Stories

I got a note from Yvon Chouinard who doesn’t use email and is notorious for brief messages. This one arrived on the back of a card with the word Patagonia on the front, via snail mail. The note read, “Come fishing. I’ll be in Montana 7/20 -8/12.” I really appreciated the invitation and it sounded like I could come about any time around the end of July. But still, I had a pretty full schedule and Montana is very big place.

Note to readers: As we seek to know more about where our food comes from and how it is raised, it is perhaps equally important to know how it dies. It may even be our responsibility. If you'd rather not see, and are okay with just the knowing, you may want to stop reading here. Although the photos are not graphic they offer transparency to the process of Wild Idea’s humane field harvest.

The Fourth of July is the time to think about freedom. Of course, the holiday is about declaring independence from the tyranny of monarchs, but all the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights are implied in that Declaration of Independence. The Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791, long after the Declaration of Independence was signed, but that list of rights to freedom of religion, assembly, press, speech, bearing arms, etc., has come to define the United States and is celebrated on the Fourth of July.

When I saw my son Lincoln for the very first time, I knew my life had changed. There was something about this small vulnerable human being that made me want to protect, teach, and love him all at the same time. His dark blue eyes stared at me inquisitively.

Some groups and recent media coverage claim that the National Bison Legacy Act, declaring the Bison as America’s National Mammal that was signed into law last week, is more greenwashing than conservation. It is hard to argue that there is no greenwashing involved in the legislation that was backed by an array of commercial interests. But arguing that there is no conservation value in bringing national attention to the plight of the bison, who were reduced from tens of millions in the days before Europeans moved onto the continent to perhaps a few hundred at the turn of the twentieth century, is equally difficult to defend.

Crawling on my stomach through the grass, concentrating only on keeping my presence unknown and not damaging my Nikon camera, I temporarily forgot about my fear of snakes. It was a misty South Dakota morning and the sun had just started to push through the washed-out prairie sky.

A curious feature of Mother’s Day is the way it is spelled. The commercial forces that help drive the popularity of the holiday sometimes spell it Mothers Day. When advertising greeting cards, flowers, and candy it is probably productive to give the impression that this is a day to celebrate all mothers. But the originator of Mother’s Day (Anna Jarvis in 1908) was quite insistent that it should be spelled as a singular possessive because she wanted people to celebrate a single person - their own mother – “the person who has done more for you than anyone in the world.”

At Wild Idea Buffalo Company our main product is not healthy, grass-fed bison meat, but an improved environment prom...

I spent all of Easter Day on an ATV to bring buffalo in from the east side of the Cheyenne River where they had spent the winter. It was a long day but not terribly strenuous. How tiring can it be to be miles from any other human being, in a piece of the Great Plains that could serve as a time machine, complete with antelope, deer, buffalo, migrating sand hill cranes, and waves of other birds heading north to begin the world over again?

Last fall I got a call from Travis Livieri, a Black-Footed Ferret expert and the founder of The Prairie Wildlife Research Foundation. He was going to be in the Conata Basin area of the Badlands National Park doing research on Black-Footed Ferrets and wanted to know if I wanted to tag along for a night of spotlighting.   

The first time the peregrine falcon shot past the window I didn’t move a muscle. It could have been my imagination. Maybe my eyes were crossing from boredom.  

Living forty miles from small town engenders a sense to isolation. A guy can get the feeling that no one know what you are doing or cares what you are thinking. Getting a call from a NY Times reporter is a seismic event that leaves you wondering if you imagined it. When the photographer shows up it seems more real, but after they drive out of the driveway, the eerie silence descends again.