I finally got some pictures of the cattle that graze along the shoreline in my town. Yes...cattle. There is a lot of farming near by. Fruit orchards are probably the most abundant crops. My neighbor down the road has sheep that graze in his front yard. But until I noticed one day that there were cattle grazing about 50 feet from the ocean off a shoreline road I didn't realize farmers were raising cattle here.
This picture was taken by my husband as we rode our mopeds along the shoreline road. He stopped to snap some pictures for me with his Droid phone.
Last summer I watched a man putting in a fence in a marshy area on the shoreline that I pass quite often on my way into town. Why he was putting up a fence when there already was a fence along the road I couldn't figure out. Now I see that it was to keep the cows from wading too far into the water; that there needed to be a new fence about 10 feet from the fence on the side of the road.
The cows come down to the march to graze and walk through the plants selecting the ones they enjoy munching on. This particular day there were a few horses with the cows and there was an especially large number of cows grazing.
This is why the term Swamp Yankee seems to make sense to me. A neighbor down the road I met who I guess has lived most of her life her introduced me to this term. It seems to refer to the people who live near the shore and perhaps to the farmers that are raising cattle in the swampy areas here. I guess there are swamp cows too.
Here's a panoramic view of the herd.
