4 - 18 - 12: Turkey Pen Mucking and Cow Observing

Today was a productive day. Mimi gave me a project for the day, which was to shovel all of the manure, feathers, and dirt out of the turkey pen and into a wheelbarrow, take the wheelbarrows of debris to the manure pile and deposit the refuse there, then shovel sawdust into the wheelbarrow and move it to the pen. So, this morning and afternoon I had a grand old time interval shoveling away out in the barn for four hours. I had two shovels, a standard steel garden shovel and a plastic snow plow shovel device. Also, I learned that some shoveling strategies work better than others when it comes to scraping turkey turds off of wood. Sometimes, a ferocious Basic Instinct pickaxe frenzy is the way to go, to loosen up the congealed feces. Other times, a methodical, controlled dragging movement is in order. But usually, what does the trick is a bunch of determined shoving and scooping, with plenty of dramatic heaving action when throwing a pile into the wheelbarrow.

In the midst of turkey tidying, I was also sure to visit the cows quite frequently (I would estimate I visited or otherwise checked on the cows approximately twenty times today). I did this for several reasons. First, I like the cows and wanted to visit them. Second, two of the cows, Creama and Jilli, are still pregnant, and I am determined to see a calf being born. No one was born today (yet), but Creama, a gorgeous black and white cow with a mottled face, let me / demanded that I pet her for forty five minutes. Mimi informed me that it is important to let the cow approach the human to be scratched, rather than vice versa, so when Creama approached me in the pasture today, I was completely jubilant to scratch on her neck, shoulders, back, side, and rump. I imagine it was sort of like a spa day for her with the attention, and I am sure she enjoyed getting scratched as much as I enjoyed petting her. After about ten minutes of petting, she started to flick her tail like a whip, which I took to be a sign that she no longer required scratching services, but as soon as I backed away, she gave me a distraught facial gesture, and promptly marched up to me and positioned her posterior right next to my hand. Clearly, this is a smart, if somewhat sassy, cow. We had a dandy bonding session. I would love to witness Creama's calf being born. We shall see what happens!

The third reason I watched the cows today is because I have been bestowed with the wondrous task of naming the newest bull calf. While I was in the pasture with the cows today, I was searching for the calf. One would think that it would be a relatively straight-forward task to find an untagged calf among a field of two dozen calves, but, by golly, it took me an hour to find him. Even after going through what I thought must be each of the cows and calves and looking in the pig pasture which they have access to several times, I had not found the hidden calf. I was actually starting to get fairly worried, since it would be highly improbable for it to be the case that everyone had hallucinated this newborn calf, and my host family is especially nice and gracious, and so would never send me on a wild goose chase ("I've got a splendid idea; let's haze the new intern by telling her there's a new calf somewhere in the field who she gets to name. She'll search for hours!") Eventually, I noticed the calf and his mother relaxing nonchalantly next to the fence. I was quite pleased to find the calf, who is positively adorable and let me pet him this evening, and since locating him was such an adventure, I have decided to name him "Waldo," as in, "where's Waldo?" Welcome to the farm, Waldo!