It turns out the massive storm surge from Hurricane Dorian didn’t entirely wipe out the wild horses and cows that lived on North Carolina’s Cedar Island when it made landfall in September.
Three of the wild cows simply changed addresses.
Residents and national park officials were surprised to find three castaway cows living at Cape Lookout National Seashore park on the Outer Banks, about 3 miles from where the animals had been living before Hurricane Dorian hit.
“The cows surviving has just been a blessing,” local resident Rhonda Hunter told Kerry Sanders on TODAY Friday.
National park officials believe the cows swam about 3 miles to their new home as they fought the surge from the Category 1 storm.
“It’s an amazing story,” BG Horvat of the Cape Lookout Parks Department said. “To be swept up by a 9-foot-plus surge of water that’s coming back and filling up the sounds, and it’s just coming. It’s not stopping. It’s just moving forward with a lot of force.”
A group of 28 wild horses and at least 20 wild cows that had been living on Cedar Island simply disappeared in the wake of the storm. Finding at least three cows still alive was heartening for local residents.
Hmmmmm…..3 survivors out of a combined herd of ~50 wild horses and cows? When the SHTF big time for us, will the human survival rate be a similar 6 or 7% in some places?
Yes.
Some people on the Outer Banks didn’t evacuate.
Maybe, like my father staying put* when Katrina threatened, they’re ready to “go down with the ship”.
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*My sisters left him some Mae Wests.
Natural selection at work on the Outer Banks. DO remember that the NC legislature has declared that sea level can only go up so much and that climate change is minimal. Those are the folks that elected them.
The only way we will evolve to a higher cognitive level and perhaps be able to deal with CAGW is for the “inferior” genes to be removed from the gene pool. And not to be unkind to your father, but did your sisters show him how to put on the Mae Wests?
Not sure that reporting on the destruction caused by a deadly cyclone, (the worst natural disaster in the Bahamas history), is the correct place for jovial (and very weak) “UDDERly jokes. Seems when push comes to shove, cows can swim. With the effects of the Rudolf Clausius and Benoît Paul Émile Clapeyron equation, developed from around 1837, that dictates a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture – self survival kicks in and more and more cows need to learn to swim their watery pastures.
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“Cows can swim, but they just don’t like swimming. But when pushed, they will swim.”
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/328998/stranded-cows-in-hauraki-swim-to-safety
In fact, researchers Rudolf Clausius and Benoît Paul Émile Clapeyron defined this relationship mathematically: for every degree Celsius the Earth warms, the total amount of water vapor the air can hold increases by about 6%.
https://skydayproject.com/torrential-rain
The very scientific sounding Clausius-Clapeyron equation is one key element.
Clausius and Clapeyron are the surnames of the German and French meteorologists who discovered that a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture. For every 1 degree C increase in temperature, the air can hold about 7% extra water vapour.
When you get the sorts of storms that generate rapid cooling, you get heavier rain falling rapidly out of the clouds, as happened in parts of England last week.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-50407508
“Jovial”? Hardly—-more sarcastic and ironic. Appropriate responses when one has run out of tears to shed. And ALL living things can “swim” when they have to—-it’s too bad that humans have lost that ability when it comes to dealing with climate change (metaphorically speaking).