Bless the pilots who do the heavy lifting when it comes to finding 100 cows scattered across 15, 20 or even 25 thousand acres paddocks, mostly heavily populated by Mulga trees and various other shrubbery. Allowing ground staff time for the intense (pecan) nut cracking session you see here.
Once upon a time, people on the ground would be spread out across kilometres of paddock, zigzagging across their section, looking for fresh tracks, checking on any known cattle camps, monitoring landmarks to ensure they covered all their section and occasionally switching off their bike (or horse) to listen for cattle bellowing, or to try to locate the person riding the section next to them. If/when they did find cattle, they had to keep them moving in the right direction while darting off to zigzag still, and checking on their cattle as they passed. Sometimes having to backtrack to find cattle that had decided a different direction (or a complete stoppage) was better.
Now a pilot flies the zigzags and calls people to cattle as needed, and since most cattle here move off in front of the plane noise, we sometimes spend the first part of the paddock moving along with the pilot’s line, checking out the biscuit container, solving problems of the world and listening for cattle, just in case some have turned back or been hiding in shadows.