A Wild Day On The Farm

Things have been going a little crazy on the farm lately.  We have a two year old heifer named Daddy's Girl that Jim bought from the Waller County Fair Junior Auction last October.  She is growing rounder by the day and we wake each morning counting heads in the field to see if she has given birth yet.  Jim and I both have been expecting it daily for the past month or more...but each day she just gets a little bigger.

On the other hand, Tuesday evening, August 7 had us worried about the heifer that I purchased at the same auction.  Wild Child suddenly began to drop a lot of weight.  She went from rather plump one day to showing her hip bones the next.  She earned her name by being a bit rambunctious in the pasture and because you never knew how she was going to react when you walked up to her.  Yet on that Tuesday night as they grazed in the garden spot, Jim and I both noticed that she seemed lethargic and that she was weaving as she stood to graze.  We discussed that we might need to load her up and take her in to see the vet if this didn't turn around before the weekend.

Imagine my surprise when Jim called me the next evening to let me know that we had a new baby calf.  But not from Daddy's Girl.  Oh no, it was Wild Child's calf.

Of course, I rushed home, grabbed the camera and trekked out to the pasture to get some pictures.

He was such a cutie.  I just love his sweet white face...but something about those black eyes looked a little freakish.

His daddy paid him no never mind.  All he wanted was for dinner to be served.

Jim moved the new baby and his mother to a separate pasture so that we could feed her without her having to fight for her food.  We were afraid the baby might get stomped on during the nightly feeding time frenzy.

As the sun went down, we started to really notice this little fellows dark facial markings.  Especially that mouth.

It was a little later that night, as he shined a flashlight into the pasture so that Will could get a look at him that Jim noticed the mouth had a striking resemblence to Heath Ledger's character, the Joker, from The Dark Knight.

Source

And thus, our new bull was dubbed Jokers Wild.

He had a rough go of it for the first couple of days.  His momma is young and she didn't drop her milk as easily as the other heifers have.  I always said that the cows are Jim's and Bri's and I wanted nothing to do with them...but this little one has really melted my heart.  We tried supplemental feeding but he wanted nothing to do with it. 

Finally, after the third or fourth day, he started walking a little steadier and by last Friday morning he had added a few pounds.   This past weekend he was bucking and kicking across the field.   I think he will be fine. 

And the best part, he lets me rub his ears!  Oh, and his momma is coming around to seeing me as an ally too.  She even lets me put my hands on her.  I think she knows I love her baby almost as much as she does.

We are still counting heads every morning, waiting on that other calf to make an entrance.  I just know it will be soon!