The Steamboat Pilot & Today

Steamboat Springs — I had some big weekend plans for this On Scene column.

I thought about heading over to watch cage fighting in Craig. If that didn’t work out, I was going to hop over to the Quintero’s Mexican Restaurant grand opening in Hayden, which promised a mariachi band.

Instead, I got caught up in the business of the weekend, checking out a movie I’d been meaning to see.

With deadline bearing down Wednesday, I was desperate for something I hadn’t seen before.

It happened in southern Routt County.

At Bar A Ranch in Toponas, I saw my first calf birth.

Fellow staff member Matt Stensland and I were touring in a pickup with the ranch manager, Wayne Shoemaker, and his wife, Sonja. They were showing us cows and calves.

“Are any calving now?” Matt asked, innocently enough.

“You mean right this minute?” Wayne Shoemaker asked.

He took us off on a hunt. Within minutes, we found a cow being herded into a barn by ranch employee Whit Gates. She was having trouble with the calf, Shoemaker told us.

I followed Gates and Shoemaker into the barn, dodging cow pies and mud puddles in my city slicker slip-on shoes.

Shoemaker jumped in, going after the leg that was sticking out. Sonja Shoemaker hung back to give me the play-by-play.

“It’s backward,” she said. “That’s not good.”

Wayne Shoemaker and Gates grabbed the back legs and pulled. Nothing. They hooked a contraption called a calf-puller around the legs and braced a curved metal section of it around the cow’s backside, cranking a handle to try to draw the calf out.

Gates’ wife, Tiffany, was in the barn in a flash, grabbing straw from the ground for reasons I couldn’t decipher. Shoemaker and Whit Gates heaved the black calf out. I backed up, relieved that the calf was blinking.

The men hung the animal upside down, and Tiffany went at it with the straw, clearing the nose and mouth. It was alive.

“If they’re backward, sometimes their lungs fill up with fluid, and they drown,” Sonja Shoemaker explained as we went to collect Wayne, who had gone to clean up.

“It looks pretty aggressive,” she said of the process. “But the sooner you get them out, the better.”

The outcome: happy cow, happy calf, happy ranchers and amazed reporters.

Not bad on deadline.