Amity Highland Ranch

The bitter cold has once again frozen our Highland cows' pristine hillside springs so that our morning routine for the last two months includes chopping holes in the ice in order to open up places for them to drink.  Last year during the Polar Vortex we were daily astounded at the phenomenon of "curved water":  it was spooky the way the spring water flowed over the existing two-foot-thick ice sheets to create curved formations of ice.  This year our ice is still pretty flat, however it's close to a foot thick.  Yesterday we observed one of the cows get gracefully down onto her knees in order to drink from the deeply recessed hole that we had opened up.

We also noted that, contrary to their warm-weather behavior, they weren't all going to the watering holes at the same time, which of course results in the animals on the low end of the hierarchy having to mill around the stream, waiting for the dominant ones to finish drinking and leave.  We saw that, as we arrived in the early morning with their hay breakfast, a small group of animals was returning from the spring.  Later in the day, there was yet a different group apart from the fold (a herd of Highlands is called a fold) who had also just come back from getting a drink.  Are they actually cooperating to make sure everyone gets a drink?  Or have the less dominant ones just learned that they need to go separately from the rest of the group?  A neat subject for further research, I'll keep you posted!