February 22, 2014
Working
on the Landmark wildlife crew, our days are rigorous. Documenting the animals of the Great Plains is not for the faint of heart. Hikes of up to 14 miles
per day over the plains and then down and up flood-cut troughs are de rigeur. As conscientious scientists,
we don't fail to record glimpses of fleeing animals, even when they come at the
end of a long and trying transect. On the other hand, we always look forward to
some cozy down time at the Lazy J Lodge after the workday is done. Relaxing in
the glow of the heatstove, a variety of leisure pursuits pass the time.
Crochet, jigsaw puzzles, and guitar strumming are among the ways we pass the
time. The other day the local ranchers even gave three of us a calf-roping lesson. But the most frequent option for our down time is reading. Send a bunch
of well educated millennials (and a few token misfits from generation Y) into a
media starved cellular deadzone, and noses tend to get buried in books.
I
have read three very inspiring books since I have been here; namely, Buffalo for the Broken Heart by Dan
O'Brien, American Bison by Dale F.
Lott, and Built for Speed, on the
subject of pronghorn antelope, by Dave Byers. Together these three form an edifying
triplet for learning about conservation and wildlife on the Great Plains. I
recommend all three to someone planning to visit the American prairie, and to
those with a general interest in the native animals of our country.
Each
of these writers is either a biologist with a literary tendency or an English
major that leans toward zoology. Lott writes imaginatively about the mass dying
of the North American megafauna, saying that bison and grey wolves "walked
together through a cloud of extinction," and emerged, respectively the
smallest of the Great Plains herbivores and carnivores, the only survivors.
Pronghorn were also there with them. Byers, a pronghorn specialist, shares the
grind of collecting wildlife data year in and year out, and the satisfaction of
riddling about the evolutionary strategies of grazing ungulates. And he shares
a hilarious account of apartment hunting as a young researcher, with a sense of
irony worthy of David Sedaris.
O'Brien is a novelist and professor of English whose love of the Great Plains
landscape flourished immediately as he travelled through South Dakota in the
backseat of a station wagon as an adolescent on vacation with his family. Since
then his passion for land stewardship and conservation biology have led him to
ranch for cattle, and then for bison once he realized that native North
American grazers were the more ecologically harmonious livestock choice.
All
three of these books were published between 1999 and 2003, the dawn of the new
millennium. Perhaps because of the time of writing and the thematic links among
them, each author concludes in the same way: with a plea for the creation of a
large Great Plains reserve to accommodate bison, pronghorn, and the many
species that thrived on the American Serengeti. Ideologically all three are
indebted to Frank and Deborah Popper of Rutgers University who suggested that
much of the Great Plains be ceded back to native fauna. Some of the events of
the intervening years might not satisfy the authors. For example, bison prices
in Montana have crashed, and rancher O'Brien may well have fallen back on his
literary trade to pay the mortgage on his spread. But one development in recent
years would satisfy all three. The creation of a grasslands park on the
Northern Plains is under way. The American Prairie Reserve is working to
collect 3.5 million contiguous acres in Montana where the grazers and the
carnivores can thrive. A creative merging of private capital, conservation
science, and public policy, the project has the potential to fulfill the
aspirations of these three insightful writers and many others who have dreamed
of a revitalized buffalo commons.
