Our herd bull is always looking for females. We learned this once he turned 13 months old. It was mid-April and I decided to drive down to check our group of steers and bulls for the second time that day. As I drove into the pasture, I noticed that something wasn't right. We were missing Tony (our current herdsire) and 4 steers. I could not find them anywhere. I even walked the heavily wooded area at the far end of the pasture; we had never lost an animal there before. However, I did find a down spot in the fence in a dense thicket. It was an old game trail, and to my surprise there were fresh cattle tracks in the dirt. I followed the tracks through dense brush for about 3 hours; by this time, they had gone onto a neighbor's property. After about 2 miles, the tracks had finally left the dense brush and I lost the trail. They had walked out of the river bottom and onto top land. I headed back to the house; I knew that it was only a matter of time before a neighbor called. And sure enough, an hour later, we got a call from a man who runs close to 300 head of Brangus cows. He told us that our silver bull was in with his herd, and trying to breed one of his cows. With this man's help, we were able to cut Tony out of the Brangus group, and load him up on a trailer to take him home. We fixed the fence before putting him back in with the steers and other bulls.
Since then, he has scaled a cliff that no other bull, cow, or calf has challenged in over 40 years. He was in the river bottom with a few heifers at the tail end of the breeding season, and our cow herd was up on the top land.
I can think of another story about Tony. He was 9 months old. Our neighbors had a group of heifers that broke out of their pen; they run a cutting horse operation. Those heifers went through a few more fences and wound up on our place. We had Tony, a 4 year old bull, and a 2 year old bull running with our steers. Once those heifers came in contact with the bulls, the bulls picked their heifers and went to opposite sides of the pasture (This first part happened during the night). When I went down to check the steers and bulls the next morning, I found that the 4 year old bull had 15 heifers running with him at one side of the pasture. The two year old bull also had a few heifers with him, but Tony was missing. Tony had walked up a rocky draw with a washed out water gap that was put in place decades ago; I did not even know it existed. He then got up on the top land, walked down into the other river bottom, and joined up with our cow herd. So, the 4 year old ended up with 15 heifers, the two year old bull got two heifers, and Tony who was 9 months old got 20+ cows and heifers.
I have one last story about Tony. He was 20 months old, and he was in with a handful of heifers. Tony is a smaller bull; he was a frame score 3 as a two year old. Our neighbor's run Brangus bulls that are much larger than Tony. However, Tony has an extremely deep bellow; he has had one ever since he was 6 months old. He got in a bellowing contest with a bull across the creek. They could not see each other due to the trees and blackberry bushes. Tony's bellow was extremely deep while the other bull had a much higher pitched bellow. Within a few minutes, the neighboring bull's bellows got further and further away from Tony. By the sounds of it, Tony sounded like a massive 2000+ lb that the other bull did not want to mess with.
Sorry if I rambled too much.