Minutes after this calf was born, he got up and nursed. Copyright 2010 Link Bar Ranch Life. All rights reserved.
I’ve seen thousands of new born calves and yet the miracle of birth never grows old, gets dull, or ceases to amaze me. I’ve never seen a parakeet, a dolphin, or anything but a calf come of out a cow at birth. It is always a miracle that an animal can transfer from an aquatic environment to an oxygen environment within minutes, gasp a lung full of fresh sagebrush air, shake his head, and immediately attempt to stand. Many times, even before the cow has licked all the amnionic fluid off the calf, the calf is walking around looking for that first meal. The cow in this picture has just given birth to this calf. Her afterbirth still hangs from her. It will shed quickly, sometimes immediately, sometimes in a couple hours. Then she eats it! It used to gag me to watch that. (I’m so glad women don’t have to lick off our kids or eat our afterbirth.) But for the cow, eating the afterbirth does a couple things. One, it is extremely high in protein and gives her a huge nutritional boost. Another, it gets rid of attracting smells and evidence that would draw predators.
Licking the calf stimulates the newborn circulation. Copyright 2010 Link Bar Ranch Life. All rights reserved.
The red ground this pair is standing on is red cinders. Our area had large veins of fissures, volcanic action years ago that didn’t erupt, but rather oozed out in veins. It is red because of the high iron and mineral content. The cinders make good gravel for roads and nice, non muddy places for a cow to give birth to her calf.
A cow licks her newborn calf. It dries him off, stimulates the circulation (her tongue is rough) and lets them both have some common smells that tells each of them they belong together. Because each calf has a unique smell to its mother, even when a hundred calves get all mixed up with each other, a mother cow can come into the group, smell hers, and take it out of that group!!! If it rains or snows and you bunch up a large number of calves and they rub each other, then that smell gets comingled and then the cow can’t tell her calf apart from the rest. So you never bunch up calves when it is wet.
