Bog Myrtle & Peat

Calving began without warning, and mistakes I made during the summer came back to haunt me on a cold morning in early March. I hadn’t planned to begin calving until much later in the spring when the grass had risen – but I had kept a young bull back for the chance of a sale which was postponed and delayed for several weeks while the buyer tried to make plans.

At first it was safe to keep this young bull in with a few of the cows and the best of the previous year’s heifer calves because he was so young that he posed no threat to anybody. He was a fine little bull and I had high hopes for him, but when the sale fell through, I had him castrated – demand for riggit bulls is slender at the best of times, and only a handful are bought each year. Even the best of my bulls are lucky to find working homes, and most are simply castrated for a lack of working opportunity. But it turned out that this bull calf was able to work his magic before the vet came, and as a parting shot from his now defunct genitalia, he caught three of my good heifers in quick succession. 

It’s telling that he only caught the heifers, even though the grown-up cows were also available and cycling. Young bulls often seem to get bullied and shoved around by older female cows, and the first calves from a first-year bull are frequently staggered over several cycles. This calf was able to have his way with the young heifers, but if and when he tried it on with the cows, I reckon they cut him down to size and ignored him. 

When the proper bull went out to work, I did notice that he seemed to have little interest in these heifers – but that’s not definitive proof of anything, and I often overlook the practicalities of bulling. As long as I can see the bull jumping some cows, I assume he’s jumping them all. In this case, he wasn’t interested in the heifers because they were already two months pregnant when he found them.

The first calf was most surprising of all. I was out in the grey dawn and looked across to one of my favourite heifers, finding her lying awkwardly on her side beneath a crown of blackthorn scrub. I went for a coffee, and when I came back there was a black and white riggit calf standing up and sucking at her teat. I looked and I looked away… then hardly believing my eyes, I stopped in my tracks. Walking out to tag this new arrival after breakfast, I found that she was a beautiful little heifer in the finest flush of perfection… but I did have to work back through my cattle movement records to work out what had happened and how she’d been conceived. The others were less of a surprise, and all three were born without hitch or intervention.

There’s no harm done here – the bull calf and the heifers are unrelated and the new arrivals are everything I might have wanted. It’s simply taken me off guard, but it’s not the end of the world – and now I have the pleasure of watching these first three youngsters head out into the spring beneath a roaring litter of skylarks. Down on the flatlands and the meadow, lapwings have arrived and begun to display in fantastic, frenetic corkscrew flights which din across the moor and the open granite brows of the moor. 

Seven hundred geese have descended upon the better grass and call at all hours in a constant traffic to the coast – and most notable of all, the bog pools are churning to life with frogs and toads in shattering abundance. Even in moments of rest for the geese, the starlight is still being punctured by the bark and scrape of toads in the rushes and the sudden prickle of cottongrass flowers which have emerged like stubble scorched from the moss. At times like this, I can be convinced that it’s not such a bad place after all, and if these early calves are sometimes a little chilled by a late frost, they’ll take in their stride. After all, I could say that youngsters which arrive in the full heat of spring have nothing to be grateful for.