Calving season on the High Plains will be harder and more costly than any year in at least a decade
The temperature outside was 10 degrees farenheight and falling as calf No. 207 who was just one hour old, lay on the floor of the warming shed, wheezing and fighting for life.
The calf was born premature, and it is way underweight, to a mother who is stressed out by the successive blizzards and the brutal cold in southeast Colorado. The baby Black Angus might yet live if it could clear its lungs of fluid and get to its feet by morning. If not, No. 207 will take its place in the dead pile, a grim place in the barn on the Butler ranch where many of the 25 or so calves already lost this winter lay frozen and twisted.
"Nothing we've done in the last three weeks has been fun," said Dale Butler, who grew up on a ranch five miles away before starting his own place here in the 1970s just west of the Kansas border. "It's a fight every day."
Mr. Butler, who is 51, knelt on the cement floor of the warming shed and held No. 207’s head in his hands, blowing puffs of air into its lungs. He had been too busy trying to save the animal to even check out whether it was a male or female.
"Come on, bud, I've got a bet with Marty we’re going to keep you alive," he said softly, referring to his business partner on the ranch, Marty Neugebauer. In the warming shed, after bouncing back from the corral with the calf on the floor of his truck, Mr. Butler laid No. 207 on a burlap bag and rubbed it with a blanket. He tickled the calf's ears and nose, trying to provoke a sneeze that might clear the lungs. He picked it up by the hind legs and dangled it, hoping gravity would help the draining. Mr. Neugebauer stood by, watching. "I don't think this one is going to make 'er," he said. Mr. Butler glanced up. "Yeah he is," he said, and kept working. But the calf -- a female, as Mr. Butler later discovered -- did not survive. Sometime between his rounds through the ranch at 2 a.m. and Mr. Neugebauer’s return an hour later, the gasping wheeze had fallen still.
More than 3,000 adult animals have been confirmed dead so far in Colorado and ranchers say that many more cows remain uncounted for. They fear that they are , uried under drifts that are four to six feet deep. Thousands of other farm and ranch animals across the state also remain unaccounted for.
With new storms on the way, agriculture and disaster relief officials are still counting the costs from the storms that hit during two consecutive weeks beginning on December 18, 2006. The biggest concern now, said the state’s agriculture commissioner, John Stulp, is the persistence of the snow that cannot melt because of the cold.
Calving has just begun on most ranches and will peak in late February and early March. The Butlers have lost about one calf in six so far -- more than three times the ranch's average death rate.
The pregnant cows are stressed, and dropping down below zero is very hard on the newborns,” said Mr. Stulp, a rancher himself in southeast Colorado.
