Good news on the farm! We had a second duckling hatch! This one came on July 4 — so we now have Canada and Indee. They are still living in the house and Lexi is learning to be gentle. She sleeps by the spare room door where they are living currently but I don’t want any unsupervised visits because she is not all that gentle. We didn’t have a very good hatch rate, but we are very happy we ended up with two. Indee had a bent foot, so we splinted it and it seems to be good now. They are messy little critters, and you are not supposed to allow them much water until they are a bit older, but they do their best to walk through it and splash it all around.
The cows are coming home for water since a lot of the watering holes are not that abundant. Last night I was really concerned because the cows seemed to have a lot of blood on them. You do see blood from flies, but this was more than that. My mom and I had seen a very large black bear last week so I was worried. They are hard to check when they are all huddled up and fighting flies. I started walking through the group and finally seen the problem; one of the cows had the end of her tail stepped on and it was bleeding and every time she switched her tail it was getting blood all over everyone else. I will have to keep an eye on her but the cooler weather they are predicting should help that and the rain we had last night should have cleaned everyone up. It is hard to count cattle when they group up, but normally if someone is missing, the cows let you know.
This weekend we will pull the bulls. I did see a couple of cows in heat more recently than I would have liked but I am hoping all else is fine. The bulls will likely be happy as they will get a chance to stay in a shed out of the bugs. Most of our butcher animals are heifers so they will continue to cycle stirring up the bulls for awhile yet.
Haying….. yes, we need rain, but I am going to complain a bit again. We just need a stretch of weather to make some hay. Haying is so important, but it is so weather dependent, and we cannot change it — by working harder, longer, or anything else. We fight the weather all the time, but it certainly makes this season drag out much longer than we would all like. We have hay down right now but hoping we can get it baled up this week. The frustrating part was that none of my weather channels that I check were not calling for a very significant amount of rain, so you cut and then as it pours it crushes you. We all want to make good hay for our animals. But we must take what we get!
