Cattle Wallows

[Robert Penner]

#1323

Using cattle to create wallows or shallow depressions with little or no vegetation is actually an unwritten management technique that we have been using for several of years here on the Cheyenne Bottoms Preserve.

Shorebirds prefer to feed in areas in which the vegetation is short and sparse and for some species no vegetation at all. So along with grazing, mowing, haying and the light disking dry wetland basins, this is another technique that we have been using to create shorebird habitat. It only takes one season to create these cattle wallows
around feed tubs or salt blocks and so we move the location of our feed tubs around each year and then return to a site when it needs to be re-wallowed (is this even a word?)

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