. I pretty much knew he wouldn’t make it. Being a premature calf and a lonely twin, the odds were stacked against him.

So this week the oddest thing happened. I happened to be walking in the pen where 3W was feeding and she looked up at me with such a “look”- hard to describe. The oddest thing was she then started to follow me around the corral. I realized that this was the first time she had really seen me since losing her Little Wayne and she may have thought perhaps I would take her to him once again just like I always used to do.

Well of course this kind of thing has a way of breaking my heart. I put too much human emotion into the lifestyles of our cows and I think it costs us some extra energy – that which we have little to spare these days at full-bore calving! However, this behaviour encouraged both hubby and myself that perhaps she was able to take on a recently born twin, in essence to replace her Little Wayne and take the load off the other twin mom cow and ultimately keep her a productive member of the herd.

So we are now in the process of attempting this “transplanting” activity, to turn 3W into the adoptive mother of Little Wayne. It requires separating the “new” twin from his original family but luckily we have another fella living in the barn to keep him company.

We experienced a sad and disappointing occurrence this past week. One of our fine young bred heifers aborted her calf almost two months early. She may have been bumped or fell on the terrible icy surfaces we are beleaguered with this winter to trigger this loss.
It was a female calf which makes it worse as she would have been a gal we could have kept in the herd.
And to top it all off, making it doubly worse, this was Suzy Q’s first calf!

What makes me extra sad is that she always returns to the same spot on the straw bed where she dropped her calf. This is where I took her picture.

This was not the way I wished to introduce the next character in Calving Capers, our dear Suzy Q [40B], the one and only daughter of our dearly departed Trixie, featured last year in this blog.
Thankfully though, Suzy Q will “be allowed” to stay in the herd and get to try again. In the meantime she’s going to have a pretty easy year just grazing and keeping all the nutrients to herself. She’s a lovely heifer with a chance to be our superstar next year!