Cattle Sustain Wildlife

     One afternoon in mid-August I was driving through Lancaster County, Pennsylvania farmland and saw a farmer cutting alfalfa hay that will feed cattle this winter.  Scores of post-breeding barn swallows were entertaining and inspiring as they swooped, dove and swirled swiftly after the innumerable insects stirred into the air by the hay cutter.  Those tiny, flying insects made great meals for the swallows.  Again, I thought about milk and meat from cattle being big business here in Lancaster County.  And I thought about how cattle, indirectly, feed and shelter several kinds of adaptable wildlife.  The corn and hay that feed cattle in winter, the straw that beds them, the barns that shelter them and the manure they produce sustain a variety of wild creatures in farmland.
     Many acres of soil are plowed each April, in which corn is sown early in May.  Horned larks and killdeer plovers are the only local birds that nest on bare ground when the corn is young and small in the fields.  Both those species of birds are pre-adapted to bare-ground fields; the killdeer traditionally nest on beaches, gravel and bare soil, while the larks do so on denuded soil or ground with sparse vegetation.  Killdeer hatch four chicks per brood on top of the ground while larks dig tea-cup-sized holes in the soil to raise four or five young. 
     Horned larks and killdeer are both brown on top, which allows them to blend into the bare ground to be invisible to predators.  And their eggs and young are camouflaged against soil, too.  But killdeer chicks can run and feed themselves within 24 hours of hatching, while lark babies stay in their nurseries and are fed by their parents until old enough to fly.
     In summer, some white-tailed deer hide in corn fields and nibble neighboring alfalfa and clover at dusk and into the night.  And those deer, and raccoons, eat some kernels of corn in the ears before those kernels harden.          
     In winter, great, awe-inspiring flocks of Canada geese, snow geese, tundra swans and mallard ducks settle into harvested corn fields and shovel up kernels left among the stubble by machinery.  Smaller groups of mourning doves, rock pigeons, house sparrows and American crows also put down on harvested corn fields to consume kernels of corn.  And field mice, brown rats, muskrats, gray squirrels and white-tails come out of their various shelters to ingest corn kernels, too, all but the squirrels at night.
     Many alfalfa and red clover fields are often swarming with cabbage white and clouded sulpher butterflies, other kinds of butterflies, including tiger swallowtails, spicebush swallowtails, silver-spotted skippers and monarchs, and a variety of bees and other insects.  All those insects land on the lavender alfalfa blooms and pink clover blossoms to sip nectar.  White-tails, wood chucks and cottontail rabbits ingest the plants themselves. 
     Grain fields here are harvested early in July.  The grain is bagged and sold to make flour, and the golden stems are baled for livestock bedding.  But some grain tumbles to the ground where it is eaten by flocks of rock pigeons, mourning doves, house sparrows, house finches, American crows, horned larks and other kinds of birds.  Field mice and gray squirrels also get their share.   
     Several kinds of wildlife live and raise young in barns, including pigeons, house sparrows, barn swallows, barn owls, brown rats, house mice, little brown bats, big brown bats, spiders, milk snakes, black rat snakes and a few other kinds of adaptable wild critters.  The bats leave the barns at dusk and spend good portions of each spring, summer and autumn night catching and eating flying insects, including mosquitoes and flies.  Spiders snare a lot of insects in their webs, while the snakes are good at catching and eating rats and mice that live in the barns.
     Manure from cattle has chewed, but undigested, corn bits in it.  Manure is particularly important to certain birds and mammals in winter when snow covers the fields, burying grain and weed seeds.
Pigeons, doves, house sparrows, geese, swans, ducks, crows and horned larks poke and shovel through the manure to eat the bits of corn.  Field mice, brown rats and muskrats all eat some of the corn in manure, too.
     Flies that settle around the eyes and other orifices of cattle are preyed on by barn swallows, tree swallows, purple martins, which are another kind of swallow, eastern kingbirds, eastern bluebirds and other kinds of birds, and a few species of dragonflies.  The flies were larvae in manure piles, changed to flies, and are now seeking mates to lay more fertile eggs.  But most of those flies, when in flight, are caught and eaten by the above-mentioned birds and insects, which is another example of cattle indirectly feeding wildlife.
     Brown-headed cowbirds, starlings and, once in a while, a few cattle egrets, follow cattle in the meadows to catch grasshoppers, crickets and other invertebrates stirred out of the grass by the animals' hooves.  Cowbirds have a long history of following bison on the western prairies to get insects.  And because the bison were always on the move, cowbirds moved with them, developing the habit of laying their eggs in other birds' nests so they could forever follow the bison and not be tied to hatching and raising young for more than a month.
     Milk and meat are big business in Lancaster County.  And the many cattle that provide those foods to us also feed a variety of adaptable wildlife in various ways.  Being adaptable is a key to success.