The rancher kneels in hay-strewn manure, his cold blue eyes and straight jaw shaded by his cowboy hat. He holds a lassoed day-old calf in his arms as its mother cow sniffs at him, its breath visible in the bitter March cold. A constant chorus of moos rings from the surrounding herd.
He pushes a plunger of pink liquid into the calf’s mouth as it wriggles. He holds its snout shut for a moment to make sure it swallows, then lets it go. It lays stunned for a moment before he pats it on its backside and it springs up, walking in a daze back to its mother’s side.
The pink liquid is Pepto-Bismol.
“She’s got some diarrhea,” says the rancher, hopping up, his red-checked flannel shirt and leather chaps smeared faintly in pink. Lasso in hand, he moves to the next newborn calf.
The rancher, Brad Day, runs the McCabe Ranch in Old Snowmass — raising Black Angus cattle with his wife, Niki. Over the next month or so, they expect to birth 260 or so calves.
They’ll raise up those calves until November, when they expect to ship most of them to market. From there, the bulls and heifers will go to slaughter and eventually end up in supermarkets and steakhouses as Black Angus beef, America’s most popular meat.
This is a hectic time for the Days. Their herd is growing by an average of 10 calves a day. Birthing them healthily and cataloguing them is a round-the-clock job.
The Days are among the few hold-out ranchers in the upper Roaring Fork Valley, where most spreads have been bought by developers. A portion of the 900-acre McCabe Ranch itself has been built on over the last two decades, with parcels sold off to a few private homebuilders (local real estate mogul Jim Chaffin and actors Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn among them).
With those homes in the distance across a snowy plain, under the shadow of the surrounding Elk Mountains, the McCabe Ranch these days is something of a bovine maternity ward.
Messy miracle of birth
In the upper pasture of the ranch, 200 pregnant cows lounge in clearings of hay, mud and manure, between story-high mounds of plowed snow.
One of the 1,300-pound cows wanders from the herd, weaving into a not-so far-off clearing. She’s shaking her tail in an uneven pendulum swing. As she finds a secluded spot, a small water bag protrudes from her vulva.
She stands silent, then lets out three bellowing moos.
“She’s older,” says Niki, keeping watch from behind a pile of snow. “She knows what she’s doing. With some of the first-time mothers, the water bag comes out and breaks and they think it’s done. They turn around and expect to see a calf. They go wild when they don’t see one back there.”
With some of the heifers — first time mothers — Niki and Brad must serve as mid-wives, delivering calves in the raunchy “pulling” process, using winches, ropes and hands to safely birth a calf. This one doesn’t appear to need help.
The cow lets out a few more anguished cries, then lays down on her side. Her moos quiet and quicken into short grunts — a Black Angus Lamaze-breathing, of sorts. Two feet poke out of her birth canal, white bottomed and insulated in the water sack. A small, hairy black head follows, bursting the water bag in a splash of maroon amniotic fluid.
The cresting calf rests its head on the ground, open eyes pointed to the sky and the mountainscape — its first peak at the world.
The mama cow stands with a sudden start, between muffled moos. The calf slips out of her partially, its hind legs catching in the birth canal. It hangs there for a few minutes, swinging back and forth, black hair matted, mussed and wet with the torn water bag spilling and swinging by its side like a busted balloon.
Then the calf drops sloppily to the ground and flops on its side. It’s the size of a full-grown German shepherd. The new mother turns around and begins licking the newborn incessantly, head to rear. She cleans the new calf entirely, and eats all of her birthing debris. When her placenta falls out, she’ll eat that, too.
After 10 minutes of licking from its mother, the calf tries to stand for the first time. It stumbles and falls right away. Mother stands patiently by as the calf tries again, and again — standing, shaking, stumbling, falling. Eventually, at 20-minutes-old, the calf takes its first wobbly steps. It instinctively goes to its mother’s udders and begins suckling.
As the calf gains its balance and learns to feed, its mother begins to walk away, a step or two at a time, looking back to monitor her following newborn’s progress finding its legs. This slow walking lesson ends with mother and newborn laying down among the herd, its population upped by one.
The neonatal corral
Down a short dirt road from the pasture of pregnant calves are a series of corrals. As calves are born, Brad and Niki periodically bring them here with their mothers, to be tagged and catalogued.
Brad lassos a calf, pulls it close to him, and turns it on its side.
Niki, spiral notebook in hand, asks, “Heifer?”
“Bull,” says Brad, sliding off his work glove and giving the infant a shot of vitamins and a dose of iodine on its healing naval, where its umbilical cord snapped.
Niki notes its sex, weight, ailments and color; not all Black Angus, it turns out, are black.
Brad punches a plastic tag through the calf’s right ear, with a number corresponding to the tag in his mother’s ear.
Brad and Niki work the ranch mostly as a couple, with occasional help from others. Today that help is Cody, a local electrician who grew up on a cattle ranch and assists here on his off days.
Brad and Cody stalk through the three corrals, lassoing untagged calves while Niki follows with her notebook and a plastic carry-all holding tags, syringes, bottles of vitamins and a big jug of Pepto.
“They’ve been healthy so far,” Brad says. “When they’re not healthy, this is not fun.”
Most of the time, figuring out which cow a calf belongs to is easy — most stay at their mothers’ sides and suckle. But some stray.
Roping in a wandering calf, Brad surveys the cows in the corral for its mother.
He nods at a cow a few yards away.
“You think it’s hers?” he asks Niki.
The cow moos.
“Must be,” Niki answers. “She’s calling for her.”
They tag them as a match and move on to the next.
Baby’s day out
After the calves are a day or two old, Brad and Niki lead them from the corrals to graze with their mothers in a bigger pasture.
Getting them there is a sloppy, slapdash journey one would expect when trying to get a group of over- a-ton beasts and infants to do something they don’t want to do.
“They’re not very good at this,” Brad says, opening the corral gate. “They’re worried about everything else but walking.”
He, Cody and Niki moo, clap, and slap cow and calf lightly on the rear with their lassos. Calves wander off into snowbanks, tumble, get stuck. Cows scramble in the swarm — mooing and yelping, trying to keep track of their young. Others turn around inexplicably, and walk back toward the corrals.
“It’s not any easier than herding mice,” Brad sighs.
Passing a hay barn, the cows all stop in a cluster, stomping and mooing.
A sick elk has come down from the mountains and settled beside this dirt road, feeding in the Day’s hay barn. They’ve let him stay for now, even though he spooks the passing herd.
After they get one group to the pasture, they go back to do it all over again.
Motherhood
Back up in the birthing pasture, a dead calf is lying in the snow. Its mother is standing stoically beside it.
Niki and Brad aren’t sure how it died. They think it may be one of a pair of twins, born late at night, and it may have died of pneumonia or been trampled.
Another calf, which hasn’t had a cow take to it as a mother, they think is the other twin. Niki has been caring for that orphan in their barn for the last two days, feeding it milk from a bottle.
Niki eyes the dead calf and the mother beside it. “We don’t know what they feel,” she says. “But they do mourn.”
Brad brings the orphan up from the barn, in a sleigh trailing behind a four-wheeler. They hope to get the mourning mother cow to take it on.
Niki herself is the mother of two girls. She and Brad are raising them on the ranch.
With Brad administering Pepto to queasy calves, and Niki nursing a forsaken orphan by bottle in the barn, one wonders whether the intimate relationship between rancher and calf ever leads to a conflict. Whether selling them for beef after caring for them for nine months ever causes hesitation. Whether these daily rituals of the birthing spring ever lead to a deeper, more fond connection.
“You try not to get attached,” Niki says. “But with ones like that in the barn, it’s hard not to. I’m her mom, really.”
andrew@aspendailynews.com
