A rancher watches about 107 cattle split between two water sources on an unfenced pasture at dusk. The herd moves west, then south behind a hill, following scent trails rather than fences. He expects them to bed down near the butte later that night.
We had 107 today at least. Here's our main cow herd and yearlings thrown together. I'm gonna pan around here and show you a second water source in the same pasture that a small group has gone down and watered at this evening. This back group there in the center of the video is on the tank. This lead group is coming off of that water. My guess is with that many head, they couldn't all water like they wanted to up here at this main— there's a tank up here at this— With this group of cattle up here, and so those split off to go grab water, but they're catching back up now. So we're just watching them here this evening. Um, they're migrating here to the left. And again here, going up behind that big hill tonight. All right, not to leave you in suspense, right over there on the left-hand edge of the screen is where that water tank was at. You can see them cattle have cleared out. They went just on the back side of that tree line, and I'm not able to get any video, but they're headed south. Which is going to put them, as they go south, they'll pick up another fence line and loop back around and come up into that bunch of cows that's right up there. When we drove over here this evening, that group of cows that I'm focused on right there, they were kind of all over this flat. So I'm guessing these other cows have picked up that same trail and are just slower in taking it on the migration. Once again, it's still a guess, but it's pretty cool for us to see. Come over and watch this this evening. All right, just like I told you, this set of trees here is what had us hooked where we couldn't see. Um, I can't even see the tank now over top of these trees. The tank sits right over there in the middle over top of that. So they came along here, there's a fence line that stays up on the high part over there, and now they're coming And they've bent and are headed back to the east to that group of cows. So kind of give you an idea of the migration, this big flat that sits here between the draw and where that group of cows was at when we came in this evening, that's where all those cows were hanging at. I think it's about 7:00, 7:30 this evening, so give you an idea of time of day on it, and they are slowly Migrating out along that path, and they'll go up behind that big tall butte. Justin and I surmise that that's where they'll probably bed at tonight if we were to stay here a little bit longer and watch things. But— And there's no— kind of a side note here— there's no fence line that they're wandering up. Fence line actually sits down. Down in the bottom against those badlands. So, I mean, it's not even like they came to a fence and are wandering up. They just came along there and decided it's time to go join the rest of the herd, which I'm pretty sure where the rest of the scent trail had been laid.
