Day 4 - bottlefeeding

Getting the calves was a bit of a mission as the combination of snow and our nations lack of readiness for snow meant that I spent an hour trying to get to Stourton Farm in my little Skoda, a journey that normally takes me 5 minutes. The journey back with the 2 calves in the back of Roger's land rover (Roger is the farmer at Stourton) took 5 minutes. Land Rovers definitely beat Skoda's in snow! Sarah who works at the farm brought a churn of their mothers milk over later that day to ease the transition from mum to bottle. Now it's day 4, and the calves are readily bottle feeding. I've been gradually reducing the proportion of mum's milk to replacer, now they're just on replacer.
The brown and white one navel sucks the brown one after feeding (they remain nameless as you can tell). I guess he's trying to fulfil his natural suckling instinct but I've heard the 'suckee' can get an infected navel from this so I've put some sheep hurdles up to separate him from the 'sucker'. I'll have to get into tying them off after feeding to break this.
I've been draping the halter over them to get them used to the feel of it. Put them both one on today briefly at lunch time. They seemed relatively unbothered by it. Nothing compared to haltering a calf that's on its mother that's for sure.
So far so good!