Lights-Camera-Action-Esther!

A movie is being filmed in the area, and one of the settings is at our bison farm. The film crew was here at 7:15 am last Friday (when it was a very cold 15 degrees) to shoot footage of the bison, both in the pasture and moving from one paddock to another. It took a while for the herd to be comfortable with the camera and strange people, but they just ignored them both after a while.

For one scene the herd needed to move and the producer said "Action" and Esther (leading the herd) practically pranced down the alley into a another paddock, just like she understood what she was supposed to do.

Over the next few weeks the cast will be coming in and shooting more scenes too, but Friday was just scenes of the buffalo roaming and doing what buffalo do...

My New Camera

I've dropped my camera - by accident- so many times (pasture and elsewhere) that the battery latch wouldn't hold anymore and I had to hold the camera "just so" to make it work.

With over 8,000 photos taken with my little Olympus, it was time to retire it. I ordered a bright fuchsia colored Olympus camera (better to find in the tall grass) and got it yesterday by UPS.

Now I can really zoom in on things! The first picture is taken just stepping out onto the porch, and the second is zooming in on the buffalo herd. I'm going to have lots of fun with this new camera. Look for better videos in the future too.

A Sad Decision

One of the "lows" of working with livestock is that some decisions must be made that are tough to make and follow through on. Yesterday afternoon I heard the rumble of Dyllan's car and wondered why he was coming in after school. Then I got a lump in my throat. Not only was Verne and Dyllan loading meat bulls to go to processing, but Little Danny was going with them.

To fill in my newer readers to my weekly diary, Little Danny was a blind calf born in June of 2007. He never left his mother's side to run and play with the other calves. Then we watched him run into fence lines, posts, and anything else that was in his way. Danny couldn't see.

For almost a week during one of the hottest days of that summer, the herd, including his mother, shunned him and wouldn't answer his frantic call of "Where are you?". They knew he was a liability to the herd. But by a miracle he survived, mostly because one of the other bull calves started answering back to Danny and become his "guide". He followed the herd by sound from then on.

During the winter he seemed to learn how many steps it took to come down the alley and make the turn to get to the water tank. You could almost watch him count them off.

When the vet came to do the ear tags for the calves last March, Danny followed the group into the pen and the vet got a good look at his eyes. They were brown and looked okay, but had severe cataracts in them.

Verne didn't have the heart to have the vet put him down, so Danny went to the summer pasture with the other bulls calves. One of his eyes turned white and went totally blind since June, but he got along okay since it's a big open pasture with no posts to run into.

But the bulls were moved back to our main pasture this last Saturday. What to do with Danny now? He was a little stunted dwarf compared to his brothers, and would never grow due to his lack of nuturtion his first year. And Danny was a danger to us, others, the herd (and fences) due to the fact he couldn't see what or where he was going while running.

So, while Danny was in the pen with the bulls, he was loaded up with the meat bulls and took his final ride in the trailer yesterday.

That was a "low" for me, but we gave him the best year we could, and a decision had to be made and followed though...