Buffalo Herd Spring Storm Yellowstone

Now as we look at the current graduating class at Yellowstone we are not staring at the class valedictorians here. Buffalo aren’t the most academic members of the animal kingdom. You will rarely see them doing calculus like the wolves do, or building particle accelerators like the grizzlies, they prefer instead to utilize their time banging their heads together and grunting, or eating grass. Eating grass is probably one of their highest achievements and they have produced some prodigious grass eaters. Which is also why they weigh 2000 lbs.

Scientists have found that there is a reason that buffalo are not as astute as some of their other animal neighbors and it has to do with the head butting activity we spoke of earlier. It is also the reason their heads are so big. It seems that the repeated whacking  together of their heads has caused them to swell up and add padding and bone to the front of their face until they have this giant huge big head. It is natures’ way of protecting a species that is too dim to do it themselves. The other manifestation of this behavior is that their brains get ping-ponged back and forth in that huge cavity and gradually get compressed until they’re roughly the size of a walnut. This new tinier more compact  brain is also encased in a substance rather like jello that acts as a shock absorber and also keeps any intelligent thought from escaping out into the open, kind of like fundamentalists. This causes them to make decisions we can not understand.

Such as the one above. A spring snow storm has blown down out of the north, its freezing, they have little ones and what do they do? They rush to the nearest pond filled with ice-cold water and stand in it. They don’t gather around a fire in a meadow somewhere and sing folk songs like ‘buffalo gals’ or ‘It’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight’, or check into the Buffalo Hilton and have some hay sent up, they head straight for the one place that will make their miserable circumstances worse.

Even the smallest of the herd, the ones whose heads haven’t been deformed and still have a brain that is a normal size know that this isn’t right and attempt to head for someplace that isn’t as totally miserable as this. Unfortunately there isn’t any. It’s like this for as far as the eye can see. Which isn’t very far in this case as it is snowing and will snow harder before this is over. The one thing the small ones can be thankful for is that the brains of this outfit couldn’t find any deeper water to stand in or else you know they’d be there. This is truly a case of one herd left behind and the results are as predicted. You don’t study and do good in school and you’re going to be standing in butt deep freezing water. In a snow storm. Stay in school. And don’t do crack.