A bad day at the farm

Hi all.  It's nice enough for the chickens and cows to be out again today, so the yard is full of barnyard noises.  The ducks are on the other side of the barn from the house, but I can hear them loudly over everything else.  The one duck that we hatched seems to be a bit under the weather lately, so I'm keeping an eye on her.  Seems that whenever a chicken camps out under the heat lamp for several days in a row, that's the chicken that I find dead under the heat lamp a few more days later.  I thought that was the case with Blackbeard (she's a black Cayuga duck, really beautiful with green iridescent color on black feathers).  She was laying under the lamp, neck at a funny angle, and I dreaded looking in at her, but she perked up and pushed a chicken out of the way when she saw me checking in on her. A bit of a panic an hour ago when I went into the garage to find the hose.  As soon as I opened the door, I heard water gushing.....  Shouldn't be any water running in the garage, ever!  But the pipes had burst under the stairs, and water was spraying all over (luckily it was contained and leaking out the side of the garage, and not INTO the garage which is still full of Palatine stuff to plow through.)  I called the well company who had sent out a guy in August before we moved in, but then when I called Jeff, he was able to tell me where the valve switch was.  I just couldn't see it through all the water spraying out!  So that's taken care of, and we didn't have to pay big bucks for an emergency visit from the well and pump guy. The cows are frisking around the back acre again, and both dogs are just about frantic that they can't get out there.  I think it would be a bit of a disaster--Rocky and Shadow would try to "play" with Lucy, and Bessie would charge them.  After watching both cows chase the cats out of the pasture yesterday, I don't think they'd put up with irritating dogs.  And we don't need any vet bills right now. It's funny today, though, because Lucy seems to be taunting Bessie.  Bess charges her, Lucy trots away, Bess gets involved with something else, and Lucy comes back, trotting as if she's up to some mischief.  It's like watching Rocky try to get a reaction out of Shadow, only on a bigger scale. Shadow and Rocky had great fun sniffing out the new cow pies after the cows went to bed last night.  Luckily, they seem to like them better when they're frozen and they can pick them up and run with them.....  Still gross. Bess has a bit of mastitis in one of her back "quarters".  I never would have thought that the udder is divided into four distinct sections, but it is. She has swelling in one of the back sections, so that milk has been going to the chickens (safe for them, not safe for people to drink).   The infection can't spread to the other quarters unless it can enter through the teat end, and I've been fairly religious about using the iodine dip both before and after milking to keep her as clean as possible.   But there are two extremes of thought on this.  Farmer Bob sounds the most sane about it.  The vet seems to think it's a death sentence waiting to happen.  Meaning, as he put it, "There's one sure way to cure mastitis, and that's putting her on a truck".  His advice is to let her have her calf (but not to let her nurse it if it's a girl), to let a couple of adopted bull calves drink all of her milk next spring and summer and then send her away.  He said we could still have hamburger---funny, that's not the comforting statement I needed right then.   Farmer Bob was much more matter-of-fact about it.  No extreme measures.  Treat it and watch it and call him with any questions. I cried a bit, Jeff and I talked it through, and there has to be some truth to both sides, and some middle ground.  Jeff even suggested milking her "good" quarters after the calf is born and bottle feeding her calf, if that would keep a heifer calf from possibly picking up the infection. So the end result for Bessie remains to be seen.  She's only been here 2 weeks, and I didn't really think I was THAT attached to her, but I should have known better.   Kind of sad, but I guess that is the reality that comes with having livestock.  :( Whatever happens with Bessie next summer, I'm determined that I'll give her the best life here, as long as she is in our care! On a much happier note--Michael has discovered a love for milk that is rivaling my own (hard to believe, I know!).  We skim the cream off the milk, and he takes a quart of it to school every day and drinks it during first hour.  Even skim milk from Bessie is much richer than store-bought 2%.  Then at dinner, he's been having 2 full cups of it, plus maybe a glass when he gets home, maybe a glass before bed......  He's tall already--it will be interesting to see how much height he might be able to attribute to the fresh milk he's getting!  ;)  And it makes me glad that I'm not PAYING at the grocery store for all that milk!  (The milk from the good quarters is perfectly fine for us to drink.  No worries there!) Here are the photos from yesterday.  You can see that Bess found a bit of mud that she decided would be great for a beauty treatment.  Luckily, it wasn't a full-sized wallow, or I'd have had a lot of fun getting mud off of her before milking last night!  Still, she's sporting a fair amount of dried mud and grit all over her face this morning and looked a bit scary when I came in and her huge head was peering around the door waiting to get a mouthful of alfalfa as soon as she could get to it.  I know the nice weather can't last, but it's sure wonderful to see the girls out back and all the chickens scattered around the yard. Laura Picasa Album