Mountain Lions are in with the Cows!

If you guys can remember a couple videos ago the last group of cows that we brought up to the hills we brought to our Cheyenne Crossing grazing permit that's where we are today they've been in this big meadow pasture for about a week but today we're going to move them out this is about the only pasture and another one we're going to go to next we're about the only ones we can move our cows with four-wheelers otherwise it's up in the trees and you got to ride but we're going to move a okay sounds good majority of them are up this draw my dad's going up no more cows on this end so i'm going to go help my dad the next pasture they're going to is literally there's a fence in this other just inside this tree line the next pasture is just over there so we just got to bring them down to a gate kick them in there and they're good to go come on girls let's go my dad's just opening the gate right now right up in this corner so kind of swoop them around up into there then we'll leave them they'll be where they should be they can stay in there for a couple weeks go on go on up there let's go hey come on guys come on through the gate come on come on calves we came down to our other premiere which we call baskela we're gonna move this group of cows quick too they're all just right down in here but we're just pushing them through a gate right up through the aspens it's not very far up there they're right here so pretty quick and easy work come on honey come on come on little one come on kiddos through the gate dad do you want to tell us the story about what you found fixing fence the other day uh sure um we were up by our shine crossing permit going around some of the last fence and i was just going along the stretch and i could see a lot of tracks in the grass and there was a lot of fresh elk tracks there so i knew there was a herd of elk probably around there and i was walking down the fence and i saw this kind of strange track going across the fence it looked like something was crawling on their belly or something so i thought wow i've never seen anything like that so i just kept it in mind and i went finished the fence and came back and i and i started following the track and i got down well maybe a hundred yards or so from the fence and and in a kind of a thicket where there's a bunch of little spruce trees and stuff you know there was a big mound and i looked in there and there were some feet sticking out and then i realized that it was a mountain lion had been dragging uh like a yearling elk to the grass probably just a few hours before i was there um because it sure looked really fresh and then the mountain lion had buried the elk under some just some trash needles and and stuff so um yeah i'm sure i sat there and looked around in all directions looked at all the trees looked around i thought he's probably sitting there somewhere close but you know he probably still was it's just they're hard to see anyway but yeah it was kind of kind of interesting to see him i've seen him not not quite that fresh but that was it was for sure you know shortly before i was there within a few hours yeah because elk tracks are really fresh and i had smelled the elk not too long before that so i mean it might not have been the same ones but they were around that area anyway so yeah so that was kind of interesting to see yeah you know where the elk were and also where the mountain lion was all like in hunting at the same time yeah yeah it's kind of interesting to see stuff like that once in a while yeah it is you never know what's watching you when you're out fixing fence or no that's right usually there's people usually outside by size but once in a while it's probably probably mountain lions more often than you know but yeah they're not that many and i don't know i don't know about too many people disappearing so no not many so they're probably just more harmless than anything yeah you could fight one off anyway unless he caught you blindsided i thought it was a bear honestly i i was thinking it was a look like it was because it was pretty tall grass i thought it was a bear or something going through the grass because it was something i hadn't noticed before so yeah that's why i wanted to see what it was because i thought well it looked like something unusual but then i realized it must have been a smaller lion and a and not a huge elk you know just like a yearling so he must not have been he was just dragging it a lot of times they can actually just pick them totally off the ground and carry oh yeah in their mouth but it was probably a smaller lion and just didn't have the strength to pick it up pick it up and all under maybe as a female or something because yeah you know say the elk weighed a couple hundred pounds or 250 pounds or something and maybe a 70 80 pound female would be a lot for her to pick up so yeah that would be yeah yeah pretty cool though so what are you eating buddy what's he eating some hamburger hamburger rice and mcgee does he love it he's turning into quite the eater isn't he oh yeah you love human food huh yeah mom give me some more that's good stuff a good alternative to milk sometimes finally got all of our winter rye baled up we cut it like two weeks ago as you guys can remember jock went and cut it um and my dad and i went up to the hills but it just kept getting rained on and if you bail it when it's too wet you can kind of ruin the quality of the feed and get moldy but it was cut on the ground it was getting rained on anyway did end up being a little bit moldy just in the wind rows so we're just gonna grind it up and mix it with feed and it'll be okay but yeah we finally got that done yesterday got that bailed up but we still have probably a couple hundred acres of alfalfa on the ground already that we need to bail up we're kind of getting behind just due to the rain that we've been getting we were going to do some haying today but we got another inch of rain last night so that's okay we're thankful for the rain but we are we are getting a little bit behind as you can see the rye is already growing back so we'll turn some cows out in there in the fall and they'll just graze that rye right up but turned out pretty good we got quite a few bales off of it a few of you were curious as to how we turn those old tires into water tanks and yes you didn't see me finish that water tank i was working on in the last video we'll still go up there and finish it we don't have cows going in there still for a little bit of time but what we do is i know some of you are going to comment about the weeds in here but the algae we don't have any cows in in here at the moment so whatever complain if you want but what we actually do is the hole in the middle of the tire we fill it with cement and bentonite so bentonite makes it waterproof so no water will leak out so then it will actually hold water and you can turn it into a water tank so like those other tires this tire has a big hole in the middle like any tire but it's just filled up with cement and bentonite and then as you can see it holds water just fine my dad ran up to the fix a little bit more fence we don't have much left but just a few little chunks jock is cutting some hay but since it's a little too wet to rake and bale don't want to ruin the quality of our alfalfa hay for sure which is what we have cut and ready to bale well not ready because it's too wet but it's not quite ready since it's been raining on it so i'm going to do a little spot spraying around the ranch go and try and get rid of some weeds my mom is trying to raise a bunch of little minis for all her little grandkids for silas and you know millie josie all of them paisley easton rent piper everybody so she's breeding her two little minis she's got sugar and marshmallow i don't know which one's which they look about the same to me and then she's got her little studs these are two little mares then she's got her little stud fabio she turned them in probably about a week and a half ago hoping that he'll breed these little girls and we'll get some baby minis for the grandkiddos you know that's gonna be a lot of fun i'm looking forward to riding out in the hills and have silas alongside me on a little mini pony that's how we grew up riding how we grew up learning how to ride we just run around the hills on a little miniature pony named foxy she'd jump logs and run over and chase cows and that's how we learned to stay on a stay on a horse so i think it's a good way for kids to learn and i'm pretty excited to have that opportunity for our kiddos so i've got the pump hooked directly up to the four-wheeler battery under the seat then we've got a little switch on here you can turn the pump on or off the four-wheeler isn't turned on so you can't tell if the pump is on or not but i'm gonna be putting in a little bit of milestone so if you have them all mixed together you can pretty much kill everything anything that you're spot spraying a little bit of escort and some 2-4-d and then this activator spreader 90 stuff just kind of helps the spray stick on kind of opens the weed up and helps the spray get into the weed to kill it and it also keeps your whole mix from foaming up so i like to turn the sucker on and just mix her a little bit and we got two more storms coming one from the west one from the east see if it amounts to anything but without things bad we'll probably get some more rain the main things we're spraying are mostly thistles be spraying these are scotch thistles we'll also be spraying canadian thistles and then i'll just show you the other weeds as we get to them but as you can see what you could have started as like one or two of these thistles last year has spread into quite a few of them in this little spot these wet years aren't only good for grass but they're also good for weeds so we'll just spot spray these try and get rid of them this other stuff right here we just call it curl dock i don't know if i've ever seen the scotch thistle this bad sometimes these weed seeds can just stay in the soil and not germinate for a lot of years and then under the right conditions they'll just germinate and pop up so probably with all this moisture they just decided it was the right time to germinate and pop up because like you can see there's just a whole slew of scotch thistles where usually we're spraying one here and there so this is a lot worse than it usually is here's another weed we'll spray it's actually called houndstongue you guys might recognize it as those little cockleburs these are still pretty green but these get in your laces and in your socks and the cow's tails all over their hides so try and spray that this is a more mature one the younger ones just have big broad leaves this oats field is looking nice well it hasn't rained yet but it's looking like it's which is just fine but yeah thank you guys for coming along today really appreciate it hope you're all doing well we'll see in the next one