Ectothermic Lives Matter!

Driving back to the home place yesterday morning, having checked cows (yay!) and dug thistle (boo!), I caught an interesting image from my peripheral vision as I crested a hilltop on the county road.

Was that...?

Sure looks like it in the mirror...

I backed up 100 feet and took a closer look.

Yep!

Cool!

Smile on my face!

I love rattlesnakes. I'm terrified of rattlesnakes. But I love rattlesnakes.

They are just so damned cool!

Flash back to a very long time ago. Probably, in fact, the Summer of '69.



No, it wasn't like that at all. But then again, we're not Canadians.

Anyway, growing up on a ranch I'd had the opportunity to see rattlesnakes. I don't think I ever saw one "by myself" until I was probably 13 or 14. Prior to that the snakes I saw were in the process of being killed. Most commonly, I'd be riding along with Dad or Grandpa, they'd pull over, say "stay in the pickup," and reach for a shovel.

They taught me that you always kill rattlesnakes, you always chop off and bury the head, and you always chop off the rattles, take them home, and throw them in a coffee can with the others.

Rattlesnakes are poisonous, went the logic, and are a threat to people, dogs, and livestock. Therefore, it was (and according to very many folks, still is) the duty of the rancher to kill 'em all.

I remember thinking how cool it was that my Dad and Grandpa were brave enough to take on deadly snakes with only a shovel. Heck, I remember Grandpa killing one with a high lift jack one time, then cutting off its head and rattles with his pocketknife. The man had stones, I'm tellin' ya!

Sometime early in the Summer of '69 I began to pester Dad and Grandpa to let me kill a rattlesnake. One day Grandpa (probably exhausted by my persistent begging) allowed as how I would be permitted to kill the next one.

"Wilbur!," said Grandma.

"With a shotgun," Grandpa quickly amended.

The day finally came. A rattlesnake was sunning itself in the county road. I stepped out of the pickup with my trusty single shot 20 gauge. And botched the job.

After five clean misses, I finally kept my eyes open long enough to hit the snake, and blew it almost completely in twain right in the middle. It was still moving, so I shot it in the head to finish it. Since the head was in close proximity to the tail, and I was using a shotgun, I managed to ruin the trophy rattles with my coup de grâce.

I was chuffed, because I'd bested a deadly snake in single combat, and was therefore pretty much a real man. Of course I was also much chagrined for being a terrible shot and a nervous nelly and for ruining the rattles.

But I'd done it, I'd killed a rattlesnake, and that was really important.

Over the next few years I killed a lot of rattlesnakes. I hunted them, learned their ways, learned to find their hiding places, learned to find their winter dens. My coffee can overflowed.

I never came close to killing them all. Somewhere along the line it got to be a chore, and most of the fun and adventure went out of it. I also began to notice some interesting discrepancies in the logic of killing all rattlesnakes.

I never, personally, met anyone who had been bitten. I heard a lot of stories, and once in a while there'd be a news item about snakebite, But I never personally laid eyes on a victim. (I've since met two, neither of whom enjoyed the experience but were also never in mortal peril).

We never had any dogs bit, never any cattle bit, and to the best of my knowledge, only ever had one animal bit, a horse, back in the 1950's, which survived.

So I did the math and decided to dedicate my life to something else.

Many years later, when I'd returned from the sea and had taken up ranching again, I ran across another rattlesnake sunning in the road. And I couldn't think of a good reason to kill it.

They still scare the hell out of me.

They're scary for a reason. They can kill you, although it's more likely that an envenomating bite from one will merely (lol, merely) make you very ill, and perhaps cause parts of your body to rot and fall off. Or be surgically debrided away or amputated. This is absolute fact.

On the other hand, there are a lot more things in the world that are a lot more dangerous, and you face a lot more danger day in and day out as you go about your normal life than you will ever face from a rattlesnake.

Particularly a prairie rattlesnake.

Crotalus viridis viridis. Roughly translated, "percussive rattle" (Greek) "green green" (Latin). In my experience, prairie rattlesnakes are quite docile and will put up with a lot of abuse before making a defensive strike. I've stepped on them twice on my life, both times while fixing fence, and in neither case did the snake strike.

Of course they might have been laughing too hard to strike having watched me levitate three feet up and twenty feet back while screaming like a girl.

I'm not saying they won't bite, but the numbers I can find show them responsible for about three bites per year, and almost always while being handled. According to wikisnakeipedia, prairie rattlesnakes haven't caused a fatal snakebite since the 19-teens, when three small children died after being bitten.

Prairie rattlesnake venom is pretty darned toxic. Mostly a hemotoxin, it also has neurotoxic properties. Given that, one could conjecture that the low number of deaths is due at least in part to the snake's reluctance to strike defensively.

Now on to the cool stuff!

First of all, rattlesnakes are pit vipers, which means that they come equipped with FLIR! They have thermoreceptive organs located in "pits" on each side of their nose, between the nostril and the eye. These organs allow them to sense the body heat of their mammalian prey. As I understand it, their heat "vision" is far more exact and acute than their normal vision. Now how can that be anything but cool?

See the pit?

They've also got forked tongues, which people tend to think is a bit creepy. But those tongues are part of yet another fantastic sensory system. When they flick their tongues out, the tips pick up molecules from the air. Then they pull the tongue back in and insert the tips into small openings in the roof of the mouth, which lead to the Jacobson's, or vomeronasal organ. In the rattlesnake, this organ is adds yet another layer to the rich sensory picture they detect of their surroundings. Not only can they use the Jacobson's organ to find prey, it allows them to track prey after striking it. Cool, neh?

Tongue retracting.

Prairie rattlesnakes mate in the late summer, but females usually only mate every other year. When they do mate, they retain the eggs internally and then bear live young once the eggs hatch inside. The little snakes are born with fangs and venom and are ready to begin hunting from the moment they hit the ground.

It's not easy being a young rattlesnake though, and they are especially heavily predated by raptors. It's not uncommon at all to see a hawk snatch up a little snake and fly away with it clutched in iron talons.

Well, anyway.

Forty-seven years after I took on the snake and covered myself in manly glory, I faced off against another snake at almost exactly the same place. The snake hadn't fundamentally changed, but I sure had. I took pictures and video, chased him off the road and into the prairie, and drove on home with a smile on my face and a song in my heart.

Windwater

When you turn on the taps in your home water flows. Likewise, when you turn on the washing machine or the dishwasher, water flows.

Most folks in this country -- well over 99 percent -- are connected to some kind of a collective water system. In general, these systems take water from ground wells or reservoirs, pump it into storage tanks, and then allow gravity to supply the force that makes the water flow into your home. Civilized humans have been using such water supply systems for more than 2,500 years.

Out in the country, however, things are usually a bit different. Well, they're different in the "out in the country" that I'm familiar with anyway.

Before 'lectricity came in there was a windmill here at the home place.

Our ranch is miles and miles from the closest municipal water system, and even farther away from any water reservoir. Regardless, we do have running water.

Water for the house and buildings comes from a well about 300 yards from the house. This well also supplies stock water for the roughly 800 acres of the home place.

There's a well under that cover. The T-handle is a valve in the line leading to stock tanks.

The well is about 150 feet deep and is equipped with an electric submersible pump. The system has a demand switch which instantly starts the pump when a pressure drop is detected. So turn on a tap in the house and water flows. Or when the water level drops in a stock tank and the float valve opens, water flows into the stock tank.

Inside the "well house"

As you might imagine, the stock tanks are supplied from the well via underground pipes. As is the house. That single home place well supplies the house and barn, a dozen outdoor hydrants, and up to a dozen stock tanks.

I don't recall off the top of my head the gallons per minute rating of the well and pump, but I do know that when stock tanks are filling the water flow is reduced at the house. If I'm watering my garden, for instance, and the cows go to water, the spray at the garden sprinkler goes from a 40-foot pattern to a five-foot pattern.

As I noted earlier, the submersible pump is powered by electricity, so when (not if!) the power goes off the water flow stops, at least until I get the generator lit off and switches thrown.

These limitations are sometimes inconveniences, but we've learned to live with them. As have most country folks. In return we get some of the tastiest and best water available in the world.

There's a similar setup down on the south unit where a single electrically pumped well serves eight stock tanks.

South unit well, previously pumped via windmill.

There's also a single windmill-pumped well on the south unit which supplies three stock tanks.

Windmills are interesting.



Wind turns the blades, which are connected to a gear box which changes rotational motion into reciprocal motion, from round-and-round to up-and-down. This moves a shaft up and down in the well bore. At the end of the shaft is a clever bore pump equipped with check valves which forces water up the pipe so long as the shaft continues to go up and down.

We've got a half-dozen windmills on the north unit, serving about 15 stock tanks.

The windmills run on "free" energy, so there's no electric bill to pay, but there's also no water flow when the air is calm. Windmills need periodic maintenance, too, and the bore pumps wear out every 5-10 years or so. No such thing as a free lunch. Or drink. I have a place in town, too, and when I carefully crunch all the numbers it looks like I pay about the same for water, gallon for gallon, in town and on the ranch.

Regardless of the system, we need the water. Cows drink 15 or more gallons per day, and the people use a lot of water too.

More soda straw analogies

As I understand it, the vast progressive wing entertainment professional victim conspiracy media continue to report that Great Britain will be completely dead by Christmas, having taken the deadly BREXIT poison.

I suppose it's a kindness that they don't realize they're terminal.



There's something you just don't see around here. The big black cylindrical thingies are basically hay bales, covered in heavy black plastic. In Herefordshire (and most of the rest of England for that matter), where grass is very thick and has a very high water content, you can't simply bale and stack as we do here with our more sparse and less wet grass. If you did, your hay would rot. So what they do is ensile each bale by covering it in plastic. Ensiling is a process of preserving grass or other green forage through a process of fermentation. Silage is made around here, but usually with immature corn, called greenchop. And it's fermented in pits, rather than in individual bales.

In the next video you can see the neatly stacked silage bales at the farmer's home place. But listen very closely and hear the sound of church bells wafting over the English evening countryside. That's the very same sound you would have heard on a July evening one or two or perhaps even three centuries ago. In the hysteriattack media, Great Britain is portrayed as dark and grim and fading away rapidly, much as in the "bring out your dead" scene in The Holy Grail. But perhaps the knowitall entertainers don't quite have the focus dialed in on their soda straw.



Now, just for fun, what about this?



I'm sitting here trying to imagine what it would be like to have Stirling Lines just "over the hill." Is that cool or what? Yesterday near Hereford The Regiment celebrated 75 years. Think back to July, 1941. Great Britain had largely weathered the storm of Hitler's initial onslaught, and it was becoming clear that there would be no invasion from the Continent, at least not for a while. Britain had bled and bled and bled, while at the same time bleeding the Nazis. The idiot Hitler had turned east, which gave England some miraculous breathing room. Now it was time to go on the attack, and David Stirling had some ideas.

Do you imagine that the British people can be snuffed out just by pissing off a bunch of communist/progressive bureaucrats in Belgium? In Belgium? Belgium is where the Brits go to kick the shit out of jackasses who firetruck with them!

And at the same time, all across the length and breadth of the land, farmers continue to grow crops and livestock, continue to feed their nation and a good portion of the EU, and are presently getting paid more for their efforts than usual because of the present volatility of the Pound.

I know it's not fair, and it's mean and racist and unsensitive and homicidal of me to mention this, but the mommies and daddies of the present crop of crap media morons confidently predicted, back in the early 1990's, that Great Britain would soon be dead from mad cow disease.

Just imagine what the hyperinflated talking boobs of the self-proclaimed propaganda ministry would see if they shoved their soda straws up their collective asses and took a peek. Their collective fecalithic brains I'd wager.

##########

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

I was out hiking and paused to snap a picture of the last calf of the season. Her mom was a little owly, but not too bad.

Late last fall, after the November snow had melted and on a lovely, balmy, early December day before the snows returned and winter clenched her cold iron grip, I was hiking across the south unit prairie. I came across a round piece of galvanized steel, a bit more than two feet in diameter.

It's not unusual to find such things. We live in a dynamic world, a world where there is weather and wind.

The piece of metal was a manway cover from the top of a grain bin. The nearest grain bin was more than three miles away as the crow flies. And that's almost certainly how it ended up where I found it. No, not Crow Air, but almost certainly lofted the distance by nature and her moving air.

I found the thing next to a harvester ant nest. The ants were deep in their burrows for the season, done foraging for the year and presently just kicking back and waiting for spring to arrive. They were probably drinking a lot of ant beer and watching ant football.

I wondered what would happen if...

So I flipped the metal disc over and stepped it down atop the ant hill.

As I'd suspected, the ants made do with the hand that the world had dealt them and incorporated the big piece of metal into the structure of their humble abode. They may be the only harvester ant colony in the world to live in an enclosed nest. Perhaps they call it the Antstrodome.



Not far away was a swallowtail butterfly

And a Tenpetal Blazingstar

And a Lark Bunting. Either a female or a non-breeding male

She or he was a little cross with me. And she or he was one or the other, and not a gilbert. Because nature doesn't give a flying firetruck what the professional liars think about the universe.

Which is nice.

Willie

A couple of months ago I wrote about Willie, a (mumble) years-old  miniature Dachshund and long time member of the family.

She'd developed an abscess on her neck, we drained it, she got better.

In that post I said she was 12 and was in error. She would have been 14 in November.

Yes, would have. She died yesterday morning.

If the one dog year equals seven human years formula holds true, she was pushing 95.

She's been slowing down in the last couple of years and not nearly as spry as she once was. She also suffered from cataracts and didn't see well at all.

None of that bothered her much. She was a house dog but spent a lot of time outside exploring. Every day she made her rounds of the outbuildings and corrals, taking the pulse of the place, as it were.

A couple of weeks ago she had a seizure. Since that time she's been fading fast.

Yesterday morning Mom and I watched her tottering around unsteadily. She was following her nose, checking things out. She was really wobbly, but I was reassured that she still had the spark of interest and curiosity driving her to explore.

She wobbled over to Mom and I, where we stood discussing her pending demise. Then she collapsed, kicked a few times, and was gone.

Nature was very kind to Willie. She didn't suffer, didn't have to live in pain or infirmity while her humans decided to put her down.

I dug another deep hole in the dog cemetery and Mom and I laid her to rest.

It's been very hard on Mom, Willie was her constant companion in the house, always close by and involved.

After we buried her I checked cows and fond that the last cow had finally calved.

Death and life, they're all part of the deal.

Thanks for sharing your live with us Willie. We'll miss you.

Beauty

I suppose there are a lot of ways to define beauty. That makes sense, because beauty really only exists in the mind of the observer, and so far as we know, the only observers there are are human beings.

Think of beautiful people, places and things. Children, the Grand Canyon, flowers. Now think of the snotty-faced, whining child; the canyon as a weary traveler with a destination on the other side would see it; the flower as a field of opium poppies guarded by terrorists.

These things are what they are, as with the rest of the universe. They do not become something else when our perception of them shifts.

Understanding this might be one of the secrets to genuine happiness. I know it is for me.

The Plains Pricklypear is ubiquitous here. It's part of nature's ecosystem. It's green and spiny and grows low to the ground, and if you ever venture onto the prairie in sneakers and drag your toes with abandon you will soon be pulling painful pricklypear spines from your toes.

For the rancher, the pricklypear has little immediate value. It's not cow food, and the tiny, sharper-than-needles spines cause slow leaks in your tires. Those spines can also cause festering abscesses in livestock.

In the spring, though, they flower, and the yellow wash of pricklypear blossoms is a fine sight to behold. They are at home here on the prairie, at home in a way that people will never be. They can take no shelter from summer's broiling sun or winter's killing cold. They need moisture to survive, yet they survive the harshest drought. They are supposed to be here, and they are here, and their presence shouts glad tidings of a healthy and bountiful ecosystem.

You can make jelly from the fruit, too. I've never done so; perhaps I will this year.

I've pulled pricklypear spines from my toes, treated abscesses they've caused, spent a small fortune on repairing slow leaks in tires.

I've also enjoyed the beauty of their flowers, the beauty of their existence, the beauty that is nature doing nature's thing.

Heat

Scritch-scritch-scritch-scritch.



Hiking along a county road, making four miles per hour. The scritch-scritch-scritch sound comes from my sneakers crunching along the fine gravel surface.

Besides sneakers and socks, I'm wearing hiking shorts and a tee shirt, a hiking vest and a ball cap. It's hot out -- 98 degrees -- and only occasionally do I feel a puff of light breeze.

The exercise feels good. Early in the hike my muscles were sore and joints stiff, but I hit a nice rhythm after a mile or so as pain eased and stiffness ebbed. Now, on the flat, I cruise along majestically, balanced on the comfortable side of exertion. My heart is thumping away at 110-120 beats per minute, and air flows smoothly in and out of my lungs like a metronome. Sweat flows freely from my pores and is nearly immediately evaporated by the dry heat.

Moon-tains!

Did I mention that it's hot?

On the down slopes I hit almost six miles per hour, legs stretching and feet pushing off against the scrunching gravel. I feel powerful and strong on the down slope.

On the up slope, not so much, My pace slows, my heart rate bounds up to 160-180 beats per minute, respirations increase and come with a good deal more exertion.

As I stride along in the still, hot air, the heat envelops me like a robe. The sensation -- and the science behind the sensation, is interesting.

The heat I feel is two different things. I feel radiant heat -- infrared radiation -- directly and indirectly from the sun. Where the sun's light touches me I feel its radiant warmth. And some of the warmth comes from sunlight reflected from the ground. Additionally I feel a slightly different wash of radiated heat from the graveled road and from the surrounding landscape. This warmth is re-radiated from surfaces which have been soaking in the sun's smile for hours.

There is also ambient heat, the heat of the air surrounding me. This is different than radiated heat. It's driven by the sun as well, but it's the heat of molecular motion.

The sun adds radiant energy to the air. Obeying the law of conservation of energy, radiant energy is transformed into kinetic energy, and the molecules of gas that make up the air begin to speed up. The faster the molecules move, the hotter it is.

That's really what we are measuring when we use a thermometer, the speed of the molecules. As those gas molecules bash into the thermometer, some of their kinetic energy is transferred to the thermometer, causing the molecules in the thermometer to speed up, too.

In the thermometer -- depending on the type of thermometer of course -- a column of liquid expands or the steel of a spring expands, and that expansion is measured against a background scale, and that tells us what the temperature is.

So as I stride along in the hot, nearly still air, I can easily tell the difference between the feel of the sun's direct, radiated heat and the ambient warmth of the air.

As the warm air envelops me it's both comforting and uncomfortable. I'm working hard and my body is making a lot of heat too. My internal thermostat is designed to maintain a temperature of 98.6 degrees, but it's hard to radiate heat away from my body when the air is at about the same temperature. So I sweat, and evaporative cooling helps a bit, but would be more efficient if there was more of a breeze. So that's the uncomfortable part.

On the other hand, there's something comforting in the way the warm air envelopes me and holds me close. It's almost a feeling of déjà vu, as if something deep and primal in the core of my being feels right at home.

I wonder about that, about the sense of déjà vu. Is it just an illusion, or does something in me really recognize the enveloping heat? Could it be a dim memory from my personal past, or something deeper, a genetic memory from the plains of Africa?

I'll never know for sure, but it's fun to think about.

The Hard Slog: Self Evident Truths

It's not easy.

I hiked 14.5 miles yesterday. I didn't intend to go that far, it just happened. The first mile really sucked because my joints -- hips and knees -- were really sore. But somewhere around 5,500-6,500 feet the pain eased and I hit a good rhythm.

My route was entirely along county roads, and I was clad in sneakers and shorts. This wasn't a prairie hike, but rather a pushing-the-limits workout hike.

It was a good hike. On the page (screen, whatever) 14.5 miles seems a long way. More than half a marathon! But it's not really that far. I walk at least five miles every day in the course of my normal activity, and often it's more like 6-7-8 miles. People are designed to walk, after all.

I didn't set any speed records. My phone tells me that my pace was 15.41 minutes per mile, and the hike took nearly four hours. I did burn something like 14 kcals. According to the phone, or to the algorithm in the hiking app.

It was hot, too! Already over 80 degrees when I set out, it was 97 by the time I returned to the barn.

One of the upsides of hiking is that it gives one a lot of time to contemplate.

##########

I'm really not so good at this blogging stuff. And that's probably because I'm not very good at making reasoned arguments. So many things appear to be self evident, but when I encounter contrary opinions I struggle with putting together cogent arguments in defense of self evident truth.

The solution to the problem is of course to keep banging away at it, keep doing the work. Keep making the arguments and try to make them better. And above all else, be rigorous and honest.

It is to laugh, because I am lazy! It's so much easier to rail in anger and to harrumph in indignity and to toss around a bunch of half truths and little white lies.

Firetruck!

##########

This is the first principle.

All men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with natural rights.

This means all men. And don't give me any crap about "what about women?" In this context it clearly means all human beings. Women are human beings. Women are fundamentally different than men, way down in the chromosomes. And vice versa. Men and women are completely different. Boys and girls are completely different. Yet they are all human beings, and therefore all are men in the sense of this particular context.

All men are created equal, which means that each has exactly the same level of humanness. None are more human, none are less human. Each human is distinctly individual and unique; none are identical to their fellows. Yet they are all, each and every one, without exception, human beings.

Human beings have the ability to think, reason, imagine, contemplate. Human beings have emotion, too, and deep seated instinct. The reasoning part is in control, though it obviously considers input from emotion and instinct. This means that humans have free will, that they are in charge of, and responsible for, what they do. Each human being has the capacity to be supremely selfless and altruistic. Each human being has the capacity to be completely self centered and vicious. Your sainted grandmother is capable of committing atrocities on a scale that would make Hitler feel inadequate. The sterno bum living under a bridge, lying, cheating and stealing to get by, has the capacity to sacrifice his life to a higher purpose.

This gives lie to the notion that there are good people and bad people. If the first principle is that all men are created equal and endowed with natural rights, then there are just people. No good ones, no bad ones. Just people.

When we sometimes use the shorthand terms good and bad, we are really talking about actions. The doing of good things, the doing of bad things. When we say that someone is a good guy, we generally mean that on balance we believe that they do much good and little bad. And the same thing in reverse when we talk about a bad guy.

Actions, however, do not change the fundamental nature of the human. They do not make the actor better or worse, greater or lesser, than other human beings. This is critical.

It's easy to think of the guys who gunned down Dallas police officers as monsters. Just as it's clearly easy for many to think of all police officers as monsters. Of all terrorists as monsters. Of all politicians as monsters. Of all people who drive in a fashion we don't appreciate as monsters.

Monsters, as in not human. Less than ourselves. Or the corollary, ourselves as greater than those we identify as monsters.

When we do this we kill ourselves.

This is the hard, hard slog of Liberty. We have to recognize that actions contrary to the first principle are conducted by human beings, not monsters. We have to turn away from the siren song of classifying "them" as things and objects. We must recognize their innate humanity, recognize our shared human equality. We must know why the first principle is right, and why violating the first principle is wrong.

Or we die. At least in the sense that we make ourselves animals, rather than human beings. Animals with all the vices of human rapacity, and none of the virtues of the beasts.

The human world is a mess. The human world has ever been a mess. There's nothing we can individually do to control our fellows. We can't "make" things change in DC or Dallas or Denver. All we can do is to choose to embrace and live the first principle. Or not.

It's a hard, hard slog.

It's not easy.