One of my favorite parts of our farm experience has been watching new life. Whether it’s the excitement of seeing a crop emerge from the ground after tilling and planting, watching calves or foals being born or even seeing the birth of wildlife, I never get tired of it!
Every spring there is a sense of anticipation and excitement as we watch the weather, waiting for the right time to prepare the ground, choose the seed, ready our equipment and plant. Monitoring soil temperature, weather cycles, waiting for the “Easter Snap” to pass, gathering soil samples, watching the flush of growth when the first warm temperatures arrive. Always the same, but fresh every year.
We usually have a foal every spring, in April, which is the culmination of a long (11 month) gestation period. It seems like it takes forever. Pregnant horses exercise our patience for sure! It’s like waiting for Christmas morning when we were kids. We have mini horses, so this year, our April foal is a charcoal black mini colt born to Tink (black and white) and Rocket (Bay). We love sharing the new births with our family and some friends who like to come visit.
One spring morning 10 years past, I arrived at a back pasture housing 2 mares, to work on fences only to find a brand new buckskin filly lying next to my mare! 11 months prior, a young colt and filly (both 2 years or less) from the farm next door broke out of their pastures, traveled a mile or so through the woods and broke into ours. We found the colt wrapped in fence wire and after extricating him from the fence we returned them to their home. I never thought anything else about it! In February, while using my mare to work the cows, my wife joked with me about how fat she was getting and how out of breath she was working the cows! I had no idea she was pregnant! A nice surprise but I sure felt bad about not providing any special care for her while she was with foal.
In addition to our own livestock, wildlife adds to the experience. For example, we have two-pair of Canadian Geese show up every spring. They hang around, watching us suspiciously for the first couple of weeks, but eventually just honk in alarm and move out of the way as we go about our daily farm tasks. Some years they raise babies, and some years they don’t, so not knowing what the difference is, we do our best not to disturb them while they are our guests. They eventually move on as the weather gets hotter and return the following spring.
We also have baby squirrels, fawns, ground nesting Kildeer and just about all our bird houses are used. Our favorite residents are the ring-necked doves and the Killdeer Plovers. Several pair of each nest on the farm each year. The Killdeer usually have 4 eggs in a ground depression, with the parents standing watch nearby. When we get too close, one will flutter and squawk on the ground as if injured to draw us away. We always wonder how the cows don’t step on the eggs, but they always seem to avoid them. When the babies hatch, they are about thumb-size with long gangly legs, hard to see until they move but very entertaining to watch running around the pasture.
The new life is as exciting as the inevitable deaths are gut wrenching. We love our animals whether they are livestock for eventual table fare, horses for work and pleasure, our dogs, or the wildlife around us. We usually find baby birds who didn’t make it, one of the cats will catch a squirrel now and then, and we even lose cattle and an occasional horse. We’ve lost 4 horses over the years to old age or illness. I’ll discuss some of these experiences in a different post.