CRAWFORD, Texas – President Bush calls his Prairie Chapel Ranch “a slice of heaven,” a special place where he can ride his mountain bike, fish his man-made pond, and clear brush to his heart’s content.

But is it really a ranch?

Here’s a clue: The Secret Service agents now outnumber the cows.

Mr. Bush’s summer vacation at the 1,583-acre spread, which ends Friday after nearly five weeks, allows him not only to relax, but to remind the nation that he’s a Cowboy President. It’s a tradition started by Teddy Roosevelt, and followed by Lyndon B. Johnson, and Ronald Reagan, that casts the chief executive as a plain-talking, outdoors-loving leader.

The president’s supporters say that’s the real Mr. Bush, and they insist he would be spending time at the property he bought in 1999 even if he had not run for president a year later. Still, they acknowledge that Mr. Bush accrues political benefits from his time in Crawford.

But with only a handful of cattle now on the property, some Texans suggest that calling the place a ranch could be considered a stretch.

“There are some guys that are all hat and no cattle. The president’s not that way; he’s hat and five cattle,” joked Austin attorney and former Rep. Kent Hance, a Democrat who beat Bush in a 1978 congressional race by portraying him as an Ivy League interloper.

The White House declined to let a reporter take a look at the grounds or interview ranch hands while the president and first lady were finishing their August vacation.

But Deputy Press Secretary Dana Perino confirmed the bovine population had fallen sharply since former ranch foreman Kenneth Engelbrecht got rid of his cattle and vacated the property a few months ago. Mr. Engelbrecht, a member of the family who sold the ranch to Bush in 1999, had been leasing back pasture and tending a herd that numbered about 200.

Ms. Perino initially said the president still kept “a few” cattle on the ranch. Pressed for a more precise head count, she said “four or five.” (They are believed to include Ophelia and Eltonia, two Longhorns given to Mr. Bush by his gubernatorial staff in 1999, and perhaps some of their progeny.)

The departure of Mr. Engelbrecht and his herd raise several perplexing questions, among them: Do four or five cows, plus two visiting Scottish Terriers, constitute a real ranch?

“Well, I guess it’s just up to the people,” said 74-year-old Ray Neuman, who runs 55 Hereford cattle on the property next to Mr. Bush’s. “We have trouble with just calling anything a ranch around here. But it’s getting more common all the time.”

Will the president’s credibility suffer if he is no longer perceived as a cowboy?

“He’s earned his spurs,” said Mr. Hance, who accused Mr. Bush of being an outsider in the 1978 race but now believes the president’s professed affinity for country living is genuine. “He is a real Texan.”

The Bushes bought the Prairie Chapel Ranch from the Engelbrecht family for a reported $1.3 million in 1999, shortly after earning a $14 million profit from the sale of the Texas Rangers baseball franchise and a year before George W. Bush’s first run for president.

The Bushes immediately began transforming it into their Texas home, building a 4,000-square-foot, limestone-walled, passive-solar living quarters, adding an 11-acre pond stocked with bass and other fish, and planting native grasses, flowers, and a tree farm that might go commercial after Mr. Bush leaves Washington.

Mr. Bush prefers bicycles to horses, and he never claimed to be a cattleman. He has described himself as a “windshield rancher” who likes to escort visitors such as Russian President Putin around his property in a pick-up. He once told a visiting journalist he had become an avid arborist.

“I am,” he said, “tree man.”

Even the first lady has made sport of the president’s animal-husbandry deficit. “I’m proud of George,” she told the White House Correspondents Association dinner in April. “He’s learned a lot about ranching since that first year when he tried to milk the horse. What’s worse, it was a male horse.”