Down by the creek

Twins! A boy and a girl. They are four days old when I meet them. They run towards my friend Lisa and I as we walk through the long grass down towards the creek. They are all gangly legs, big brown eyes, floppy ears and the softest pale brown fur imaginable. Bramble and Berry are calves, born to Bessie, one of Lisa’s much loved Jersey cows. Bessie is nowhere in sight when Lisa and I get to the calves. The calves are all over us, clamouring for milk. Bessie has been unwell since their birth, her huge udder swollen and sore with mastitis. Lisa has been treating her and she is improving by the day, but she has been unable to feed her babies, so Lisa is giving them bottles of milk, two litres each twice a day, 5.30am and 5.30pm. Bookends on busy days. That’s the sort of commitment dairy cattle demand.

I take a bottle and one of the calves latches on to the teat. I’m not sure whether it’s Bramble or Berry. I can’t really tell them apart. They are equally cute. The calf I am feeding pushes at the bottle and sucks hard. Its tail wags and it dances with excitement, spinning around me as it feeds. I can see its belly slowly filling behind its ribs.

Once the calves have finished their milk, Lisa goes off in search of Bessie. We both fear the worst. I stay put with the calves, but they want to follow Lisa. They don’t know me. I dip my finger in the little bit of milk that spilt in the bottom of the bucket we carried the bottles in, then slip my milky finger into a calf’s mouth. I do the same with the other. I have a calve hanging off each hand. They are happy to stay with me now. They suck hard, rasping their tongues along my finger. I can feel the boney ridges along the tops of their mouths. Sometimes, my finger is pushed across to the side and I feel sharp teeth.

Lisa comes back. She hasn’t found Bessie yet. She walks off in the opposite direction. She doesn’t say anything, but I can feel her worry. She is half expecting, perhaps more than half expecting, to find Bessie down, very ill, perhaps dead. I stay with the calves. Hoping.

The calves are losing interest in sucking my fingers. The few drops of milk aren’t that fascinating after all. They stay close to me but begin exploring around the place. One licks a bit of spilt milk from my pants. Another noses into a clump of grass. I rub and scratch them and they lean into it. Their bodies are a strange mix of fragility and robustness, vulnerable yet tough.

“Found her!” I hear Lisa call from the other side of the creek. Relief floods me. I pick up the buckets, one containing the empty milk bottles, the other with feed for Bessie, and walk towards Lisa. One of the calves comes with me across the creek. It’s narrow enough for me to step across. The calf does the same. A little jump. A scramble up the side. I give it a push to help it up the bank. The other one - I think it’s the little heifer, Berry - hesitates. She stands in the mud by the edge, then turns, going back up the bank to where she was fed. Lisa comes down, crosses the creek, catches Berry and carries her across. The calves follow us through the tall grass to where Bessie is standing. She’s okay. She licks the calves. They latch on to her teats and she stands immobile as they attempt to suck. Bessie doesn’t have much milk and what she does have is thin and watery, not enough sustenance for two calves. Her udder is still swollen and hard with mastitis, but is improving. Lisa is hopeful the antibiotics and anti-inflammatories she has given her will clear up the mastitis and Bessie’s milk will come in properly. All going well, it will resolve in coming days. It will take longer though, to reveal how well Bramble and Berry will fair. 

Twin calves are unusual in the animal world. Not unusual in the sense of rarely occurring - around two per cent of cow pregnancies produce twins - but unusual in the way the twins gestate. In utero, twin calves share placental blood. Let’s go back a bit. Mammalian twins are either fraternal or identical. Fraternal twins occur when two eggs are released at ovulation, both get fertilised, and both develop into foetuses. Identical twins form when a single fertilised egg splits in two and then forms two foetuses. Identical twins are identical genetically, so always the same sex. Fraternal twins may be the same sex, just like non-twin sisters or non-twin brothers, or different sexes. For most mammals, fraternal twins have completely separate placentas (the placenta is formed from the fertilised egg) and separate blood supplies to the placentas. Other than sharing the womb, which may be a bit squeezy, there are usually few consequences for their development. But calves are unusual because they share placental blood. So what? I hear you say. Well, what happens is that the hormones secreted by the male calf (testosterone and anti-Mullerian hormone) can affect the female calf’s development. So the little heifer’s reproductive bits don’t develop properly. She may be infertile and perhaps a little bullish. The odds are high, with upwards of 90 per cent of heifer calves born with a male twin partner affected by what is called Freemartinism. (Interesting word, of unknown origin, according to Wikipedia. Perhaps from Gaelic or Flemish and perhaps meaning willing to work or infertile, but whatever its origin, the term has been around for a long time. Infertile cows have been called Freemartins, sometimes martins, since the nineteenth century.)

Whether or not little Berry is a Freemartin or not is uncertain at this stage. Lisa hopes not, because Bessie is a good cow and her daughter could well be the same. Berry appears to have developed normally, but the numbers say she has, at best, a 10 percent chance of growing into a cow capable of having a calf and producing milk. For now, she’s a doted upon baby with an equally cute brother. For his part, Bramble is unlikely to have been affected by sharing the womb with his sister. He may have lower fertility and smaller testicles than he would otherwise have had (but chances are he’ll have them removed anyway; his destiny is probably not as a breeding bull). For these two, the future just might involve pulling a cart together. Now that would be a story!

(Thanks to Lisa for the photos, and for letting me visit the calves.)

See you outside,

Jill