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Riding Fence

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Cowboys Pinedale Wyoming

If you want to see fence go to Wyoming. They have some. Miles of it in fact, miles and miles and miles of it. It stretches from here, where you happen to be at the moment, to way the heck out there. Beyond however far you can see. If you have new glasses, or have just got your eyes done and think you have the eyesight of a young eagle, you still can’t see the end of it. Stand on top of your car, jump up real high, squint and still the fence goes on. Too put it simply there is a lot of fence in Wyoming.

Ok if you’re one to ask questions about fence and fencing in general, and I suspect you are, here are some answers.

Is fencing dangerous? Fencing in and of itself is not inherently dangerous, although it is terribly unforgiving of your desire to just turn left and drive off into the pasture land, willy nilly, as it were. One exception, most fencing is wire and it’s got pickily, stickery pieces with sharp pointy edges every 8″ along the entire length of it. This is known in the trade as Barb wire (Easterners say Barbed wire which clearly identifies them as tourists, dudes and tenderfeet) and is the primary fencing material used in the west and Wyoming. These are designed to tear your brand new $120.00 jeans if you try to sneak thru it by crawling over or under or trying to jump it and missing. So be warned of that.

Does fencing block off access? Fencing does block off access. This is both good and bad. Bad if you’re one to go out onto someone’s land and squat there. Build a house maybe, scatter old wrecked windshield-less cars from the 40’s around. Put up signs saying things like “The Jones Live here. No Trespassing.” Or “Beauty Acres, We Don’t rent Chickens.” The people who really own that land don’t like that. They don’t want you to do that, Hence the Fence. The good, because it keeps things like the above from happening.

Why do they have so much fence you might ask and can I go and see it? Yes you can go and see it. Just behave yourself. There is a lot of space in Wyoming. You can drive for what seems like days and not meet an oncoming vehicle. And people somewhat like you and I (but not us) own it, all of it. Even parts that don’t look like they’d be worth owning, someone does, and it isn’t you and me. This is neither good or bad it just is, deal with it. I don’t know about you but I don’t own one square inch of any fencible land in Wyoming. I’m betting you don’t either, unless of course you’re a bonafide Wyoming landowner, and if you are you already know all this stuff.

What’s the real reason they have fencing, not the bull you’ve been handing out so far? Ok, the real skinny on fencing and why it’s done can be answered in one word, Cows. Cows is the reason we have McDonalds. There are other restaurants too that are in the cow meat business because of cows and lets face it if you want to eat cow meat while you’re out driving around looking at fences, you have to go to McDonalds. Wyoming landowners have figured this out some time ago and taken advantage of this knowledge by buying up and owning the entire state of Wyoming and then fencing it.

Why do Wyoming landowners like fencing so much? Because. That’s it in a nutshell, because they want to and can.The fences keep one guys cows on his own place and doesn’t allow those cows to mingle or fraternize with the guy’s cows next to him. Each guy and/or girl feels very strongly about this. There’s been trouble about it, so like they say “good fences make good neighbors”. Because of this it is imperative that one’s fences are in good repair, not busted and laying on the ground so cows can leave and get all mixed up with someone else’s. To make certain of this the landowner employs cowboy type guys to inspect the fence regularly for damage. This is known as Riding Fence in western or Wyoming talk. The image above shows two young cowboy trainees riding along a fence to check its integrity and continuity. This is an important job and taken very seriously by all involved. If they find any discrepancies they will immediately race home and tell the landowner so it can be fixed. Good job boys. Thanks for helping all of us better understand fence and fencing.

A Murmuration

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Murmuration0512

Lately there has been an explosion of news on the major networks, NBC and CNN to name just two, about murmurations. Well two rather small announcements actually, one very visible and the other I sort of had to hunt around for. But when was the last time you heard anything about murmurations at all. Been a donkey’s age hasn’t it. One murmuration was in Israel and the other was in England, where they go absolutely nuts about anything birds do.

So what is a murmuration you might ask, well according to Wiktionary it is as follows,

murmuration (plural murmurations)

  1. An act or instance of murmuring. (I know, that really helps doesn’t it.)
  2. A flock of Starlings.

What it appears to be in real life, is a huge flock of birds, usually starlings but can be other kinds too. This flock photographed at Bosque del Apache wildlife refuge, is made up of mostly red-winged blackbirds. They gather together in extra-humongous numbers that apparently makes them kind of nuts or something, as they will all take off and fly around aimlessly but enthusiastically, until one of them decides to land, then they all land at once and make noise. This is repeated endlessly.

There are supposedly many scientific studies that explains why they do this. Money has been spent and mans hours accrued by these scientists watching these birds to figure this stuff out. They say that they have figured out why there is this nutso behavior and have published their findings in some awfully prestigious publications. I looked at one and all I can say is it made my brain hurt, your mileage may vary. If you really have to know what they said, Google murmuration – expensive scientific studies, and it’ll tell you more than you ever wanted to know.

Of course our scientific community here at *The Institute has already figured this all out and we didn’t bill the government doodley-squat in American dollars. We sent a team out to look at them, those red-winged blackbirds, take some pictures, kind a talk amongst themselves for a while, go to lunch, take a short nap after lunch, come back out, check them out one more time and come home. Total cost about 12 bucks for hamburgers at McDonald’s, which we fronted out of our own pockets thank you very much.

 Our conclusions were a little different from the scientific types and as we chose to use American, as spoken by everybody on TV as our language, this makes our report a little simpler to understand. Here it is in a nutshell.

These birds are not your average run of the mill dummies. Yeah some of them may look goofy but they’re not. They learn by watching and when they see one of their neighbors grab a seed out of the dirt or find a worm or something they pay attention. They are also greedy by nature and want that worm or seed for themselves so they go right over there and try to take it away from that guy. All of these birds in one place at once, squabbling over a bug causes a commotion, and some of the other birds and it only takes one, freak, jump up into the air and that tears it. Now they all jump into the air and being paranoid figure that the other guy knows where the better food is and they are not going to let him out of their sight for a second.

Hence the flying around in perfect unison. They pack so tightly together that nobody in the middle can even see anything so the guy on the bottom of that murmuration gets a chance to see something, like a juicy bug down there in the weeds, and goes for it. When that happens the result is everybody dives for the ground and you get ‘murmuration’. One of our observers came up with the thought that they fly so close together because they totally believe the guy next to him knows where he’s going, when the truth is not one of all those birds, and we’re talking like, thousands, have a clue. Yes, it creates pretty patterns in the sky but it is not a display of higher intelligence.

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Murmuration is said to be derived from an old English word or medieval Latin, ‘murmuratio’, the meaning of which supposedly sounds like the murmuring of a crowd from the sound the huge flocks of starlings make as they form at dusk, back then when it was medieval. Well it does if the crowd is making a screechy, raspy, squawky noise similar to fingernails on a blackboard and you have a hangover. But since this word ‘murmuratio’ comes from old English who even back then really liked all things birds, they probably thought it sounded beautiful. To each his own. Just remember these English guys medieval or not, like warm beer and eggs fried to the point of incineration. Just sayin’.

Murmuration is a world-wide event that the media is trying to play up as a special thing that only happens in exotic places like Europe and the Middle east but nothing could be further from the truth. We’re having murmurations all over the place right here in the USA. This one was in New Mexico, we saw one up in Wyoming of Franklin gulls visiting for  a day that put on a great show, and that was just a bird squawk above the state line from Colorado.

I hope we’ve taken some of the mystery out of Murmurations and helped you to understand one of Nature’s little quirks before you get led astray by expensive and some say unreliable studies even if they get on TV. As always if you have any questions about this subject or anything else for that matter, call us, drop us a line, we’re from The Institute and we’re here to help.

*Note: For those of you unfamiliar with The Institute and what it does, please see the page labeled The Institute on the Menu Bar above. That should explain everything. You shouldn’t have one single question remaining regarding The Institute after reading it. None. For those of you favored few who already know about the Institute, Never mind. Return to your daily activities. Thank you for your support.

Anasazi Storm

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AnazaziStorm0278Rock Formation Zion                                                    click to enlarge

Another mystery solved. That’s what we were able to write in the Journal of Mysteries Solved, kept in our celebrated “Explorers and Natural Scientists Guys” room here at The Institute. This legendary room is the headquarters of a bunch of little-known, but famous in their own mind, group of world-renown experts that make up our division of CyrptoBotan-PaleoKayology dedicated to solving the mysteries of the ages. Very much like that upstart organization, The National Geographic Society, which has its own fancy-schmancy headquarters building in Washington does. Only we’re not some Johnny Come Lately bunch that’s only been around for a few hundred years like they like to brag about. No, we’ve been doing this stuff for a long time now. Those NatGeo guys will often come around here trying to sneak in and find out about our newest most secret projects we’re trying to get funding for just so they can get the jump on us and get stuff in their magazine before we can publish. We had that story of the Super-Collider and the Dangers of Inter-specie Mutation in the bag until they butted in. We’re out of sorts with them at the moment so enough said. We run them off as soon as we see them now. Headline grabbers.

Some of you folks who have been busy with your lives may not have heard of this new offshoot of science called CyrptoBotan-PaleoKayology. We’re proud to be able to state that we have the very first department here at The Institute. It is made up primarily of experts that couldn’t make up their minds about what their majors were and so they dabbled in a little bit in everything. We have the fields of Cryptology, Botany, Paleontology, Archeology, Welding, School bus repair, Home Healthcare advocology, Dog Walker certification, BB Stacking 101 and 102, T-shirt design for the Hooters restaurant chain, I guess that would come under Designology, Cosmetology, Zoology and “Etiquette In Line” at your local fast food restaurant (which isn’t really a science but we thought it would benefit humanity if we taught those blivets some manners. We’re looking at you, McDonalds.) represented here. Our motto is “Our experts may not know a lot but they know everything about what they do know”.

If you’ve been to Zion National Park you may have noticed this rock formation on the road to the Temple of Sinawava. At first glance it looks just like any other incredible fascinating rock formation but that’s what has hidden it mystery for so long. Beneath its gorgeous natural beauty it hides a tale of danger, destruction, doom and despair. Our CyrptoBotan-PaleoKayologists have unlocked its secrets by a little know technique called Imagineering. That where you see something unusual and say “hmm I wonder what caused that”, sit around, have a few beers, talk about it with your fellow CyrptoBotan-PaleoKayologists and come up with a theory that can not be disapproved and write a paper. Whole religions have been started like that so there’s precedent.

This particular rock formation is actually a major construct created by the predecessors of the Anasazi, a people lost in time. The class of this type of construct is called an anti or reverse pictograph because as you know a pictograph is ‘picked’ into the surface of the rock it is on while reverse or anti pictographing is made up by applying layers of stone on the surface of the rock canvas building it up until the desired image is created. It is hard to do, really hard, they are still trying to discover what the composition of the adhesive was that has allowed that applique to remain in place over the eons, let alone how a race of people barely 4½ feet tall and weighing less than 86 lbs. and couldn’t even speak English, could have lifted pieces of stone weighing about the same as a greyhound bus.

After several cases of a very strong English Ale called the Bishop’s Finger, which had been smuggled into the National park by a British member of our team, the theory began to emerge. There was a tremendous storm the likes of which had never been seen before, it swirled and twirled and rotated at an incredible rate destroying everything in its path. It uprooted trees, pulled gigantic rocks out of the earth, sucked an entire river dry and spit it out in the canyon it had just formed and then relocated a good portion of the unconsenting tribe to the nearby Sonoran desert several hundred miles away. That’s what made this a true tragedy. The storm took men, women, children, liberals, conservatives, 32nd Degree Masons, Avon ladies, members of the DAR, and others that may have been undocumented. The storm didn’t discriminate. If you were near you were gone.

This was a calamitous event, a storm of this type and magnitude had never been seen before. The people named it xqjtornadolix, which is one, if not the only surviving word, from their language. We now call it tornado because their name was impossible to pronounce and we’re scared spitless of them too. A simple little EF5 (Enhanced Fujita Scale) tornado with winds of over 200 mph will send us scampering for the storm cellar as soon as we see it. The storm that created Zion canyon was like a really big bunch of those EF5’s all rolled together.

We  think we finally got the jump on those NatGeo guys on this one. We’ll be publishing in Nature and Science magazine just as soon as they accept our paper and if we don’t run into any problems during the peer review process we’ll be pocketing that fat $300.00 dollar advance and waiting for the royalties to come streaming in. And best of all we were able to give you, our loyal readers, an advance look, not to mention the knowledge gained by seeing it first right here on our pages. No, you don’t need to thank us, sending us those large donations is thanks enough. Remember the Institute is here for you.