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.
Willis, so if in springtime I drive past an un-enclosed New England bus stop during a chilling Arctic storm from the north I can expect the people waiting for the bus to be facing the direction that doesn’t mess up their hairdo? Or facing one way if they are wearing horsehair coats?
John
sorry Willis,
my horse always stand butt to the cold wind strong winds or rain.
only on mild days does he face into it.
and thats true wether he is rugged up or not.
An engineer friend who had been transplanted from Wisconsin to Oklahoma said: “it’s impossible to get lost in Oklahoma, because all the trees point North.”
In Holland a lot of cows also. One day hiking in the country side (I am a townboy) I took a rest near a fence, all empty around. After a while I hear a soft sound behind me, and turning I see some fifty cows standing close and looking at me. There was intelligence in their eyes.
Don’t underestimate them. In India they rule.
Another thing about cows… as a teenager, I spent a summer in a beautiful Appalachian valley in
Virginia. All of the slopes had very discernable rings around them where grazing cattle would
move around and around the hill, gradually climbing, as cattle are known to follow the easiest
path. I found the trails both strange and puzzling, since none of the slopes of my native home’s tall grass prairie had those terrace- like rings; cow trails all over the place for sure, but no rings.
The tall grass in Osage county is the finest grazing in the world and there were certainly large herds grazing there and the steep slopes of many of the limestone- capped buttes would rival anything in Virginia, so why were these rings not seen at home?
Now I know the answer…
When I noticed the phenomenon in the late 60’s, those hills in Virginia had been grazed continuously for over 200 years, while back home, the prairie had been grazed by cattle for maybe 80 years, with the erosive effects having much less time to become apparent. Now, some 40+ years later, the buttes and hills of the western Osage prairie are showing the rings- not as well defined as those in Virginia, but they are now apparent.
One might ask why the vast herds of bison didn’t didn’t produce the same effect during the preceding millenia…
I would suggest that the bison weren’t confined and were free to go where they would. Another reason is the nature of bison versus cattle… a bison will go where he wants, regardless of difficulties getting there- as witness the strong fences necessary to contain them- so bison likely didn’t amiable graze around and around, but if he wanted to go up the hill, he just went.
I’m surprised at Anthony and Willis relying on cow computer modeling.
Empirical evidence and the consensus of a rear review process proves beyond doubt that it doesn’t matter which way the cow is facing, the wind definitely emanates from the other end.
I have applied “sophisticated statistical techniques” to the problem and concluded that, no matter which direction they are pointed, all the cows are going to burn up and die. (Except coastal cows. They will be the first to go by drowning.) May as well just go ahead and eat those bovines with a clear conscience. Head ’em up and move ’em out!
I’ve never seen any herd animal face into a snow storm, not horses, cows, elk, deer. I’ve been seeing them for over sixty years and they haven’t changed. It would probably be a good way to pack your nostrils with snow. Just to confirm my memory, I searched for horse images in snow storms, all butt to the wind. Maybe horses will head into rain, but not snow.
“Minds me of a story they tell about Willy Feeley when he was a young fella. Willy was bashful, awful bashful. Well, one day he takes a heifer over to Graves’ bull. Ever’body was out but Elsie Graves, and Elsie wasn’t bashful at all. Willy, he stood there turnin’ red an’ he couldn’t even talk. Elsie says, ‘I know what you come for; the bull’s out in back a the barn.’ Well, they took the heifer out there an’ Willy an’ Elsie sat on the fence to watch. Purty soon Willy got feelin’ purty fly. Elsie looks over an’ says, like she don’t know, ‘What’s a matter, Willy?’ Willy’s so randy, he can’t hardly set still. ‘By God,’ he says, ‘by God, I wisht I was a-doin’ that!’ Elsie says, ‘Why not, WIlly? It’s your heifer.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/heifer
Since moving to Florida I have become an amateur expert in seagulls, and my studies indicate that seagulls stand facing the wind, so as to not ruffle their feathers.
TomT says:
April 14, 2012 at 4:10 pm
Since moving to Florida I have become an amateur expert in seagulls, and my studies indicate that seagulls stand facing the wind, so as to not ruffle their feathers.
==========
My guess, is that when facing the wind, all the gull needs to do is spread its wings and they produce lift from the wind. Probably the best position to be in when a hawk is bearing down on you.
Just a guess 🙂
Anthony and Willis are both wrong.
Prey animals face downwind as much as possible so they can see predators approaching from downwind and smell them coming from upwind.
Birds all tend to face upwind because, just like an airplane, they take off into the wind.
And there I was thinking that the poor old things turned away from the wind to stop rain blowing into their ears. (Well its so damn hard to get water out of your ear with a hoof!!!!)
Willis,
I call BS on your explanation… fair dinkum… do you think maybe whoever told you that just
might have been having a lend of you?
Where I come from the rain mostly falls ‘down’, is it different in your part of the vworld :).
I really can’t know about places I haven’t been.
Best…
Do the cows do a headstand when the rain is coming straight down? Inquiring minds want to know.
I love this thread. No wonder the cow reportedly jumped over the moon!
From many years of watching so-called ‘seagulls’ (but that’s another topic), they do tend to stand facing into the wind. But having never systematically considered what they do when taking off, I will pay more attention in future. Of course, if a chip is in the offing, all bets are off. They will eviscerate their grandmothers, let alone face the wrong way, should a chip enter the equation.
An important conclusion from this thread is that the behaviour and characteristics of cows, bison and horses are at least as reliable as the inputs to contemporary climate models, quite possibly more so. I refer in particular to the post above which pointed out the implications of cows which are white on one side and brown on the other.
Food for thought, indeed.
Pretty scenery. Does it ever rain enough to fill the creek?
buffalo, at least the montana version, head into the wind and let it blow that heavy shoulder “fleece” down over their hindquarters.
over the last century after terrible blizzards a number of herds of buffalo have been found in the upwind fence corner of a pasture alive where a like number of cows were at the downwind corner of the fence and frozen to death.
once out in the plains both herds were at the intersection of the same four fences, cows dead buffalo alive.
C
luther W:
In hamilton montana it was the custom to bareback ride buffalo at the county fair rodeo.
the first year they tried it the first bull out of the chute dusted the cowboy off in a couple of seconds and promptly jumped over a six foot fence. the riders and herders were caught unaware and it took a couple of weeks to retrieve that bad boy.
the second year they tried it with ten foot fences, mounted riders….. as it turned out the whole six yards. that bull just plain rammed through the fence and headed for corvallis, a small town about 4 miles to the east where he was caught by men on very tired horses that evening.
the third year one of the bulls jumped the ten foot fence, the rider bailed out about 29 feet before that happened, it took thirty herders on foot, 15 horsemen, the ravalli county sherrifs mounted possee (24 riders with horses ready in trailers) a helicopter and thirty six hours to capture that fellow, and he made it 3/4 of the way to missoula.
we moved away that fall and i never heard what happened after that.
i guess that buffalo just don’t like to be ridden although there were indian stories and stove top tails that some indians rode them in the 1820’s
C
@pk says: April 15, 2012 at 11:23 am
I heard also that a bison (buffalo) will move the snow with his beard to graze during a snow storm, while a steer (cow) will stand and starve to death with food mere inches below him.
Being a city boy, I always found that a bit amazing, but have never ventured out to verify that behavior.
Obviously, all Califronia cattle face left.
All this talk of cows and weather predictions got me curious about something. So, to satisfy my curiosity, I checked out some old emails on the UV server. Lo and behold, I discovered that the lesser known but very first “Hockey Stick” wasn’t based on tree rings at all! It seems a certain someone studied a series of preserved hoof prints. Not being a farm boy, he could only tell which direction they faced by noting the location of any assoiated cow pies. After discarding those that didn’t have a cow pie, he determined the direction of the remainder. Assuming any wind coming from the direction of Tennessee would be warmer (for some unknown reason), he plotted his proxies and the very first “Hockey Stick” was born! But … alas … someone saw his raw data and it was discovered that he wasn’t looking at cow prints and cow pies at all but rather bull prints and bull … scat. But he liked the “Hockey Stick”! Rather than admit it what it was really based on, he looked for something else to plot that would produce the same results as the original bull-based plot. When he noticed the first rise of his stick seemed to correspond to Al Gore’s winning his first election, he turned to something wooden. This is how the second but better known “Hockey Stick” was born. And now you know the rest of the story!