Cowboy Science

We’ve spent the last week getting the herd settled in our highest elevation pasture. Snow, please hold off. I say this as blizzards break records across the Rockies.

There’s something about fall cattle feed. The grasses are tall, straw colored and seeded out, except for the green leaves at the base of the plants, especially in a wet fall like we’re having. Looks good enough to eat.

There’s an ethereal element to time spent in the fall field. The days are alternately warm and cold, windy and quietly still, crystal clear then cloud covered as the cattle come in and out of view perusing the perimeter of a pasture saved for them during the heat of summer. The calves have a special bloom to their coat – beef in the making.

I’ve been immersed in “range” in more ways than one. I’m reading a history of range science, The Politics of Scale, by Nathan Sayre. It’s too academic for me, but if I go slow enough, underline enough, and read and re-read, I’m good. I always grin at academics who insist on using “temporal and spatial” instead of “time and space.” I know it’s a different application, but every time I come across either word I have to remind myself what it means.

“Scale,” is another word that has broad implications to science as it relates to time and space in a range landscape. In simple terms, it means that research conducted on one landscape cannot readily be applied to other areas of different sizes, different locations, and with different variable factors over time such as weather and grazing. Every region, every watershed, every ranch is different. As is every growing season. Idaho is diverse enough to prove that.

Even in the same pasture, plants can be over-grazed and over-rested. The merging of cow and grass is confounding in its complexity.

Mark and I started work on taking down an old fence, removing staples that held the wire to the posts and then rolling up the old wire in large circles. A few cows came over to see what we were doing. We wondered about the men who built the fence and how many had visited it year after year, repairing the damage caused by snow so they could put the cows in. It’s cowboy work, fencing and tending cows. And looking at grass.

We cowboys (and girls) and range scientists have a lot in common and much to divide us. We use different terms, but in the end, we love the same rolling vistas of robust bunchgrasses, the heavy lift of a sage grouse, the brilliance of quakies in autumn.