The Breeders Laughed When He Bought a Bull Covered in Thousands of Ticks—Then the Caracaras Arrived

The Breeders Laughed When He Bought a Bull Covered in Thousands of Ticks—Then the Caracaras Arrived A bull covered in thousands of ticks walked through the ring at a South Texas auction and the auctioneer couldn't get a bid above salvage. A seedstock producer in the third row called him a liability on four legs. One man paid a thousand dollars . . . loaded him into a trailer . . . drove home . . . and did nothing. No pour-on. No spray. No chemical treatment. His wife asked what he was going to do about the ticks. He said . . . wait for the birds. His grandfather ran cattle on that same ground for thirty years before chemical tick control existed. Never used pour-on. Never used spray. His cattle survived because crested caracaras . . . large ground-hunting birds native to South Texas . . . landed on the cows every morning and ate the ticks directly off the hide. Thousands per week. Free. Every day. No prescription. The system worked for centuries until the chemical companies replaced it with a twelve-dollar bottle that had to be reapplied every month and cost fifteen hundred dollars a year. Six weeks after he stopped using chemicals . . . the caracaras came back. Seven birds the first morning. Nineteen within a month. Landing on cattle the way they'd been landing on cattle since before fences existed. The tick-covered bull lost seventy percent of his load in two months without a single drop of chemical. Gained a hundred and forty pounds. Bred twenty-two cows at eighty-six percent conception. His annual tick control cost now . . . zero dollars. His neighbor stopped spraying the following March. Same result. Thirty-one caracaras between two properties doing the work that used to cost three thousand a year combined. His grandfather had a saying . . . the land has a doctor for every disease. You just have to stop buying the medicine long enough to let him show up.