Christmas Cattle time

First, of all, here is to wishing all of our friends and family a Merry Christmas.

We took our annual, once a year family photo for this event.

As Jess is all fired up to hit the cattle show circuit,

we decided to take some of our commercial Angus calves to a show in Dawson Creek this January.

So, that meant our Christmas break was spent halter breaking, practice showing, washing and clipping these animals.

It is always fun to work with the kids, and the cattle,

 and the best part of it all is, that the older the kids get, the more they can do without my help!

The black heifer of Jess.

My red heifer

and, the black 4-H steer from Roy.

So, keeping in the spirit of things, Jess was gifted a few signs;

All that is left to say is,

have a great day with your herd and flock!

Meco update

It has been 4 weeks since Meco had his injury to his neck and ear.

He has had 2 surgeries on it, and I am happy to say that the healing is going very well.
When the vet tried to re-attach the ear, they did not manage to restore all the blood flow back to the ear, resulting in part of the ear dying off.
Once the hair grows back on his neck and head, the smaller ear will be the only visible sign of this injury.
It looks like he has a semi traditional, sarplaninac one ear crop.

His spirits are high, he is playful, runs around and loves our daily walks.
He enjoys the visits to the collies and the chickens,

and he even went to visit the livestock today.

He has indicated that he is ready to move back to the stock;
 by escaping from the heated recovery barn, climbing over the kennel panels, ripping out the door,  and being resistant when I want to place him back in the barn.
He wants to be out and about.

He will move back to the stock once he has completed his last round of medication.

I am happy he is making such a fantastic recovery;

 he is young, healthy and resilient,
with good vet care,  our daily care and of course  antibiotics,
have all helped speed up his recovery.

Critter cam shots

I have not looked at my critter camera for quite some time,
so it was fun to see who does what...

And, these picture of Vuk, who decided the cam needs some early morning inspecting.

We notced a few days ago that 'something" had grab a chicken in our yard.
We do not have any LGD in our yard as they are all out with the sheep and cattle.
So, the question was if it was a fox or a coyote.
So, I hung the camera up to see who the thief in the night was...

We locked all the chickens up in the coop,
and this is who came to investigate.

About 20 minutes later one of our cats comes ambling by.
So, time to have one of the lgd on the yard,
to persuade Wile E to go elsewhere.

It is always an adventure to see what is on the camera,
but 4000 pictures of ravens is not the most exciting.

Time to place the camera further out in the bush.