Valentine with a distended rumen

My herd is full of lopsided cows. Cattle are ruminants which means they have an extra stomach that sort of digests their food, then they regurgitate it as a cud and chew the food more.  The rumen is where they store the hay while they go through the first digestion.  A cow who has eaten a lot of hay will have one side very extended.  That's the side with the rumen.  Right now, with this very cold weather, all my cows are lopsided with lots of hay in their rumens making heat to keep them warm,

How Many Round Bales More to Go

600 to 800 pound bales of hay

In November the hay man arrived with his long trailer holding 18 of these beauties.  I unloaded them with the front bale spear on my tractor's front end loader and lined up the load along the driveway. A few days later he brought 18 more. I stored those up by the barn.

The hay was bought to feed five cows, seven heifers, a bull, two bull calves, five alpacas and one donkey.

At this writing there are only five bales left - although everyone has at least one bale in their feeders tonight as the temperature drops down to single digits.

18 bales stored at the equipment barn yard.

The bull calves are eating away at their third bale.  The alpacas and donkey are working on their second. With just five bales left, the first purchase should last through the end of the February. I had hoped they would last the winter. That's because the cattle stayed on pasture almost through December and by the end of December I'd only put out 12 bales.

But as the cattle enter their last trimester of pregnancy they have begun to eat a lot more! The bull calves have grown over the winter and are also eating much more.  Even the alpacas and donkey are munching hay all day now.

L to R:  Ginger, Tabitha, Pixel and Hollywick

Hay is mostly carbohydrate with enough protein to meet the cattle's needs for a good fodder.  Eating carbs keep the cattle and other animals warm. So when the weather get really cold they needs lots of hay to keep their body temperatures up. The cows have thick warm hair covering and can take cold weather as long as they are dry and out of the wind.The alpacas have thick fleece coats that keep them really warm.

At this time of year everyone is bored with nothing else much to do they just keep eating.

Taco Belle, or Belle for short.  She keeps the alpacas safe from predators and hollers at me every morning.

Voles for Cat Breakfast

A dead vole

Our winter has been gloomy but relative mild, unlike a lot of the northern part of the country. One morning this past week while sipping my coffee and enjoying the view out the back porch French door, I notice a cat cavorting on the back porch.  It was Little Joe tossing something in the air which landed with a thump. Jasper, Harmon and Zeke were still in the house and begged to be let out to see what was going on.

Woodland Vole

Joe had captured and killed a vole.  I knew it was a vole because it was so much bigger and fatter than the little field mice - which are still resident in the barns. Satisfied that the other cats had seen his prize, Joe carried the vole off and promptly ate it.  A couple of days later Jasper brought another dead vole to the porch door, proudly displaying it for his brothers' admiration, then devoured it in front of them.  The amazing thing to me is that the cats ate the voles.  I feed these cats twice a day with a good quality dry cat food, which they seem to like very much.  Most of them do not like any kind of cooked chicken, though Jasper will eat bit of raw beef trimmings. Most of them like canned tuna fish but neither Zeke or Pippi touch the stuff. But they will happily eat a mouse or a vole, bones, hair and all, leaving just the intestines behind. No accounting for taste.

Voles can do a lot of damage to the roots of plants. I've lost a lot of perennial flowers to voles who I suspect live under the back porch all winter feasting on my expensive bounty.