It could be as complicated as a rare hereditary disease or as simple as nibbling on a few too many acorns or on a piece of toxic trash that had blown in from the road. There are a lot of ways for a calf to die. Buck had been raising cattle for a long time-this ranchland had been in his family for more than a century-and he was accustomed to losing the occasional animal, even the young. He grabbed the 250-pound calf by its legs and rolled it over, searching every inch of the animal for a possible cause of death. The calf lay stiff and still, its dark, velvety coat cold to the touch. He quickly realized why its mother had been bawling. He jumped in his beige F-250 to investigate, rumbling over the ranch’s winding dirt roads, through the pasture, and out toward the shallow, moss-covered pond that sits near the back of his land: 112 wide-open acres nestled amid the Piney Woods of East Texas and punctuated with a few clumps of elm trees, where his small herd of cattle often gathers in the shade.Īs he approached the pond, Buck saw a single calf lying beneath a tree. One sunny afternoon in February 2014, Buck Birdsong heard a low cry echo across his Longview ranch. One of his cows, a recent mother, was wailing relentlessly, a slow beat of deep, frantic moans. This story originally appeared in the September 2018 issue with the headline “Who’s Killing Buck Birdsong’s Cows?”

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