Strange Case Of Disappearing Fish

A friend of mine in Idaho has about forty horses, he doesn’t need them, very few people really need horses, but he loves them and that is good enough for him. He lives on the South side of the Snake, in a semi-desert area. He does a little farming and ranching, has excellent irrigation water from the Snake and good well water. Of course the birds figure the horse watering tank was put there specifically for them and they are perfectly willing to share with the horses, just to be good neighbors and citizens.

Unfortunately, that presents a problem, the metal rim of the tank is slippery and the birds will often fall in the tank while getting a drink. Holding on while drinking is hard, but climbing out is impossible for a bird; sadly, they swim until they drown. Life is hard on the ranch, but it’s really hard if you make a stupid mistake. My friend is a fairly soft hearted man and he knows that a dead bird will foul the water and the horses wont drink with a dead bird in the tank. To alleviate this problem of clumsy birds, he leaves several boards floating in the tank. The birds can climb on the boards, shake out their feathers until they are dry and fly away.

In time the birds learn that it is easier and safer to drink from the floating boards than the metal rim. They also enjoy resting on the boards and watching the brightly colored Coy fish my friend put in the tank. There were over a hundred of them when he first put them in the tank; he enjoyed watching them and the fish seemed to enjoy life in the tank they ate bugs and the mossy like growth that grows in the tank. Life seemed good and everything was in balance, like in the early bible days.

However, there was a problem; the Coy fish began to disappear. It was nearly impossible to count them accurately, but there was no longer a hundred in the big tank. A week later my friend took inventory again and there were even fewer.

Intrigued by the depleted fish stock, my friend sat with binoculars on the hillside above the tank to try and solve the enigma. Within an hour the answer was obvious: Magpies would land on the boards and stand perfectly still, when a Coy fish rose to the surface to sun himself, the Magpie would deliver an incapacitating blow with its beak to the back of the fish’s head rendering him unconscious. The bird would then fly off with the helpless fish and feed its young back at its nest.

This wasn’t a government team sent to investigate, there was no need to muddy up the water with philosophical theory and a multitude of causes like Climate Change and pollution: no, like most problems, the answer was simple, but the solution was a problem indeed.

Oddly enough the fish solved the problem after about forty of them had been eaten by the blood thirsty feathered savages. The remaining 60 decided that it is dangerous to sun yourself at the surface and they never came to the surface. Eventually, the Magpies only came to drink like the other birds and nature’s balance was restored.

The Coy remind me of Republican congressmen, if they compromise their principles and bask in the warmth and seemingly easy life at the surface and play the game of go along to get along, they will become branded as RINOs and it wont be long until they are carried away. Before long they learn that the only way to insure longevity is to stick to the cold hard principles of true Conservatism. Survival requires a consolidated effort to avoid the entreaties of Democrats who are no longer in power and now are more than willing to seduce Republicans with a faux olive branch promising compromise like mincing harlots, but in reality it is merely a trap to weaken the movement and destroy the integrity of Republicans by having them labeled as RINOs and making their political survival in 2012 a questionable proposition.