This was the view from near my home today. Cows on Bidwell Ranch acting like a weather-vane…all pointed north, due to a strong south wind with stinging rain…and who needs stinging wind in your face?
Click for a hi-res image.
Saw it on my weather station at www.bidwellranchcam.com and used my camera to get this photo from ground level. Everybody should have one of these 😉
UPDATE: My assumption about cowvanes was incorrect. Willis Eschenbach advises:
As a reformed cowboy, I fear you’ve made a small error. You assume the cows are facing downwind because they don’t like the wind in their faces … but horses always stand the other way, facing the wind. It has to do with which way the hair runs on their bodies. Horses hair runs from the bow to the stern, and on cows it runs the other way. They both stand so their hair sheds the rain …
w.
Enron’s Cows, good for telling which way the wind is blowing:
Capitalism:
* You have two cows.
* You sell one and buy a bull.
* Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows.
* You grow old, sell your herd, and retire on the proceeds.
Enron Capitalism:
* You have two cows.
* You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows.
* The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island company secretly owned by your CFO who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company for a 50% profit.
* The annual report says the company owns eight cows with a bank-guaranteed option on six more.
Now you see why a company with $62 billion in assets declared bankruptcy.
As a reformed cowboy, I fear you’ve made a small error. You assume the cows are facing downwind because they don’t like the wind in their faces … but horses always stand the other way, facing the wind. It has to do with which way the hair runs on their bodies. Horses hair runs from the bow to the stern, and on cows it runs the other way. They both stand so their hair sheds the rain …
w.
REPLY: Ah, well I learned something new. Thanks – Anthony
I see a blonde and a (blondie-faced) brunette can’t help but looking into the camera. – Fame at last!
I suppose, Willis, that wrong-facing Equines and Bovines would also fluff up like a frizz hairdo, creating more drag. This may explain why horses like to run forwards. Cows, on the other hand, would be foofy after a bit of a jog.
In the early days of flight they also used out houses as compasses, They usually faced south. The modern equivalent are TV satellite dishes. If you are disoriented in a strange neighborhood you can figure out which way is south by looking for which way the satellite dishes are facing ( in the northern hemisphere).
When storm chasing we often used the livestock to determine wind direction. Not only would the cattle face away from the wind, but eventually they will drift to the down wind corner of the pasture and cluster there. On the eastern plains of Colorado the ranchers often put a stock tank in the corner of the pasture a severe snow storm is likely to drive the cattle to. In blizzard conditions the cattle suffer from dehydration if they don’t have access to open water so the stock tank and a wind break there can save the herd in a sudden spring storm.
Larry
Willis, note that the “Huckleberry Finn” passage didn’t mention wind at all. Of course she relied on convention wisdom and not science, and therefore the question served its purpose to smoke Huck out.
Max Hugoson says:
April 13, 2012 at 10:46 am
Anthony, this is one time I refuse to be COWED by your arguements. Obviously, with the studies of BOVINE BELCHING we can figure out that YOU, yes YOU are somehow responsible for a major part of GHG emissions.
Thereby placing good Mr. Watts on the horns of a dilemma.
Have we milked this thread dry yet?
“Horses hair runs from the bow to the stern, and on cows it runs the other way. They both stand so their hair sheds the rain …”
When birds are not flying they stand facing the wind. When they turn the other way their feathers start to flap around, so they turn back and face the wind again.
I have a beef with this post!
Brian Adams says:
April 13, 2012 at 10:47 am
I have an old Army flight training manual from the 1930s, in which it discusses how to determine wind direction on the ground when no wind sock is present. One of the suggestions was to observe any livestock, as they would tend to face away from the wind.
In Vietnam, we’d watch the cattle egrets (aka, “buffalo birds”). When we were on short final into the LZ, they’d take off as a flock, and always into the wind. If they took off in all directions, it meant there was something moving on the ground that scared them, and we’d be in for a bad day…
You know, cows are not as useless as most people think. “Fetchez La Vache”
Pointman
Willis Eschenbach April 13, 2012 at 11:17 am
I must have been a horse person in another incarnation,because my feelings as I looked at the picture were of shivering and feeling the rain going through my fur !
Oh and by the way, is the temperature on that farm 46 °F or is it 46 °C? – I only ask as since the humidity is 89% and it should therefore follow that this constitutes a temporary presence of a lot more atmospheric GHGs than a miserable doubling of 0.039% of CO2.
Only joking.
Tipping Point!
Weather Cows – Pffffff!
This beast comes out when it is 25 degrees below zero
It can rip your head off
It can fly as high as a bird
It can bite your face
The Chicken Cow
The Chicken Cow
The Chicken Cow
The Chicken Cow
Rock on London
Rock on Chicago
Blockbuster Video – Wow. What a difference.
All we are is butts in the wind. Sounds like a song.
That cow story was a reminder about the company that financed global warming alarmism PR companies in the USA to drive up the value of natural gas by demonising the higher level of CO2 that emerges from coal fired power plants. Good job they went bankrupt! Phew! That was close! People actually were actually beginning to believe that crap. No one would fall for that ‘carbon argument’ bunk in this day in an age when science and rational debate rules to conscience of the world’s major decison-making bodies!
Can you imagine it? Enron was actually bribing newspapers and journals to print articles claiming that natural gas was ‘cleaner’ than coal on the basis of having a lower CO2 content emerging from the combustion process. “Carbon is black, right?”
Imagine what would have happened if they have been successful! Before long we would have had the EPA banning coal plants and Enron-like gas fracking companies making Swiss cheese out of the whole country! Through bribing, price fixing and cartels, electricity prices would be shooting up, millions of people would be plunged into energy poverty; the destitute elderly would freeze in winter and sweat to death in summer. But seriously, it would never have been successful. All kinds of scientific fraud would have been necessary to pull it off – getting faked ‘science’ published every month, running propaganda blog sites and fund Chicken-Little politicians of every stripe, compromise major publications, get editors to spike articles proving the contrary arguments – the whole ball of wax. Only a bunch as devious as Enron’s club of criminals could have even thought up such a scheme.
Good job all that nonsense was averted. Can you imagine how much it would have cost to set things right again after a couple of decades of brainwashing?
Hard to imagine anyone getting on the wrong side of that sort of that losing proposition because when it comes to issues of CO2 and climate, even a cow knows which way the wind is blowing.
Tom Nelson has a wicked sense.
I did put this in T&N but the linkie on the right hasn’t been changed.
Richard Norths EUReferendum has moved home to http://www.eureferendum.com/
DaveE.
@doctor Dave. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference.
Willis said: “I must have been a horse person in another incarnation,because my feelings as I looked at the picture were of shivering and feeling the rain going through my fur !”
But they never complain. I appreciate that trait.
Anthony, despite living in a completely different country, the view from your house looks very similar to the view from mine, complete with cows.
Thanks for that info, Willis. I did not know that difference between horse and cow hair growth patterns. That’s fascinating!
I also like the good old Beaufort Scale for determining wind speed from easily observable phenomena:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaufort_scale
@Crispin in Johannesburg.
It’s hard to believe, but there’s a lot of people in fuel poverty in the developed world nowadays. I kid you not.
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2012/04/13/the-sun-is-setting-on-solar-power-the-moneys-gone-and-nobodys-asking-any-questions/
Pointman
So, why does the grain of cows’ hair run aft-to-front, while horsehair goes front-to-stern? If speed’s the issue, what of cheetahs vs. water-buffalo? Darwin, thou shouldst be living at this hour!