Calving time is always an exciting time on the farm or ranch.
Last week it was even more exciting than usual for new arrivals at the Borderland Cattle Company near Rockglen.
Glenn Ching says the morning of the 4th, they had a 15 year old Angus cow give birth to a set of twins.
"Which is unusual and surprising for a cow that age to be able to carry twins, let alone carry them full term. Then on the afternoon of the 7th, she had a third calf and then early in the evening, about two hours later she had a fourth calf, which from my understanding is a 11.2 million to1 chance of this happening."
He says she ended up with a pair of heifers and a pair of bull calves born over four days.
"The calves were all born sight unseen, unassisted and the cow is doing really well for what she's went through. She's lost some body conditioning but we're giving her fairly heavy supplements and the calves are all healthy and bouncing around and doing great."
They went back through her calving records which showed that the cow never even had a set of twins before.
He notes they are subsidizing the calves and they're looking at putting some of the calves on nurse cows - adopting them out.
"We won't leave the calves on her just because she's too old and she won't be able to take enough nutrients in to be able to keep up with these four calves. So I think for her sake, we're going to, you know, put some on a nurse calf or adopt some of them out, you know, I've had a couple of people contact me about possibly, you know, buying some of the calves and adopting them. They've got cows that have lost calves or whatever. We kind of talked about it, and decided it's so unique. I would really like to see these calves grow up here and see what they look like this fall."
Ching says they've had typically a few sets of twins every year but never triplets let alone quadruplets.
He's been talking with his vet and a number of people about how it likely happened.
"One set was in one embryonic fluid fed by one placenta and the other set of calves were in a different embryonic sac fed from a different placenta. So when the first set came out, the other two were still all attached in their own little world inside the uterus, and, you know, stayed for another four days until they were ready to come out."
The calves weighed in at 64, 60, 70 and 72 pounds.
Borderline Cattle Company at Rockglen is owned and operated by Glenn, Wendy and Wyatt Ching.
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