Maggie has popped at last!

Maggie was officially due last Friday. Each and every morning, armed with my camera, I carefully checked her before releasing the cows from the corral. And each and every morning … zip, zilch, nada.

Yesterday morning, Don and I were getting ready to do a fencing project. I started walking across the yard and, as always, glanced up to gauge Maggie’s posture (cows adopt a sort of hunched position when in labor). She looked like she was peacefully grazing … except she had a long strand hanging from her backside.

I turned and walked back into the house. “Change of plan,” I announced. “Let’s go get Maggie’s calf instead.” The little sneak had managed to conceal her early labor when I released her and the other animals from the corral into the pasture, and then had the audacity to have her calf without my being able to watch.

Dragging the gorilla cart, Don, Younger Daughter, and I all trooped up into the pasture to fetch Maggie and her newborn back into the corral.

The calf had just been dropped and was still flat on its side, and very wet with the birth fluids.

Loading the calf was a three-person effort: One person to hold the cart steady in its “dump truck” position, and two people to shove and push the slippery-wet calf into the cart. (By the time we were finished, both Younger Daughter and I were soaked with placental fluids and would require a full-body change of clothes and a shower.)

After the calf was in the cart, I pulled while Don kept the calf from trying to climb to its feet, and Younger Daughter shooed the other animals from following us out the gate. It was a steep downhill drop from the pasture to the driveway, then level-flat as we pushed/pulled the cart around to the back of the barn into the corral. Maggie trotted on our heels, agitated but not aggressive. (Thank God for sweet Jersey cow dispositions!)

Once in the corral, we gently dumped the calf out of the cart to the ground, and let Maggie continue licking her baby dry.

Meanwhile the other animals had come around through the gate to see the new calf. This is Stormy, the calf’s older sister, meeting the newcomer.

And the baby is a girl! Back when we had Maggie bred by AI (artificial insemination), the breeder was actually able to select for a heifer for a slight increase in price. She emphasized the gender was not guaranteed, but of all the times she’s selected for one or the other gender, she’s been successful. We’ll have to let her know she succeeded again.

This is our first purebred Jersey calf, so we’re pretty jazzed. In years past, all our calves were either purebred Dexter, Jersey/Dexter crosses, or Jersey/Angus crosses.

Maggie is an experienced mama now, so we had no concerns about her maternal care. However we wanted to make sure the calf was nursing as soon as possible to get colostrum.

Meanwhile, she had a long strand of mucous hanging from her backside that was dragging on the ground and tangling around her legs. I took a pair of scissors and snipped off a length.

It took the baby some time to get to her feet. She didn’t seem in any hurry.

We left the animals to calm down a bit and let nature take its course. An hour or so later, we checked and saw the calf was standing, though very unsteadily, and blundering around trying to find a teat.

She tried the usual suspects: Maggie’s armpit, her sister’s leg, the steer’s nose, that kind of thing. (It takes a calf a while to figure out where the udder is located … and on what animal.) The calf didn’t quite have her footing, either. At one point, trying to master the three-inch lip on the threshold of the barn door, she went splat.

“What just happened?”

Maggie wasn’t much help during this process because she was swishing around in agitation as she labored to pass the placenta.

I went to fill up the feed bins with hay, since the animals were confined to the corral, and by the time I was finished, Maggie had passed the placenta.

Then, in true bovine fashion, she proceeded to (try to) eat it. This is normal behavior for cows, and doubtless is an instinctive technique meant to prevent drawing in predators. Maggie slurped and chewed and chewed and slurped, but wasn’t making much progress.

After about fifteen minutes, I grabbed a wheelbarrow and a pitchfork, and scooped up the placenta. Maggie seemed vastly relieved to be excused from this duty.

I decided to run the placenta down to the county dumpsters (located a few miles away) rather than trying to bury it somewhere. I invited Younger Daughter to come with me, and she went to put on some shoes and use the bathroom before departing.

“I’m going to go load the placenta into the car,” I called to her through the bathroom door.

“That is SUCH  weird sentence to hear,” she shouted back.

Toward evening, Younger Daughter and I went to check on the animals and saw both mother and baby were resting, doubtless exhausted from their ordeal.

I was mildly concerned because I had not yet seen the baby successfully nurse, and I rummaged around in our supplies for a rubber teat in case I needed to milk out some of the colostrum and bottle-feed the baby. The calf was still blundering around investigating armpits and legs without locating the correct spot.

So YD and I collaborated to get her to feed. At a point when she was kinda in the right neighborhood of the udder, YD pushed the calf gently from behind while I guided her mouth toward the teat. Aha! Success!

With a belly full of warm colostrum, within an hour she began doing the cute little skippy-hops of a healthy calf as she tried out her legs.

“Hi Mom! Whatcha doing?”

Later she settled in for the night among her new herd-mates.

So all is right in our little bovine world.

Source: http://www.rural-revolution.com/2026/06/maggie-has-popped-at-last.html