As one travels the center of our country the effort to conserve and restore the diversity and natural systems of the American Great Plains is evident. Conservation groups, government agencies, and individuals are hard at work on a thousand projects; from habitat restoration, to reintroduction of endangered species, to water shed protection, to base-line science that will help us understand what needs to be done. I see these efforts everywhere I go and I marvel at the array of fronts on which lovers of the "Big Open" are working.

But the "Big Open" is more than big. It is immense, and the systems that give it the power to lift the human spirit are complicated, indeed. In fact, when measured against the enormity of the Great Plains, the efforts to restore its vitality seem puny. What is a protected forty-acre patch of pintail duck habitat compared to the hundreds of thousands of subsidized acres that have been plowed and sprayed with poisonous chemicals? What is a repository of endangered plants in the garden of a private botanist? What is a local effort to improve gazing management on public lands? What is a tiny buffalo herd in the center of the range that once held millions?

It is hard to be optimistic about the chances for a meaningful and timely recovery of the Great Plains. With climate change clearly in progress and the Plains predicted to get even drier, the chances for help, from a series of wet years, seems unlikely. With fossil fuel consumption showing no real signs of tapering off until it becomes a rare and expensive commodity the human assault on the Great Plains seems destined to continue. National attitudes concerning our relationship to the land show no widespread signs of turning away from head=long consumption. It is hard for me to imagine that we, as a society, have reached the peak of our mindless, arrogant binge of environmental abuse and are on the downhill slope toward a workable harmony with the natural systems of the Great Plains. It seems clear to me that, if things are ever to get better, we will have to suffer through a period of increased deterioration of the land that sustains us.

So what, you might ask, is the value of all those people protecting those forty acres patches of pintail habitat? Why dedicate your life to securing the seed stock of a prairie forb that no one cares about? Why try to figure out how best to rotate herbivores over the face of the Plains? Why sacrifice time and fortune to maintain a free roaming herd of buffalo?

Aldo Leopold said, "The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the pieces." The intelligence of our tinkering on the Great Plains is in serious dispute but the fact that we have tinkered with the connective tissue of the environment is a simple fact. It seems highly likely that, as with the population and fortunes of all species, an adjustment looms in the future for mankind. The ingenuity of humans that allowed their populations to exceed the carrying capacity of its range was not ingenuity at all. It was a stroke of luck called cheap oil - no more the doing of mankind than it is the ingenuity of the antelope that brought about a freakish series of wet summers that allow the population of antelope to explode. But, as in the case of the antelope, the luck will not hold and the adjustment will eventually come.

It would be easy to view all this as bad news for mankind, but no thinking person ever believed that population and prosperity, for any specie, can increase forever. The great adjustment is not bad news - it is simply news. But there may be some good news in all this. Unlike the antelope, who are not capable planning and so destined destroying their habitat in the times following the boom years, there are a few humans: individuals, groups, and agencies, who have been "saving the pieces." When the smoke of the adjustment clears, in fifty, or a hundred, or three hundred years, there may well be a forty-acre wetland with pintails bringing off broods, there may be a garden of once pampered wild plants ready to break out onto the prairie again. There may be sections of prairie that were managed for the duration, healthy enough to accept those plants. And there may be a little herd of free roaming buffalo ready to claim their birthright - to step through the crumbed fences and fill the void left by the deposed monarchs whose time has come and gone.



by Gervase Hittle

As noted in last month's RRD, we were bringing the buffalo in during early April. The time I wrote about concerned a group of about forty animals. We had maybe forty in already so that left maybe a hundred animals to gather, which made the middle of April a very busy few weeks. We spent a lot of time just looking for the animals, sometimes by air. One of our neighbors is a pilot, and he helped us, but he has his own work, too. Twice we got calls from Pine Ridge Reservation saying that a few bison had apparently gotten through the fence. We went there to bring them back but by the time we got there, there were no buffalo. That racks up a lot of miles for the truck and the horses, not to mention the wear and tear on what I sometimes call the "geriatric division of Wild Idea Buffalo," namely me, Dan, and Erney.

By the time the tenth of April leaps up in front of us, we're beginning to feel the hammer of time swinging toward the anvil - the reluctance of some of the buffalo to come home due to nice, fresh, greening grass. We have until the twentieth of April to "bring 'em in."

Typically Dan and Jill (non-geriatric) and I scatter out in the government ground pasture, about 22k acres, and search for buffalo. We use radios to communicate (see last month's RRD). But now time is growing short and we began to worry; so we call in Dan's older brother, Scott, who flies his plane in from Florida for a working visit to the ranch - to be our eye in the sky.

A working visit is nothing new to Scott; so he was eager to come. He flies reconnaissance and radios directions to us, who he calls the cavalry. Note: we are not afraid of using technology. Besides there are some very distinct differences between herding cattle and herding the Lord of the Prairie on horseback; and bison with calves and drunk on green grass has its own dynamic. Momma buffalo don't always like horses with riders to come close and bluff charges are not uncommon. (Or are they bluffs?) The buffalo don't always walk; they don't always take the path you hope they will, and they don't always take the easiest path. Sometimes I think they are ever so closely related to mountain goats, as they frequently take "the road less traveled." Just when you think they are going well, they turn a corner up some draw a quarter of a mile ahead of you into someplace you have maybe never seen and thought impassable. So the voice from the sky, Scott, tells us how to save our horses, how to negotiate the passages, and where the buffalo are, which direction they are heading and how fast they are moving. Sometimes I think that the riders in "The Man From Snowy River" have nothing on us, or our horses.

So it's closing in on the twentieth; four of the big bulls, including Curly Bill, and about seven or eight other animals, including cows, calves, yearlings, and two-year-olds are still out. We locate them in the deeps of rough country and off we go. We have Scott in the air, three riders, and Erney on a four-wheeler to be ready to open the appropriate gate(s) near the river when the time comes. We're always optimistic and do not say "if" the time comes. The time will come. The hammer will fall on the anvil on or before the twentieth. Anyway that's what we tell ourselves.

Scott leads us to the animals; we take our positions; we start the buffalo toward home; they make our lives miserable for the next couple hours, nimble footed, shy, quickly, and retiring beasts that they are. Our horses labor to keep them in sight, occasionally successfully. Scott tells me that Dan has the buffalo going in the right direction; and he tells Dan that Jill and I are trying to find a way down out of a series of badland bluffs; so she and I are temporarily out of the picture. Dan kept the buffalo moving. We get tangles in the maze of badlands but Scott reports that Curly Bill and crew got through a gate Erney had opened quite a ways ahead of Dan. Then Scott told Dan that, "the rest of the cavalry is now in Big Corral and out of the hills. I'm going to Rapid for fuel." Jill and I could see Dan a mile or so ahead of us. He was waiting for us. We talked to him by radio. "Curly Bill is home again," he said. Erney was waiting for us by the gate, which he closed behind us. The hammer had come to rest on the anvil--gently.