A new arrival
It's been a nail-biting few weeks here on Fliskmillan Farm. The bull first ran with the cows on 16th June last year, which meant that calves should have started popping out around 16th March. The day came and none of the girls even looked like they wanted to pop. A week on, still nothing. Ten days, forget it.
I've been checking them every day, of course. Three or four times a day. They are all in a large field on the north side of the hill. I'd not checked them first thing this morning - getting a bit blasé about the non-appearance of anything small, but my neighbour out walking her dogs noticed something not quite right in the field and phoned me. I whizzed up on the quad bike to find this.
He, for he is a boy calf, was up and trotting - if a little unsteady - behind his mum. She is Margaret Fay Shaw 1st of Inchmarnock, or Maggie-Fay for short. Highland cows tend to have rather complicated and long-winded names - a tradition I will doubtless irritate many people by refusing to follow. As yet, however, the calf remains nameless.
Mother and child both seem to be doing well. Fergus Ruadh, the bull, looks a little bewildered. Given that it's not his third birthday until Tuesday, I'm not surprised. Still, at least he hasn't been firing blanks all year.
The first thing a new-born calf has to cope with, of course, is the heavy weight of bureaucracy. All calves have to be double-tagged so that they can be easily identified. The primary tag has to be readable from a distance - not easy with something as shaggy as a Highland - and so it is rather big. In Scotland we now have mandatory testing of all calves for BVD*, too, so one of the ear tags catches a small sample to be sent off to the lab for testing. I thought this was going to be very traumatic, with Maggie-Fay trying to skewer me as I wrestled with a feisty young bullock anxious not to have its ears pierced. As it happened, my first hands-on experience of tagging a calf was pretty painless, if a little noisy.
So there we have it: the first true member of the Fliskmillan Fold. Farming is finally starting to happen.
* Bovine Virus Diarrhoea, not the underwear brand. That would be weird. Cows in Keks!
I've been checking them every day, of course. Three or four times a day. They are all in a large field on the north side of the hill. I'd not checked them first thing this morning - getting a bit blasé about the non-appearance of anything small, but my neighbour out walking her dogs noticed something not quite right in the field and phoned me. I whizzed up on the quad bike to find this.
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| Is it a teddy bear? |
He, for he is a boy calf, was up and trotting - if a little unsteady - behind his mum. She is Margaret Fay Shaw 1st of Inchmarnock, or Maggie-Fay for short. Highland cows tend to have rather complicated and long-winded names - a tradition I will doubtless irritate many people by refusing to follow. As yet, however, the calf remains nameless.
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| Happy Families! |
Mother and child both seem to be doing well. Fergus Ruadh, the bull, looks a little bewildered. Given that it's not his third birthday until Tuesday, I'm not surprised. Still, at least he hasn't been firing blanks all year.
The first thing a new-born calf has to cope with, of course, is the heavy weight of bureaucracy. All calves have to be double-tagged so that they can be easily identified. The primary tag has to be readable from a distance - not easy with something as shaggy as a Highland - and so it is rather big. In Scotland we now have mandatory testing of all calves for BVD*, too, so one of the ear tags catches a small sample to be sent off to the lab for testing. I thought this was going to be very traumatic, with Maggie-Fay trying to skewer me as I wrestled with a feisty young bullock anxious not to have its ears pierced. As it happened, my first hands-on experience of tagging a calf was pretty painless, if a little noisy.
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| One in each ear. Ouch. |
So there we have it: the first true member of the Fliskmillan Fold. Farming is finally starting to happen.
* Bovine Virus Diarrhoea, not the underwear brand. That would be weird. Cows in Keks!
Comments
Enjoy Dornoch. I used to spend summers around there - my Dad's from those parts.