Gawkers of Runners?

Gawkers or runners, that is the question. I was out in
a unit checking wind for a helicopter spray job when I looked down the hill and saw an entire herd of true Gawkers. (If you do not know what a gawker is, look at my blog archive for a definition) This herd of elk gawkers(the largest variety of gawkers in the area) was grazing on all the brush we were coming out here to spray. They were doing a good job of it too! We actually don't mind having them keep the brush and weeds down for us. But when we plant the trees, they like to use them as toys. They will grab them with their mouth, pull them out of the ground, and throw them at each other.(I have actually seen this happen!) Then once they get bored with that they start just eating the trees. Since we are in the business of growing trees, letting these gawkers run loose like this is kinda bad for business. We have tried to appeal to the gawker union, but have only gotten freshly planted trees thrown at us. So we resort to throwing small pieces of lead at them at certain times of the year to try to keep the tree throwing and tree eating to a minimum. I know this herd is definately gawkers because if they were runners pretending to be gawkers, I would not have been able to get this close for as long as I did. After I saw them, I hiked back to the truck to get the camera. Thinking that they would probably be gone, I went back with the camera and they were still there munching away. So I took a couple pics. Then I decided to test their Gawkerness and hiked closer. I was able to get to a good hiding spot about 150 feet away from them. I continued to take pics for about 20 minutes. (about 99 pictures in all.) There was 3 smaller bulls.Here in this picture.
This one bull was the biggest. I think it is about a 6 point. The picture at the top is the same bull.

You can see what a Gawker is like as he is stretching out his neck to give you a bigger target. Its so nice of them to do that.
Then the big bull had his harem with him. There was about 8 cows and about 4-5 calves. If they were runners this cow would have kicked this calf in the head and said "Not now we got to run!" But as they are Gawkers, they could take the time for Junior to get a quick bite to eat before getting back to shelter. By this time, I had got a phone call and they were all startled. It seems that their Gawker genes have been contaminated with some of the runner variety in their past because when my phone rang they all jumped and ran at least 25 - 30 feet and stopped to look around and find the noise. Uncontaminated Gawkers will just look up and go back to eating in about 10 seconds. Runners, if you could ever even get this close, would, at the sound of a strange noise, start running in the opposite direction of the noise as fast as they can and would not stop until they get to the next county or state line.(where ever the hunt boundry is. Remember that they have a copy of the hunting regs!) These Gawkers, sometime in their past, let a stray Runner mingle with their group. So now when they hear a strange noise, they have a unknown urge to run, but then they get hungry again and stop. We can only hope that this gene slowly goes away and doesn't get worse. So there are a few Gawkers that get big horns. Just remember, those big horns don't taste very good!