Rain Crows and Cow Tail Weathervanes
Folk forecasting, uncertainty, and thorniness
Down at the tail of a nearby draw populated with pin oak and hedge and withered elm sloughing its bark, the stuttering, croaking, gulping hoot of the rain crow rings out – more commonly known as the yellow-billed cuckoo (Coccyzus americanus), hearkening an advancing horizon of cumulonimbus clouds swelling with thunder. The cuckoo is known for many things: its prettiness, its alarming call, like a beater car with a bad starter, its tendency to show up in the midst of insect population booms like cicada emergence or tent-caterpillar hatching, and its egalitarian child-rearing scheme that employs both male and female birds equally in the responsibilities of nest-building, incubation, and feeding hatchlings. And whether or not it be true, the cuckoo is regarded as something of a meteorological forecaster, in some enclaves.
It may merely be the correlation between sultry summer heat (and the attending thunderstorm season), and the timing of the rain crow’s migratory cycle that would lead us to believe that the yellow-billed cuckoo is some far-seeing prognosticator of the weather. Perhaps, like a lot of birds, the cuckoo makes noise all the time, but folks aren’t hearing it until that ominous stillness prior to severe weather hushes the creaking and slapping of breeze-stirred leaves and branches.
This said, there is some scientific support for birds predicting the weather. Not necessarily the yellow-billed cuckoo, but rather, the golden-winged warbler (Vermivora chrysoptera). In a 2014 incident documented by researchers focused on studying migration habits of this threatened bird which winters in southern Central America and breeds in eastern North America, a group of warblers outfitted with tiny tracking devices disappeared from their breeding grounds in eastern Tennessee’s Cumberland Mountains within two days of their initial arrival. Upon their return, five days later, tracking data showed that they flew south over 900 miles, to wait out an active tornadic front moving into the region. At the time of their departure, the front was still hundreds of miles off. The speculation is that these warblers could identify this significant risk well before weather service warnings were issued (this same front would spawn 84 tornadoes and take the lives of 35 people) by means of infrasound hearing.
Infrasound is low-frequency noise that humans cannot hear. It occurs with storm fronts, volcanoes, and crashing waves, among other things. While scientists, researchers, and anyone who spends time observing animals have long speculated that many creatures can detect violent weather prior to its arrival, this incident provided the first set of solid data which seemed to clearly illustrate the phenomenon. It isn’t much of a stretch to extend this extra-human ability to the yellow-billed cuckoo, which I have personally heard calling towards the tempestuous walls of western storm-fronts on occasion.
Unfortunately, yellow-billed cuckoos aren’t around in sufficient enough numbers to adequately provide for my own forecasting needs. It is much easier to find a cow. One imperfect claim is: A cow with its tail to the West makes the weather best, A cow with its tail to the East makes the weather East. There is some logic in this contrivance– a cow prefers its hind to the wind. In regions where calm weather arrives from the west and unsettled weather comes in from the east, this rhyme holds some utility. Another predictive proverb, when cattle lie down when put out on pasture, rain is on its way, has been suggested to relate to barometric pressure. It is claimed that dropping pressure may cause swarming flies to buzz around the sensitive bellies of cattle, causing them to lie down. As a person who stares at cows professionally, I conclude that cows stand up and lay down all the time, for many reasons, regardless of the barometric pressure.
Rain crows and cow tail weather-vanes are only the start– fish, lobsters, and assorted modalities of chicken-based divination have been practiced since time immemorial to determine the fate of weather-affected people. I won’t even begin down the rabbit hole of nautical predictors, as I much prefer to take my chances where things are landlocked and less wet. While there may be some elements of logic to weather lore, it would seem that the determining factor in whether or not folk forecasting is believed to be true is largely due to a notable fallible factor: human memory. When a correlation appears “true” –a cuckoo perches high and calls just prior to a summer storm– we tend to remember it. We do not remember, nor necessarily observe, all the cuckoo calling which signifies nothing at all. If only our species was moved to draw correlations between longer term patterns of climate and our own activities… unfortunately the only rivalry to our poor memories would be our even poorer foresight.
I haven’t seen apple trees reach a particularly old age here in Northeast Missouri. If they’re managed organically, they eventually fall victim to trunk borers, cedar-apple rust, or fireblight. If they’re raised conventionally, they’re inevitably laid down by chainsaws and plowed out to make room for less-fussy and substantially more well-subsidized crops. Back when I lived up north in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the roadsides and thickets were punctuated by fairly veteran apples, mostly of standard size, and not necessarily intentional in their generation… the remnants of deer plots, homestead orchards and cider plantations, unmanaged, unpruned in any way, and nonetheless bearing considerable crops of smaller, sharp-flavored fruits.
Many of these old trees also bear thorns. It is not uncommon to find spines on crab apples, or ungrafted rootstock, but in the case of these antiquated wolf-trees, thorns arise on account of a certain regression, a hardening of the tree’s own will, if we were to attempt to convey this physiological abnormality in human terms. The lifespan of a tree is, like our own, bookended by vulnerability, and a certain logic– that the wear and abuse and consistent onslaught of environmental hazards inflicted by the elements will give rise to an innate thorniness in the feral fruitwood.
How different are we? I have felt the formation of my own thorns developing, parallel with a similarly hazardous, uncertain time spent in the elements. I have callouses that will never leave my body– at the base of my outer-third metatarsals on each hand, and extending somewhat higher up the digits of my dominant limb. The outer edge of my right forefinger and inner portion of that thumb are hardened from tightening screws and grasping weeds, hammers, and axes.
The heart and mind too, can become calloused and thorny places, when consistently worn and attacked by the uncertainty inherent in a life spent gambling on climate, economics and caloric yield. Prior to the age of unceasing data, analysis and propaganda available at the instantaneous interface between soft finger and silica-plated screen, we took our cues from the hoots and hollers of cuckoos, the shape of persimmon seeds, and the direction of cow tales. Most folks know this to be largely hokum and bullshit. Yet, we haven’t been offered any superior certainty in how things will pan out, even with a pervasive and panoptic extra-global digital nervous system. We may as well cast our lot with soothsaying roosters and clairvoyant cuckoo birds.
That supposed storm, hearkened by the rain crow, never came here, exhibiting instead that mid-summer weather pattern whereby my lack of faith is shaken by the seemingly spiteful direction of some omnipotent force. Chalk it up to my persistent sinfulness.
Uncertainty abounds in this, the rip-roaring decline along the back end of summer’s spine. Up until now, the weather has been amenable to establishing firm roots on young trees and filling our hay mow to the brim. As the barometer rises, and the flies dissipate (we hope) in the coming high-dry days, as the ironweed blows open in shouts of purple and the chicory fades to hardened stalks and dry seed and the once flexible green thorns of hedge and locust assert their points, as we again prepare the earth to accept new seeds of carrot and lettuce and rutabaga– our trajectory is speculative at best. Standing in chin-high swards of tallgrass prairie, a scythe in my hands, attempting to determine the best lane to mow for the mobile pasture fence, I’m overtaken by the sense of an opaque future, and my hands harden in the thrashing and slicing towards some unseen endpoint.
The warm-season grasses stretch their thickening stems up towards the long arc of the sun and the gradually shriveling ornaments of bramble fruit give way to profusions of wild bergamot and sunflower buds bursting open, and the cows, unresponsive to the barometer, stand often in the fine, summer air. The thick, sweltering stagnation of deep summer has subsided for a few days, and with the heavy sow’s-breath haze temporarily cut by a somewhat cool, high pressure system, one can nearly see past the punishment of this burning season. A person with ample seed and forethought might begin sowing turnips and daikon radish, in accordance with Turnip Day. The next round of cicadas has begun to stitch its rhythmic trill into the mellifluous song of fat robins, and the hearkening hoots of the yellow-billed cuckoo. Still, the dog days of summer are young yet, and much perspiration lies ahead as we tromp through the prairie reaching overhead.
Dog days indeed. As I reported not long ago in the pages of this Almanac, we have recently laid our senior working dog to rest. The place of her burial, the promontory spine of this ragged slope of stormswept clay, is now awake in sunflowers and tick clover. This spot, overlooking the flock of growing turkey poults that weave between hazel seedlings in pursuit of abundant Japanese beetles and ever-growing grasshoppers, is also a favorite observation point for Wanda. I thought I would last ‘til the pasturing season ended, but I have broken and taken on a new working puppy.
As a gardener, I am often disheartened by one thing or the next– drought, disease, pilfering cottontails, tenacious weeds, and all the bad bugs. Still, when the time is right, I plant. Just as now is the right time, in our climate, to sow fall crops, it seemed that early winter would have been the best time to take on a new pup, with the grazing and gardening season ended and the provisioning of meat keeping me close to home and abundant in blood and bone. But as much as I feel unmoved by any notion of fate, it seems that a puppy has dropped into my lap.
Said pup was not obtained by a reputable breeder at a high price-point, but was a flea-market giveaway, slated to be dumped on the roadside as unsold dogs often are in these parts. She was submissive, properly oriented to livestock and machinery, and alleged to be the breed-mix I was looking for, a cross of Great Pyrenees and Anatolian Shepherd. In recent days, we’d been losing an unacceptable amount of poultry to fox predation, the expanding grasses and forbs of deep summer prairie offering much cover from our dogs. I allowed my heart to soften– just a little, and after some consideration, we took Wanda home.
I cannot claim to be an expert in rearing working dogs, but I have some experience. I made a veterinary appointment immediately, and gradually introduced Wanda to her farm, in a consistent and controlled manner. Like a greening bed of turnip sprouts, this was another investment of hope, in spite of uncertainty. That was a little over a week ago. On her third day here, Wanda was clearly stricken with lethargy and illness. It turns out that Wanda contracted canine parvovirus, and would become the most expensive free dog I’d ever owned. She’s been hospitalized for nearly a week, but appears to have made it through the most critical phases of the disease and will be back home tomorrow, we think. But from day to day this past week, up until now, her future has been uncertain.
In a reversal of the thorny apple phenomenon, honey locust trees will sometimes lose their prickliness over time. I have seen weather worn wolf trees, their broken limbs bare of spines, standing softly in the overgrown edges of abandoned pasture. Perhaps this is happening to me. Or maybe I just have a soft spot for sick little puppies. Either way, it looks like I’m now the proud owner of a million-dollar farm dog.
This morning I shot a raccoon through the skull. I don’t do these things with a particular level of spite or vengeance– I even give most varmints an opportunity to move along from our homestead peaceably at first, but in the end, the success of this project and our survival requires some measure of certainty, and certainty is often ensured by a degree of decisiveness, and accompanied by some development of thorniness. Even if I cannot always outwardly admit it, a life of matter-of-fact decisiveness can leave one in need of softness too. I try to remain pliable in the face of such hardening elements, but uncertainty sometimes leaves us in thorny places.
The yellow-billed cuckoo croaks haltingly as rising towers of cumulonimbus clouds veer off around the periphery of the broad horizon. Rolling down the spine of summer towards the inevitability of some harvest, we know not yet what we’ll be reaping. And while my own opinion may be as well-reasoned as taking note of which direction the cows present their asses, it's common sense to seek shelter when the thunder rolls this audibly. The cows throw their tales westward, and perhaps we’d all do well to take heed of the darkening horizon.