Website

The ranch website is up and running, YAY! It is www.O-Bar-Ranch.net and it looks pretty good. Now we just need to get on the ball and sell some hunts! Anybody wanna buy a hunt? :)
Let us know what you think of the site!

New Breeder Bucks

We are almost done bottle feeding for the year. We have 1 late bloomer left and she is down to 1 bottle a day and we are about to start weaning her off of that. Bottle feeding has been a curse and so much fun all in one. It has been fun getting close to a wild animal and getting to know their personalities and they have helped with the other fawns that weren't bottle fed to be more calm. It was a curse because we went from no kids to having 5 little fawns all looking at us for care :) You know they say to get a dog before you have kids to break you in, I say get a deer! A deer is more realistic to a baby! We have 2 dogs and they were a breeze compared to the 5 little fawns we bottle fed this year, but I can't wait to do it again next year!

Our new breeder bucks arrived bright and early Monday morning. I mean bright and early! The guy that delivered them left Minnesota Sunday afternoon and drove straight through the night. The last shipment of doe's he brought down, he got here around 12 driving straight through. He also stopped somewhere along the way and took a nap with the doe's. Since this time he was delivering big bucks, he didn't want to take the chance and stop with them, so he drove straight through and got here at 6:00 a.m! That was a suprise to all of us. Since it was still so dark outside, Cody wanted to wait till it was light out, so he could make sure he was putting the right buck in the right pen. Which was good for the driver! He got to come in and take a nap, he was sooo tired! After he left here, he was driving straight to Louisiana! I don't know how he did that on 2 hours of sleep.

This is Buddy's Son

This is Big Boy

And this is Avalanche's son

Adrenaline to the MAX

We had a vet come out this afternoon to prep the deer for AI. We had 27 doe we had to run through the shoots and it went by crazy fast and super smooth! We had 2 pens to run through and we tried to get everything situated before the vet got here. Well deer are crazy little suckers! They are skittish, don't do what you want them to and sometimes just straight CRAZY! We are working with an animal that are not supposed to be worked! It took about 2 hours but we finally got one pen loaded in the holding area, ready for the vet and the other pen in the alley way and ready for the holding area. After this 2 hours, I was shaking, my heart was pounding, I have bruises all over my arms from trying to hold a gate open while the wind was blowing 50 mph and it was the best adrenaline rush ever, seeing a herd of 12 deer running full throttle at you! The vet got here about 4 and we started. It went super smooth! The deer cooperated in the shoots, did exactly what we needed them to do and it couldn't have gone any better. We were done by 6:30.

I have never seen a deer being ran through a shoot and it was an eye full! Cody and Louis were very impressive to watch, they acted like they do this everyday. Even the vet acted impressed on how smooth everything went. I didn't realize how involved I would be with the deer, but I have enjoyed it so far. We noticed on one doe, she had a growth under her kneck that the vet had to slice open and clean out, it was GROSS, and it slung all over the vet. I think she was even grossed out a bit that it slung all over her. All the deer did great, except one got too stressed and we had to shoot it with some banimine but she will be ok. It was a little warmer today than it has been, which put a little more stress on them. We have to run them through 1 more time in 2 weeks, for a shot and then we AI a few days after that. We are AIing laparoscopicly, so we will have to knock them out and the vet will pretty much have to do surgery on them right there!

Hopeful

Cody has been putting out game camera's everywhere the past couple of months. Trying to scope out where all the animals are hanging out and trying to get a count of what we have in the high fence. Last year Jeff put in 10 Minnesota shooter bucks and we haven't seen one of them, but we are hopeful their out there somewhere. We have been getting a lot of pictures of native deer that got stuck in the high fence. Here is my favorite one!

We are also starting the AI process on Sunday. The vet will come out and get it started but we aren't actually doing the AI till the beginning of November. I am super excited about seeing this be done. Cody has done this before at other ranches, but I haven't! I am not looking forward to running the doe through the shoot. We got a shipment of 25 Minnesota doe in yesterday. To make room for them we had to rearrange the doe we have. This was not pretty. This is the first time I have seen a doe being worked. I only helped for about 30 minutes and couldn't take it any longer. They would just jump in the fence for NO reason! Cody did eventually get all the babies in one pen to ween and all the Doe that will be bred to a Buck, separated in every other pen. They couldn't be side by side because the bucks might fight through the fence and that would not be pretty! Out little bottle fed fawns helped out a lot when we were trying to get the other fawns together. We just opened the gate to the bottle fed fawns and they just followed us around the alley, which made the other fawns more calm when they had to run past us. Cody's girl was just looking at them like they were crazy! We are still bottle feeding 1, the last preemie, and she is 2 months now and about ready to be weened! Yay!!! Almost done with that!!!!!!

Cody is trying to get me interested in Bow hunting, still not sure I want to do that :(

They call me Big Poppa...

We got a new addition to the family here on the ranch today. It is almost time for the rut and since we lost all our breeder bucks this year, it was time to get another. I think by the end of the month we will have 4 more breeder bucks and 20-25 more breeder doe. This big guy came from a guy down the road and scores around 190. Since he is from around here he will have an easier time surviving the heat next summer and we will keep him in the breeder pens. The other 4 bucks are coming from Minnesota. I think the plan with those will be to breed the doe in the breeder pens and then we will set them out in the high fence. Since their northern deer they will have a better chance surviving next summer in the high fence than in the breeder pens. I think they are gonna pull straws from them too, so we will have backup if they don't make it.

Summer is officially over up here! It has been so nice this week. Everyday has been in the 70's and humidity free, so it feels like it's 68 and perfect. Last night I had to turn the air conditioner off because it was so chilly and I was able to cuddle up with a sweatshirt! Last night was a GREAT night because it was the start of comfy sweatshirt season, I picked up a pizza (and it didn't make me deathly sick), read my weekly magazines, and Cody got to do a little dove hunting. He took Louis and Fransisco with him because they were curious about how that worked. Last week we invited them over and we cooked dove for them. They asked about a million questions from how many can you shoot with one bullet to how does a dove look. They loved the dove and told us we had to try tongue since we made them try something new. So last night they decided to bring some over for us. Luckily they brought it over and left. I just couldn't eat tongue, no thanks! They invited us over this afternoon for a fiesta. They received a phone call this morning at 4.00 a.m and their friends were in Woodward and that they came to visit. This is hilarious to me, they didn't call first and they drove all night with like 12 people scrunched in a car. To Funny! So they had a fiesta today and had normal fajitas and it was yummy! Louis, Fransisco and Gizella amaze me sometimes. It is refreshing to know that there are still people out there who are committed to family, who are honest, and who would give you the clothes off their back if they thought you needed them. ALso, I noticed they had a table outside that all the food was sitting on. It was so cute. I kept staring at it and it finally dawned on me that it was the same wood that they made our deck with. They had taken all the scrap pieces and made the cutest wooden table ever! If I knew they were that good I wouldn't have spent money on a table and just bought chairs and had them make us one. It was that CUTE!