Calving at the ranch has started all at once because half the cows were bred on the same day last spring by the miracle of artificial insemination. We expect them all to calve this week. Unlike our neighbors who midwife their cows in a barn in January, we have timed our outdoor calving so that we don’t help them much in the trenches, but we are around to record the date and tag the calves with their mothers’ numbers. We are more clerks than midwives.

Like human births, calving involves pain, a sense of helplessness, and a lot of grunting and pushing. Cow mothers handle the nesting instinct by leaving the herd and finding an isolated place under a cedar tree or near large sagebrush. She will arch her back, tail in the air, and push and moan. When the calf finally effaces, she will often lie on her side for the final push. Then she will lick the calf until it stands up and looks for something to suck. (She may also eat the placenta.) The pair’s body proportions are perfectly matched so that a standing newborn will bump its head into the cow’s teats and latch on.

A year ago in February I watched a calf born at sundown on the coldest night of the year. I think the mercury was 10 degrees and dropping at sunset, so I gave them an hour and the calf still hadn’t stood up and her ears were freezing. I picked up the calf on the four-wheeler and took her into the house for warming, and tubing down colostrums. By then it was way too cold to return it to its mother so I put her by the wood stove all night and returned her at sunrise.

But I had interrupted the mothering process; the mother hadn’t licked the amniotic fluid off of the calf. I like to think this is motherly love and that the tasty slime is secondary. She hadn’t bonded with her offspring, took one sniff at the dry healthy calf, and wanted nothing to do with it. Similarly, a calf’s sucking is instinctive during the first three hours, but the instinct wanes and what was simple and instinctive became difficult and foreign. I had to put the cow in a head-catch, then squeeze the calf’s jaw and tickle its tongue with a finger and introduce a little milk so the calf could learn to associate the sucking with eating. Still, the cow figured she didn’t smell right and would kick her own calf. It took a week of this feeding tango for the mother to decide the calf smelled OK. By then I had worked so much with the calf that she thought of me as a second mother. Even last week, the yearling let me walk up to her and scratch her neck.

When a cow has twins, she often will not acknowledge it. Usually she licks them both off, sometimes even gets them both to suck, but if the calves get separated, she reaches the limits of the bovine brains. Cows cannot count past one. She realizes one calf is sucking and thinks, “This is my calf.” Not “Where is my other calf?” So it is usually best to find a cow whose calf has died and graft the twin to her. There are several tricks such as sprinkling salt or “orphan-no-more” on the calf to encourage the cow to lick it. Often tying the dead calf’s hide to the orphan will fool a young cow, but older cows will smell the calf’s belly to get to the truth.

Now and then a calf-less mother cow will try to steal another cow’s calf. Last year, a calf-less cow adopted a calf that was very happy to have two mothers, twice the meals, and twice the cream. When we weighed her in the fall, she was 200 pounds above average.

A few years ago, three cows had their calves one night under the same cedar tree. The next day, they left for hay and returned to a fight that was worthy of King Solomon. One mother and calf paired up and left, but the remaining two mothers insisted that one calf was hers and neglected the other. Finally, I took my best guess and isolated one mother and calf in the corral. She bellowed the whole week of grafting, insisting I was wrong, but finally adopted the calf. We’ll never know for certain without DNA testing, but she may have been right.

Elizabeth B. Mitchell, along with her husband Alan, operates the Bennion Ranch at Benmore.