When we worked the cattle this summer we had a few funny mistakes that were not so funny at the time.

The longer you are standing out in the hot sun the more tired you get and the more mistakes can happen. As each animal exits the chute you have to determine where it is going. Are you moving it to the home place, keeping a calf with its mother, taking a bull to be castrated and so on? We had three cows with calves only a few months old. We were going to take these back home to a pasture near the house. We had already separated the mama cows into holding pens and we were working the calves. We released a calf by mistake into the pasture by the pens rather than back to its mama.

The only way to get it back was to get the horses and rope it.



This was not all that easy and took several attempts. Once it was roped the calf was not in any mood to go anywhere. We had to go get the cattle trailer and with a lot of effort get the calf inside so we could reunite it with its mama. Then it was a short happy trails ride back to the barn.



After this we thought we had things under control. We also thought it best to leave the cow and calf where they were in the corral for the night and get over the stress of the separation and roping. We took the other two cows and their calves home and left them in our corral/holding pen there.

The next morning we had two calves and one cow and a knocked down fence. The sheriff called and said someone had seen one of our cows (they all have our name on their ear tag) on a road about a mile from the house. Javier went one way and me the other and no cow was found. Eventually we found tracks off into some woods that had been recently clear cut. It looked like a snake den, but we went in and found nothing.

In time, a ranch hand from the place next to ours showed up and said he had our heifer on his place. We went there and finally got it in a horse round pen so it could be taken home.

What caused all this is we had our paperwork records wrong and had brought the wrong calf home. The cow that ran away was looking for her calf and the one we had penned at Rocky Branch was having nothing to do with the calf we left there.

Putting everyone on a trailer we went to Rocky Branch and got everyone in the same pen at the same time and figured out which calf belonged to what cow. It was easy, they were all hungry for milk.

Another day of waste effort and a lesson learned.