Conservation - beneficials

We monitor the health of our farm by observing "beneficials."  Beneficials are animals, plants and insects that show that we are moving in a direction toward a healthy native environment.  So it was very exciting to see this morning, while I was moving the cows into their next grazing area, a hen mallard fly out of the grass.  I searched around a little and found her nest buried in the tall cool season grasses.  She has 5 eggs in her nest.  The thing that's so great about the mallard nest is that it shows that we're giving wildlife areas to nest and thrive while still utilizing the grasses for our cow/calf pairs.  The area that the mallard is nesting in was a very rough and heavily grazed area when we first bought the farm.  By maintaining good grazing patterns around this area we've been able to allow the area to fill in with grasses and still grow big bluestem and other forbs later in the year.  We'll avoid her nest and graze around her, leaving a large amount of cover for her to hide in.   Other "beneficials" that we've seen over the past couple of years are that we've increased the number of meadow larks and other prairie bird types, and we've seen sora rail on the wetlands for the past couple of springs.