All In A Name

I struggle trying to place what critter goes with what mother around here. I mean, in a field of black cows I have a hard time figuring out who is who. Mike is amazing at recognition and is able to tell not only the name of any individual but also any nicknames they have been saddled with, who is the father, the mother, how many calves she has had and most of the names of those offspring. I look at that same critter and say, “eh, its a black cow” most of the time. In an effort to assist memories (namely mine) when matching up lineage, we try to use name games as the newest babies are born so that we can remember who came from who but there are exceptions.

A question came up recently about how the cow named Scooter got her name. If you remember, Scooter is the one who went up the hill with her own little entourage to calve a couple of weeks ago and we named her calf Tophill. We named this guy without regard to his mother’s name and went with where he was born since that search is something I will remember years from now. Even beginning this story today I was able to remember the mother’s name with her baby’s name without looking it up, and that in itself is saying a lot.

Scooter has been around since early in 2015, she was born to the cow Quiet. Since I started this little blogging farm diary in that same year I had planned on impressing you with looking up her birth story and revealing her name meaning. I did look up those pages and found that I have dramatically changed the way I do the dutiful journaling. This is the actual post from the month that Scooter was born;

Newborns stay close to their mothers for about a week. As they get older and learn to start playing with the other youngsters, they get more brave. Many times when out in the field, I notice that one mother will be babysitting four or five little ones while the other mothers are out grazing, or going to the other end of the field for water.

The little ones also will pair up with other calves to play and look for mischief. We have a gang of eight calves, they happen to be the older ones in the herd. This gang has taken to pulling the wires off the solar powered electric fence charger and disarming the whole fence. Knowing that they can step right through the line, they follow the fence looking for an easy spot for an escape! Recently, the gang of eight have broken out several mornings in a row and have gone to play along the river and over by the big farm truck. They love to rub their heads on the tires and play tag in the covert area beneath the truck bed.

New lines have been changed out on the charger, and they have been moved up higher so the youngsters can’t reach them as easily. The gang members are starting to respect the fence. They just have to do their rough-housing in the 36 acre field instead of trying to bust out!

I was much more focused on giving you an overview of farm activities yet vague compared to my current way of telling of the farm story. Back then I added to the journal only a couple times a week and mostly on the amount of yearling bulls we had in the bull pen, who they were and their sale info in an effort to get the word out that they needed to be on their own farms away from here.

But back to Scooter, I had to go to the analytical brain of the farm and ask directly why we named her Scooter to begin with. Quiet the mother is such a calm critter, she really lives up to her name. The day we found Scooter we realized that Quiet must have delivered right after dinner the night before. By the time we realized she had her calf she had her new baby all cleaned, fed and very mobile. Our first glimpse of the baby about twelve hours after the birth had us watching as the newborn was trying to run circles around her mother in bursts of scoots.

Since I now am better at announcing and sharing in blog form the birth stories of our little ones, I can safely say that Scooter has had five offspring. In previous years, there was Big Wheel, Segway, Vespa and Barbie (as in pink car), although we had to change Barbie to Bobbie when I realized I had in mistaken a bull for a heifer on the day she/he was born. Tophill broke the mold of naming them after rolling vehicles but the Barbie/Bobbie goof last year already caused a kerfuffle so it all seems to fit somehow.