Finally Cruising into May

The wind has died down and the temperatures have finally warmed up into the low 70s. With recent rains and warm sunshine, the grass is getting tall and it's hard to see the calves if they are lying down.

The herd, both old cows and new calves, are enjoying the settled weather and growing pasture.

The cows with the oldest calves are relaxing a bit when I walk out to check the water tanks, although I still stay a good 15 feet from the fence dividing us.

It was ChaWakan and Lottie that had calves last Thursday. Since then Ida, Colorado, and Dakota have added calves to the herd too.

We'll still have more calves, but it could be into June before they are all born.

I’ll keep you updated on the pasture births as I see them.

More Buffalo Babies!

Just watched the newest baby stand up! That's the second today! Both mothers are smaller in stature, so I'm guessing they are ChaWakan and Camille. Since these were three-year-old "heifers", they now are "cows" because they have given birth to a calf. I'll let you know in my next email who the new cows were.

I'm checking the pasture by binoculars these days, for both babies and water tanks. On Tuesday I was on the porch watching and waiting for Freda to give birth. She had a tough time with a three-hour breech birth last year, so I was worried about her this year. It took a while, but she had her baby at 7 minutes before 11 am, and it stood up at 7 minutes after 11 am. Fourteen minutes from birth to standing- be it a little wobbly...

About 2 pm that day I needed to check the water tank as it had a problem and was overflowing when I first checked it that morning. I turned off the electricity to the fence and started walking across the first paddock to where the tank was between two paddocks.

As I got half way across the pasture, I heard a deep rumble from Freda's throat. Bison make very distinct sounds, and this threatening call only comes when you get too close to a mother's newborn.

There were two more fences and 300 feet between me, the water tank, and Freda near by, but I turned around without taking another step. Bison have very good memories, and you never want to make a new "bad impression" with a cow.

When I made my turn, I saw the flash of another newborn starting to stand further up the pasture. Kajsa got through her delivery without me as her audience.

May Day at the Bison Farm

Happy May Day!

Mom was picking wild violets from her yard when I stopped by with the newspaper this morning. That's her favorite flower from her childhood home, and she's happy that they thrive in this yard too.

My favorite flower to pick this time of year is the lilac. The original bush planted by Kajsa, who homesteaded our family farm, still blooms each year. It was featured on the front cover of Looking Back, the fourth book in my Butter in the Well book series.

As children, we'd take a May Basket of lilacs and tulips to Kajsa's daughter, Julia, who lived on the farm north of us.

Since we've had a late spring this year, the lilac bush is just starting to bloom and in perfect timing for our spring tradition of picking flowers for May Day.

The lilac scent is very powerful in my office today from the big bouquet on my desk. Spring is now officially here for me!

Update on buffalo babies! Cows Clara and Lillie added calves to the herd this week. Freda, Kajsa, and Ida look like they are next to add to the nursery.

Buffalo Babies!

They're here! The first calves of the year have arrived!

Cow Hilda had her calf on Monday, Esther on Tuesday, Las Vegas on Wednesday, so the "meet and greet" herd is growing!

So tiny, yet the babies are figuring out how their legs work and are running in little circles- at only a day old.

I've been watching this action by binoculars as the herd is clear down in the southeast corner of the pasture, as far away from the Visitors Center as the cows can get. That's where they feel safest as they start having their calves.

And the calves were introduced to their first full blown prairie thunderstorm Wednesday morning, complete with heavy thunder, lightning, and rain. I noticed when the worst of the storm hit, the herd all laid down- trying to stay safe when the lightning was the worst?

But other times they grazed like there was no storm going on even though it was pouring rain. Interesting to see their reaction to the weather, and when it's at its worst, they know it.

I'm going out to the porch several times a day now to see what's going on in the far end of the pasture. Please check back next week to see how many more new calves there are!

Glad I'm not in a Tepee

Weather this week has been one extreme to another. Tuesday's high winds blew down the large wooden fence gates around the Visitors Center patio that protects the big BBQ grill- which blew over too.

Yesterday was a calm beautiful day in the 70s. I enjoyed a walk through the pasture to talk to the buffalo and take photos of the herd.

Takoda was playing with the portable water tank. It's not the best thing to toss around and get upside down so that the herd doesn't have water to drink, but he wasn't listening to my telling him to "Quit!"

Eventually he backed off to let some yearling heifers come up for water.
Last night we had wind, drifts of hail stones, and a torrential downpour of rain.

I always worry about the buffalo being out in the open getting pelted by hail, but there is no shelter out in the pasture (nor would they use it anyway.)

Luckily there aren't any new baby calves yet in this bad weather.

Back to the Kansas Prairie

It was a drive through the Flint Hills and time...

Wednesday my family drove to Burlington, Kansas for the funeral of my great uncle Ralph Pieratt. He would have been 97 next month, and the last living of eight children born to my great-grandparents.

Twelve nephews and nieces drove in from Nebraska, Texas, and Kansas to attend the service. After saying goodbye to him and our ancestors in the country cemetery, we drove around the sections to see the family land again.

Ralph's Pieratt family was the main characters in my Trail of Thread book series. The first generation of Pieratts left Kentucky for Kansas in 1854. The second generation (the children that were on the covered wagon trip) moved to the Flint Hills after the Civil War.

My great grandpa Ira Pieratt married German descendent Kizzie Hamman in 1894. After trying their luck in the Oklahoma Land Rush, they settled back in Kansas and built a homestead from scratch.

They raised a family on this land, and welcomed three generations of their descendents for family reunions until they were in their 90s, and had to move off their farm. No one ever lived in the house again. It was burned down and turned back to prairie in the 1980s.

On this spring day (except for the fence and gate), it probably looks like the same wind-swept prairie that Ira and Kizzie walked on as they dreamed of their new homestead.

I'm just glad it's back to grass and not a shopping mall...

Pasture Burning

The wind was going down at 5 pm last night, so Verne and Dyllan started the Eastern Gammagrass on fire to get rid of the old grass clumps. We have a planted pasture of it on the northend of our land.

Eastern Gammagrass is native to Kansas, and the bison have eaten it for centuries. It looks like big clumps of Pampas Grass, and can get three to four foot tall. It has a wide leaf and is sweet to the taste. When Kansas was fenced by the homesteaders, cattle liked it too and ate it down to the ground, which killed it out in most areas.

Because bison eat and roam, and this type of grass needs 6-8 inches of the crown left on the plant to rejeuvenate, it thrived on the prairie with the bison's grazing pattern.

The goal was to burn the old growth off, leaving fresh new grass to come up from the ground. Old dried stems can poke the animal's eye as they try to get the fresh stems, and it just tastes better not to have old grass in a mouthful.

From the picture you can see Verne is equipped with a water tank on his back with a short pump to dose fire, the red fire starter, and the rubber flap to hit out stray fires. (The Visitors Center is in the background.)

I was driving the pickup with the big water tank in the back, and Dyllan was manning the hose from that tank. They burned a strip west along the driveway and north along the fence and road ditch first to form a fire break, then went to the south end of the pasture and started the main fire.

From the second photo taken this morning, only part of the pasture burned as the wind died down and the fire could not jump from clump to clump in some places.

Verne had planned to burn again tonight to get the rest of the clumps, but we're getting a light rain today so the grass will be too damp.

Most people don't realize what we do to maintain pasture... to graze the buffalo... to provide meat for our customers. This is all to mimic what nature did centuries ago when prairie fires cleared the dead winter grass for the bison's spring food.