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The Sign of Cattle
Thu Dec 29, 2005
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I’m Bryan Yeaton, and this is The Weather Notebook. Irish commentator Chuck Kruger waxes on a quaint, ungulating forecast
When you live on a little island cut off from the Irish mainland by severe storm between five and fifteen days a year, you need to take on board certain weather signs. Especially if you’re a fisherman preparing to set forth for the week or a farmer preparing to make hay.
One of the easiest of all signs to read is that provided by the island cattle. Now Cape Clear Island has a remarkable variety of terrain, which is one of the reasons it’s considered probably the finest place in all of Ireland and the UK for the sighting of rare birds and pelagic life. Though small, consisting of only 1600 acres, and as many walled fields, Cape has two sizeable bogs, a fresh-water lake of 12 acres, some thick patches of ten-year-old lodgepole pine, barren rocky hills, a few small, intensively farmed fields, and an abundance of high sheer cliffs.
And it’s above the cliffs, where a variety of seabirds nest, that the fishermen look before venturing out to sea and it’s there, three to five hundred feet above sea level, that farmers peer before mowing their fields and building first cocks of hay and then, a few days or weeks later, that haystack which will last them through the winter. For when the cattle venture high up on the rugged hills, and can be seen out near the final walls or barb-wired edges of cliff, then farmers and fishermen alike know that they have the best chance for an extended stretch of fair weather.
To our knowledge, the National Weather Service does not employ cattle for forecasting purposes. The Weather Notebook is produced with funding from Subaru of America. We are online at www.weathernotebook.org.
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