Monday, May 1, 2017

Finding cows





From above, it all looks agreeably flat.


In "To Hell And Back" Audie Murphy spins a tale of a Naples bar fight between he and his Infantry buddies and the Air Corps. When the MP's arrive both sides claim that it was the Italian barkeep who started the fight, and things got broken up as the Infantry and Air Corps were trying to help each other leave the premises quickly so as not to get in trouble.

The MP officer say's something along the lines of, "When this war is over I'm gonna live as far away from the goddam army ask I can, like Nebraska, where everything is flat (Italy is very un-flat) and quiet and nothing ever happens."

Well, he may have moved to Nebraska and found peace and quiet and a lack of army activity, but if he moved to this part of the state he didn't find flat.

These pictures were taken in the canyon that appears in the upper right of the above image.





The pasture is only a few hundred acres, but there is no place larger than a foot square that could be called flat. In that kind of terrain cows and calves can disappear. To do a proper job of "checking cows," you have to eyeball every bit of it.

Usually takes about an hour. Three times a day or more. Sometimes time seems to vanish into thin air.

These insolent calves are lying just over the west bank of the canyon at lower left in the aforementioned image.


And this wascally wabbit (jackrabbit so actually a hare) is in the same canyon. He ran afoul of a red-tailed hawk. The hawk ate the guts and left most of the muscle tissue, because it makes sense to fill up on the most nutritious and energy dense part of the hare.


Couple of branding pics from a couple of years ago while I'm at it.





Just more stuff to think about. Hope you are all having a great day.




6 comments:

  1. So, no red hot branding irons these days, done with electricity now? Although I'm sure the older type are somewhere just in case.

    Paul L. Quandt

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes on both counts. The electrics make things much easier but take away some of the romance. But old rancher guys don't need that much romance.

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  2. The only place I've ever been which comes close to being flat was in the Netherlands near Amsterdam. I'm talking pool table flat. Seriously.

    Most terrain has ripples and folds which can baffle an observer. Not in Holland. I mean, that was flat.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Your cattle don't have transponders that report their location on demand?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. They do, but the barstids have figured out how to hack the codes.

      Delete