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.
they would make better weather predictions than any of the team we need to get them on the government payroll A.S.A.P.
Pamela Gray says:
April 13, 2012 at 2:29 pm
“This country girl still has her cowlick (one side of my bangs stands straight up)…”
That brings to mind There’s Something About Mary☺
Another factoid: cows need water in winter but bison don’t, because bison eat snow.
Oh but PaulID, they already are on the payroll. Wolf food.
I don’t know why any of them face the way they do, but they do so regardless of whether the wind is wet or dry.
Buffalo face the wind, and out-survive cattle in blizzards.
I used to tell the kids about the sidewinder cows on the mountains, which had the legs on one side shorter than on the other so they could wind their way up the hill, without falling over.
Kind of a disadvantage, as they never could turn around.
Don’t think the kids believed me, though.
/Mr Lynn
A little off topic, but bovine, equine and other rural critters do eat it…
For the longest time, my kids believe that those large, cylindrical bales of hay wrapped in white plastic were the mature, fully-grown marshmallows on marshmallow farms. Can’t imagine why they believed that.
And Pointman, I’ve observed the same about alarmist humorectomies. But then it is very hard, grim work getting someone to believe something, especially when that something is so obviously uncertain or wrong. Probably frustrating, too. Except for the true believers. But history is full of examples of the damage they’ve done.
My horse when I haul him in the stock trailer will always turn his rump to the wind. the cattle when hauled will move around the whole trip. With my cattle there are always some standing and some lying down. And they are headed every which way. However they are mixed breeds with a lot of dairy breed influence. You cant drive dairy cattle efficently. The lead boss cow(They establish a pecking order) will start through a gate then stop and turn and face the others daring them to try and get past. However get a bucket of feed preferably range cubes and throw a few out and you will have a stampede following you. However Deer will always travel into the wind so as to smell for danger. During the rut bucks travel into the wind to catch the scent of the does.
CAR !!
h/t the far side
Don’t you know that cows are much more complex than just being weathervanes? You don’t even need a weatherman if you have a cow. You only need to look out the window, because:
If a cow is wet, it is raining.
If a cow is white, it is snowing.
If a cow casts a shadow, it is sunny.
If a cow is bouncing, there is an earthquake.
If a cow is underwater there is a flood.
If a cow has it’s tail in the air, it is windy.
If you can’t see your cow it is foggy.
If your cow is gone, there has been a tornado.
At least that’s for cows in Colorado. Calilfornia cows might be different.
Good point Gail. After selecting post comment, I had a whoops moment where I realized that I didn’t plug in “cold” at the relevant and necessary point. Thanks.
In the winter my cows up here in Northern BC wake up and turn so the sun hits them full on their sides. It was freaky the first time I saw them early one winter morning, all facing south as in some pagan ritual. Cows are great!
Pointman, my wife milked cows by hand as a teenager and now has very few good words to say about them based – in part – on the ” foot-stomping” you mentioned.
As a townie, all this is beyond me, but she reckons all the cows, sheep and horses she knows find shelter in bad weather so they would never be able to use them as weather vanes. Of course, mountain pastures in Norway always have shelter in terms of rocks and trees – makes the sheep very hard to find in the autumn!
@Curly. Do you mind if I steal the humourectomy word? Too good to languish as a mere comment.
Pointman
Pamela Gray says:
April 13, 2012 at 5:27 pm
On a brighter side, results are in for Idaho’s first wolf hunt. It appears the wolf population was thinned by 50%. All I can say is: “Outstanding!”
(Another year and we won’t be bothered with those nasty beef- and mutton-killing machines at all!)
Fred from Canuckistan says:
April 13, 2012 at 1:13 pm
A NASA GISS computer model would say they are actually buffaloes. 🙂
A NASA/GISS computer model would say that the picture was taken at the ssite of a now-melted Himalayan glacer, and they’re yaks that’ve lost their hair because of CAGW…
Jurgen says:
April 13, 2012 at 2:31 pm
But can you also tell the direction the water is streaming? Did study the water flow for a while, the shapes, the lay-out… It gives me the feeling from left to right, but then the erosion in the bank looks like water flowing there from right to left… I have no real clue. Can anybody tell from the image?
Yup — you nailed it with the erosion in the bank, which is a feeder gully into the stream. The flow is from right to left, otherwise the eastern spur of the gully (the one closer to the camera) would be convex, and the flat bank between the spur and the main stream would be more eroded to the north.
My wife is convinced that when cows lay down that means it’s going to rain within a few days. She wasn’t raised on a farm, so I’m not sure where she came up with that. There are plenty of cows hereabouts, and I’ve been unable to find any pattern in their laying down-ness. I think it’s just because they feel like laying down.
Jenn Oates says:
April 13, 2012 at 1:24 pm
There certainly seem to be quite a few of us from the general Northern California area!
[Including Anthony, Willis, dbstealey, Steven Mosher, Dr. Leif Svalgaard, Charles the #1 moderator, Alec Rawls, Tom Fuller… and apologies if I’m forgetting any others. ~dbs, mod.]
Thus raising a number of questions!
I did not read all of the comments, so apologies if this has already been said, but here is an article about German researchers who have discovered a tendency in cows to align their bodies along a north-south axis.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/of-cows-and-power-lines
This magnetoreception in the cows is disrupted by power lines if they are within 5o meters.
So these ladies here in the pictures are just doing their job, rain or shine (-:
The cows measured a wind direction but they also measure temperature. Who needs too much heat being absorbed by your body? There is one cow in the ensemble that is white at least from one side so that’s where the climate is warmer.
This is all right and well, but what really interests me most is: how do they taste.
ROTFLMAO! There’s the thread winner right there.
PLEASE, no more entries or I’m gonna need a paramedic!
UPDATE: My assumption about cowvanes was incorrect. Willis Eschenbach advises:
Submitted on 2012/04/13 at 11:17 am
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.
This just goes to show that cows are smarter than horses. If horses brushed their hair the other way, they would not need to get rain in their faces!
Lubos Motl says:
April 13, 2012 at 10:31 pm
“The cows measured a wind direction but they also measure temperature. Who needs too much heat being absorbed by your body? There is one cow in the ensemble that is white at least from one side so that’s where the climate is warmer.”
Cows also measure wind speed.
When white cow turns brown again, wind speeds are on the increase.
Cows also measure the amount of snowfall.
In the picture at this link for example the snow pack is half a cow thick.
http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://www.highlandcattleworld.com/images/information_page.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.highlandcattleworld.com/information.html&usg=__KmbWbBX9jY-7DT43J47Lg3MlrhM=&h=300&w=400&sz=19&hl=en&start=41&zoom=1&tbnid=oWfcjuVaalnz6M:&tbnh=93&tbnw=124&ei=SFGJT_b0CsrHswbMnKznCw&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dcows%2Bin%2Bdeep%2Bsnow%26start%3D21%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26gbv%3D2%26tbm%3Disch&itbs=1
Cows make great sustainable weather stations that can be recycled 100%,
Now sell the concept to the Greens so they stop worrying about cow farts.
Only a cow-ard would fail to finish with:
TRADITIONAL ECONOMICS
You have two cows.
You sell one and buy a bull.
Your herd multiplies and the economy grows.
You retire on the income but continue making a popular specialty yogurt with local berries to keep you occupied.
INDIAN ECONOMICS
You have two cows.
You worship them.
PAKISTAN ECONOMICS
You don’t have any cows.
You claim all Indian cows belong to you.
You ask the US for financial aid, China for military aid, British for warplanes, Italy for machines, Germany for technology, French for submarines, Switzerland for loans, Russia for drugs and Japan for equipment. You buy cows with all this then claim exploitation by the world.
AMERICAN ECONOMICS
You have two cows.
You sell one and force the other to produce the milk of four cows. You profess surprise when the cow drops dead. You put the blame on some nation with cows & naturally that nation will be a danger to mankind.
You start a war to save the world and grab the cows to pay for the weapons use and start a Cow Exchange trading milk futures.
FRENCH ECONOMICS
You have two cows.
You go on strike because you want three cows.
GERMAN ECONOMICS
You have two cows.
You reengineer them so that they live for 100 years, eat once a month and milk themselves. The milk is bland and sold as ‘vegetarian milk’.
BRITISH ECONOMICS
You have two cows.
They are both mad cows.
ITALIAN ECONOMICS
You have two cows.
You don’t know where they are.
You break for lunch.
SWISS ECONOMICS
You have 5000 cows, none of which belong to you.
You charge others for storing them.
JAPANESE ECONOMICS
You have two cows.
You redesign them so that they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. You then create cute cartoon cow images called Cowkimon and market them worldwide.
RUSSIAN ECONOMICS
you have two cows.
You count them and learn you have five cows.
You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
You count them again and learn you have 17 cows.
You give up counting and open another bottle of vodka.
CHINESE ECONOMICS
You have two cows.
You have 300 people milking them.
You claim full employment, high bovine productivity and arrest anyone reporting any actual numbers.
IRANIAN ECONOMICS
You have two cows.
You don’t know economics.
You choose one of them as the leader of your country and the other one as the president. That is not the same position, in Iran.
ENRON/CLIMATE-SCARE ECONOMICS
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 applying a new clause in the Renewable Energy Act (cows are obviously self-renewing or they wouldn’t be producing milk).
The milk rights of the six cows (but not the milking rights) 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.
The annual report is written by a Climate Scientist who uses a computer model to show the company owns, including correctly interpreted milk and milking rights, eight cows, with a preferential option on six more. He also reports that due to an earlier discrepancy, the original value of the first two cows has been adjusted downwards.