Killdeers and the Big Old Moon

Big moon

Killdeers lament across the heifer pasture, still snow, still snow, still snow. I want to tell them to come down on the lawn. Every footstep there crushes the rotten snow like a stomping Sasquatch and leaves a new bit of open ground behind.

The lawn at sunset

There are plenty of footsteps too. Cabin fever cure here I come. I am out making footsteps every chance I get.

The river thrusts itself east and south, bank to bank and bulging, crammed with authority granted by thousands of streams and rivulets, swollen far beyond capacity by a little rain and a lot of dying snow. Black birds, cardinals, grackles, geese, geese, geese, from before dawn to after dark, swirling, rising and falling, screaming to be heard over one another. And robins shuttling everywhere, busy, busy.

All the culverts along the highways are still chock full of ice and snow so there is road flooding everywhere. Just west of the farm a huge whirlpool churns busily over a clogged drain. I swear it would suck down a car if you drove in there. So we don't.

The boss and I undertake to get some calf medicine and shavings for their little beds and inflations for the milking machines. The things we see, the things we see.

Wouldn't you think at this budget-busting laying off of everybody season that the guys moving little teeny tiny crumbles of ice that is going to melt anyhow, would not have a pay loader and a bunch of trucks and a large crew of workers out doing a job that a farm kid with a shovel could cover in an hour? Or even better, it was almost sixty...the stuff woulda been gone by morning. And they wonder......why we wonder.....

Come almost-night a moon with a big reputation rises over the horse pasture. It doesn't look that big. Maybe tomorrow when it is full.....

Just as I have had enough out on the lawn as the sun is setting time thousands of geese fly over, yodeling the wishes of their hearts across the sky.

All during our trip I looked in vain for snow geese. Now this morning as I edit the photos from last night I find that the gigantic flock that stretches so far is in fact a flock of snows. Cool

See, they really are snows

Stale Peeps

An Easter tradition since the nineteen eighties.

Big Red

The new calf, a son of Spungold-R Frolic Poker, full sibling to last year's Rose Magnolia.

Out of Broadway

Seeing Red on the Day of the Green

Here is somebody who wears green every day

As a Facebook friend pointed out the dairy markets are crashing again. It was looking as if we were going to see some decent prices this summer, which is a great thing for little farms like ours. Although we milk year round, we are just a bit on the seasonal side, with a lot of cows calving right now.

Then the mamas go outside to graze for the summer, fresh and ready to make a lot of milk for us on that nice green grass. For those circumstances to coincide with good prices would mean we could pay of some of the poor folks to whom we owe money and maybe do a few of the things many folks take for granted.

Alas, I guess those futures markets were just idle speculation, tempting dairy farmers into thinking things might be okay for a change. You can read ongoing discussions on all the factors involved in the dairy markets here.

So we are seeing red the about market messing around, and we are seeing it in the color of our bottom line.

We are also seeing it in the lovely mahogany-and-white of the big bull calf born to Broadway last night. He is sure a beauty! Of course he decided to be born at midnight after a six-hour struggle on the part of his mama, so I am even more jet-lagged than after the time change. We took it in shifts to walk over to the barn and check on old B-Dub.

For hours and hours and hours, nothing was happening. Then there were feet and a nose when I made the last hike. I assisted a little just because she had been laboring so long, but she would probably have had him okay without me. He is so huge I had to call the boss to lift him over the gate in front of her so she could lick him off!

As time goes on I like the milking shorthorn cattle more and more. Six hours of hard labor and B-Dub jumped to her feet the minute he was out and swapped ends to moo and lick. Six hours of being hard labored upon and he was shaking his head and sneezing and trying to crawl up to her face in less than a minute after birth. The red ones are hardy cows indeed.

Happy St. Patrick's day to everyone! I am using the circles under my eyes for my wearing of the green. With all the McIntosh's and McGiverns and Ferrins and such in the family background, I figure there is green enough right in my blood.

Something About the Season

Common redpoll

He let me walk right up to him

while he stuffed his beak with sunflower seeds

It is grey, muddy, soggy, gloomy, a bit on the nippy side, and I don't care one bit.

First turkey vulture-last week

First Killdeer-about ten minutes ago

Robins-everywhere

Grandma Peggy's daffodils up by the corner of the house-check

Eggs-hens are laying them

Warm enough to toss the roosters outside-yes (three roosters to four hens is a terrible ratio.

Yep, technically it is still winter, but March is so much closer to spring than February

National Ag Day

Let's party!

In New York

Cats with Thumbs and Clever Little Border Collies

Da typist

You know I am an animal lover. Been that way since I was so small that I thought my grandma's little Spitz cross was the size of a Saint Bernard.... I can remember just nicely being able to hold on to his shoulders.

I couldn't believe it when I saw photos after I got tall* and found out that he was a little bitty thing that today I could scoop up under one arm and walk away with.

Anyhow, I have always shared a special connection with animals, especially dogs.

However, today provided the most amazing in a lifetime of uplifting interactions. I got up this morning, jet lagged and grumpy from the time change, to find that Nick had enlisted Elvis the cat, Wally the cow dog, and several of the more knowledgeable among the cattle, and written my newspaper column for me.

Yeah, turns out Elvis is a secret member of Cats with Thumbs and can keyboard. They did the research and the whole nine yards. Can you believe it?

They even copied and pasted in a couple of good quotes. And you wanna know what they wrote about?

Turns out the animals hate the time change too. So much that, according to Nick, Keebler the Shuttle Cat made 350 trips between the barn and the house forwarding (and backwarding) information.

Thanks, guys! You really made my day.

*Okay to head this off at the pass, all you wise guy family members can hold the smart remarks about just how tall I am not. I am at least tall-ER than then if not actually tall.

Atall.

Sunday Stills....the Letter P

Pretty Painted Pony (the latest lawn art)

Promise of Plenty to Come

I was going to do the Peacocks, perfect for P, but the sun was out of town all week, so....

For more Sunday Stills......


***Update, after the coffee kicked it hit me that I could photograph the peacocks using the flash....

Peacock Pantaloons

Peacock, a very flashy guy

Threes

Blitz's udder (she was not involved in this story)
The blue is special liniment for her udder comfort, named amazingly enough,
Udder Comfort The stuff smells so strongly of peppermint the whole barn reeks when we use it.

As in bad stuff comes in them. Last night, after a pretty decent day we got 'em. First the chainsaw died. The boss cuts wood every day for our heat so that was emergency number one.

Then after being out of the barn about an hour and a half doing other work he went in and found that one of Becky's cows, Armada, had had a really big bull calf and had suffered a prolapse of her uterus. Major medical emergency. He called for a veterinarian and we all hurried out to get started on chores early so we could deal with the situation.

Right in front of one of the steers was the still-warm body of everybody's favorite feline busybody, the little kitty who has been in so many photos here, sleeping on calves and snooping into everything, our beloved Tux. It really doesn't pay to give your heart to a barn cat, but we do it over, and over and over again. He was the most special of the favorites.... except maybe everybody's little lovey, Athena. We figure the steer got him because he was always so absurdly friendly with the cows.

He was always good for a nice bit of string chasing too, when you were feeding out hay, or posing somewhere cute so you just had to take his picture. Liz got him from one of her farmers and she cried when she saw him....and I darned near did.

The procedure to replace the errant uterus went much too perfectly. It was all back in and the vet was ready to suture her when the fool animal got mad and threw herself on the floor. Guess what....they had to start all over again. And she landed on the vet and Liz's BF who was helping.

Yeah, there are others who had much worse, but it certainly wasn't the best evening we have ever experienced. We finally got out of the barn around nine-thirty. And then when the boss went back to give the prolapse cow her second doses of her medicines she kicked him in the chest.

He is fine and so far she is fine, and the calf, which she evidently had standing up and dumped on his head, is fine too. So there are three good things to finish up with. Guess that is all we can ask for.

Dwarfed

Anything I could write about life here at Northview would be so dwarfed by the horror in Japan that I can't seem to say much. The little triumphs and tragedies go on here as always, but the shadow of the horror there looms huge over everything.

What can you do but hope and pray? I just don't know.

Bling and Chrome

Bling

Chrome

Bling's name isn't set in stone yet, but she is a brand new baby daughter of Liz's Fustead Emory Blitz daughter, Mendocino (we just call her Blitz) She was sired by Myrik.

Can you believe how big she is? Liz had to order a 2X large calf coat for her even though she was just born, because all our normal coats were way too small for her!

Chrome is closely related to her, being a daughter of Blitz's full sister, Neon Moon, but by our own bull O-C-E-C Lindy Fred ET.

Gloom with Grackles

Ditch-dull grey outside with some kind of sleety stuff slotting clickety-clickety against the office windows. Ewww.....

Dog didn't waste any time getting back inside I can tell you. Reminds me of the winter when the next younger brother and I had measles. Lying in the darkened living room at the old farm house down the road from here (lost now to the ravages of northern weather and neglect)...no books allowed, which was worse than the disease for me. It is dark and wintry like that today...too wintry for March.

The birds don't care. Damn the snowbanks, full speed ahead. I heard the first red-winged black birds when coming over from the barn Monday and right behind them was a trio of silver-eyed common grackles. They clinked and clanked at me and whistled and whoo-whooed, then moved along to wherever they were going.

Back south maybe. Can't say as I would blame them.

Sick all week, but not sick enough not to work. This achy, drainage swamp of a flu-cold went through the whole family, including appending boyfriends, last month for Pete's sake. I nursed everybody else or worried about them or said kind things to them, but never got a sniffle myself. Which was odd.

Then weeks later, wham. Yeah, not sick enough to not work, just sick enough to not want to. Oh, well, I am sure the old immune system is getting a great boost.

Got the computer running at least. Took Keith's advice and ditched Zone Alarm, which according to the boards does this a lot (had to work in safe mode to do it) . Guess I will have to use the Windows firewall, which isn't supposed to be much good. However, a firewall, which locks the whole computer so I can't even type up the minutes of last month's Farm Bureau meeting (yeah, Johnny on the spot, that's me) is no good at all.

Anyhow, today I am thankful for daughters who bring cough drops, sons who milk most of my cows when they are home, another daughter who feeds calves early so she can help when the brother is at school, and shiny, black, spring birds (which I will hate when they start cruising the front pasture slurping up nestlings like canapés.) Have a good one!

Wordless Wednesday

Strange Cotton

Some of Dad's woodcarvings

And Easter egg pastels. That is how it looked here yesterday. The sky was sometimes pink and glowing like an opalescent pearl. Then it would turn soft, shining blue and silvery grey. Kinda like an old-fashioned post card only more treacherous. Yeah, I know its still winter...yeah, yeah, and the weather still knows it too. Our snow was about all gone. It is about all back.

Normally when snow coats the branches it blows right off in the first puff of wind. However, the Sunday/Monday storm left a coating of ice first, then painted on the the fluffy, sticky snow. It hung and clung. Last night after chores it was still clinging to every twig and branch and piled in every connection between or among them. It was pretty. I admired it. Now it can melt.

The boss couldn't even get to the ag bag to get out feed. So much snow. So deep, so soggy, so sucking of the skid steer right into piles of it. They fed dry hay instead, which is fine with the cows, but hard on the supply.

Computer is still toasted. I think it is something fairly simple and probably has to do with Zone Alarm fire wall, which sometimes goes rogue just because it can. I tinkered with it yesterday off and on all day, to no particular avail, although I did manage to run a virus scan. Which didn't find anything. If you know any handy, dandy hackers or geeks......

Meanwhile, I can't take photos off the camera, so these are what was hanging around on this computer.

Toasted

Some of the shag bark hickories on 7-County Hill

The big computer seems to be. I can get it as far as loading the browser and then it freezes. Power went out in the middle of the night in the middle of the storm and it hasn't been right since.

So, the slow little bookkeeping computer has been called back into service as an Internet computer. Paying bills online is great stuff except when your computer doesn't want to play.


Did I mention the storm? Lots of bad stuff going on around the region, of far more import than my computer. Roofs, branches and power lines all over are taking an awful beating. I think this is the worst storm all winter. The boss didn't even try to get up to the ag bag, just gave the cows a pile of dry hay and gave up.

My old friend Mike

Had to go out in it at four this morning to check the springers. Egrec had delivered a really, really big bull calf. I was about done in by the time I had managed to get it up in front of her so she could lick it off. Then after checking everybody else in the barn and kicking in some hay I went back to bed. All I could do to get back and forth to the barn....it was snowing so hard! And so deep.


At five thirty the boss stirred, so I sent him out to give Big E a bottle of calcium and some oxytocin. Would have done it myself but she is a giant and crazy as a loon. I didn't think I could.

Anyhow, it is pretty but nasty, the wind is kicking up now. I hope you are all safe and warm and dry. Take care! I will leave you with a few pics of a nicer season that were stored on this old computer.

Sunday Stills...My Favorite Place

All week I have been anticipating this one. My favorite place, in the whole, wide world, is that red metal chair on the front porch of cabin 2, Peck's Lake NY, preferably at sunrise.. Any kind of summer weather. We have sat here in the rain, thunderstorms, blazing sun, chill and grey. I love that porch....fishing pole locked between my knees, coffee cup, camera and binoculars. Field guide to the birds, a good book, or a journal. Better yet when shared with dear friends (you know who you are, you wonderful folks who have shared summer afternoons and great conversations there) and beloved family members. Lots of those too. So many little folks have caught their first fish off that porch. Yeah, I am saving up my pennies from painting lawn ornaments and my newspaper writing money even now so I can get my deposit paid for my week in Paradise on that little porch.

For more Sunday Stills.....

Saturday Morning Cereal

Big doings in Alaska today. The Iditarod kicks off...and you can have a front row seat by visiting here.

Apple peels fight cancer (Me I just eat the whole apple)

More on honey laundering. NY is trying to do something about it.

Johanns is trying to get the EPA to commit to some common sense instead of treating milk as if it were crude oil.

Calves and Currycomb Love

Heather's baby boy. Check out his eyeliner

In the next four weeks we have around eighteen head due to calve. It is with a mixture of awe and dread that I face this prospect. Among the "springers" are my beautiful Broadway and Liz's Fustead Emory Blitz daughter (whose name is Mendocino, but who is simply called, THE BLITZ...she gets caps even in every day life.) We care a great deal for all the cows, but there are always certain special ones that cause just a little more worry and heartache when calving time rolls around. As with any birth there is a lot that can go wrong.

Last year if you remember, Broadway had a gigantic heifer calf, breech, and it was one of the toughest deliveries I have participated in. We were thankful for the hybrid vigor of the shorties that day I can tell you. It looks as if she is carrying another big one.

I worry.

Evie, Verona, Egypt, the two Whirlhill Kingpin daughters, Zobaba and Bayliner, Heather, and several others have already had their babies, mostly bulls, alas.

Does anybody who milked cows back in the sixties remember any temperament issues with the Kingpin daughters? These two are both snarky little darlings I can tell you. They are from unrelated dams, but they are like the nasty devil twins. I have been lashed with more sodden, stinking tails and stomped at more by them than by all the other first calf heifers together.

Even Egypt, who was a real wild child all through her carefree heiferhood, is a little sweetie and loves to have me scratch her exceptionally furry head. I was currying cows yesterday and didn't even try to brush Zobaba (although Bayliner is finally liking the attention.)

You wouldn't believe how the cows are shedding. I could bed them with the hair I get off with the comb. And they love it so much! Always worth a laugh to see the heads waving and the stanchions clanging while they await their turn. I like it too. I can't even see over Lemmie's rump, she is such a big girl, and normally she is flighty and a little loony. However, when I have that currycomb, she is like a fourteen-hundred pound kitten, all cuddles and love.

Kinda like cupboard love, only this time it's currycomb love.

Cage Free vs Traditional

Cost of eggs debated.

Friends in High Places

In this case the roost. The queen gets down to eat when I am there, but the king stays on the roost and peers down his beak at me.

Butter

Is made from fresh, sweet, cream, skimmed from milk that comes from cows. (I read that on Facebook the other day.)

Period.

Anything else is simply not butter. It may be nut paste, or soybean paste, or some kinda amorphous, yellow, synthetic bread-greasing goo, but it is not butter.

Only real butter finds its way to the Northview table.

However, up until the day before yesterday, any butter would do. Ours usually came from a big box store or Stewart's (which has really good dairy products, from ice cream to milk for your cereal).

However, the other day we were given a two-pound tub of butter, which surpassed all expectations and reminded me how foods such as butter tasted when I was a kid.

It even looked good, so when we celebrated National Pancake Day, I opened it, even though there was half a stick of regular butter still in the dish. It had the nicest pale, clean, color, like justbeforesunrise in June.

A chip popped off the knife as I chiseled off a piece (yes, our kitchen is routinely cold enough this time of year that you have to chip off butter and hope your toast is still warm enough to melt it). I tasted.

Wow! It was so sweet, so light, so smooth and creamy. Instant flashback to my grandma's kitchen where we grandkids fed upon buttered bread with sugar when we just couldn't wait until dinner. (It was real hard to wait for dinner at either of my grandmas' houses. Those fine ladies could COOK!)

This butter was like that. Easily the best I have ever tasted.

Can't seem to find a website, but it is made by The Country Creamery in Canastota, NY.

Have I mentioned that I like it?

Good Morning from the Ice Cave

Or hockey rink if you prefer. We are having crystal days with temps in the twenties or thirties and shining nights near zero. Nice sugar weather and the days are really pretty.

However, the result is that in the day time no matter how much sand is spread, all the drives and walkways are like shining sheets of glass. And all the sand is sucked under by the melting, presenting a fresh ice world each morning.....

I can remember being a kid and skating on such stuff. Loving it. Flying. Crashing down on it and not caring, and getting up and doing it again. We skated EVERYWHERE when we were kids. If there was a six-inch patch of ice we were all over it.

I mean we had wild hockey matches on the thin little threads of ice between the hummocks of grass and corn stubble in the field next to our parents' house. If you came to a grass tuft you just jumped it. I don't remember it hurting except the time I froze my toes ...just a little, but enough to hurt for days and days.....skating up at Caroga Lake. Having too much fun to notice until it was too late.

Where did that marvelous sense of balance go? Now I can't WALK to the barn on the ice...let alone skate (and the toes I froze back in the day are not happy little campers in this weather either.)

Yesterday I got as far as the back of the stock trailer and just waited. I couldn't even hold one foot still on the stuff....I was afraid I would slide right off the hill.

The wait was fruitful as it happens, as the boss grabbed the skid steer as soon as he got to the barn and scooped up some sand and did the drive between house and barn.

Still made for a slow walk, but at least I could walk. Beck was not so lucky. She was feeding her dog and took a terrible header. Being a farm kid she went to her off-farm job anyhow, but she is black and blue. Nasty stuff ice.

However, when I took feed to the peacocks yesterday, a mix of cat and dog food, corn and sunflower seeds with a nice chopped apple for topping, I waited for a few minutes over by the outside door. The hen began to give those guttural little clucks they have, then very, very cautiously hopped off the roost and began to eat the corn.

I was delighted.

National Pancake Day

We love pancakes!

Every now and then someone goes in early from chores to make a stack for supper. When we have sausage from our own pigs, maple syrup from our trees, (or homemade apple, grape or strawberry jam if you prefer) plus real butter, a glass of cold, fresh milk ....well, it is a feast of fine proportions I can tell you!

And every bite was produced on a farm. (Many of the bites right here on our farm). The local Farm Bureau has a program called, "What is a pancake?" wherein hard-working folks visit area schools to cook up pancakes and maple syrup for the children, while teaching them how each product involved is grown and harvested on farms. I think they do a fantastic job of showing how food isn't made in the back room at the grocery store.

***The photos were taken in our maple woods which are tapped by Mr. Savage from Johnstown. (We have a real nice barter deal, wherein he taps the trees and gives us syrup when he is done each year.) Word is that the sap has been running in some places, although we haven't seen any sapcicles yet. Everywhere you drive folks are out in the sugar bushes though, getting everything clean and ready to go

Word Verification

I experimented with turning it off for a while. I know it is really a pain in the neck to try to read and type those twisted letters. Sadly within just a day or two spammers were aggressively hitting my old posts and driving me crazy.

So, I turned it back on. Sorry for the annoyance it may cause.