Two years ago Nancy Anderson, Director of the Leslie Powell Art Gallery in Lawton, OK invited me to speak at their Lunch Bag Lecture series. We finally were able to schedule a date; so on October 19 of this year I was there to talk about “Great Plains, Buffalo, Restoration, and Other Stuff.” The audience was at least nominally familiar with the American Bison because of Lawton’s proximity to the Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge, which has held a herd of buffalo since 1907 and today has a herd of about 550 animals, which also is one of the major attractions for anyone who has family visitors or house guests. The refuge is Lawton’s answer to Mt. Rushmore, the Liberty Bell, Niagara Falls, the Royal Gorge, or Old Faithful.
Much of my talk dealt with the practical concerns of how a private ranch can implement practices that can contribute to the restoration of both the Great Plains and the buffalo, and to do so I often used examples from this ranch and the things we have done here to expedite some of our restoration efforts. These examples included details: of fence removal and construction, of conversion of a ranch from cattle to buffalo, of grazing on public lands, of harvesting and marketing–which is a lot to cover in a short lunch hour.
The real glitch to restoration is probably three-fold. A) What was once open range has become a crazy quilt of closed ranges, a hodge podge of deeded and public lands where everything is fenced off, thus preventing natural migration. B) Bison survival, when extermination was imminent, depended almost exclusively on ownership by private individuals or government agencies. Ownership hold the animal to be, if not an asset, a liability. Unmanaged buffalo on closed ranges can devastate a range and reach a point of die off, which in an ownership configuration is not acceptable. To prevent such an occurrence the Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge, like Custer State Park, has an annual roundup and auction. C) Climate goes a very long way in controlling water availability and grass production. Animals on a closed range that has insufficient water must rely on artificial water production, ie., wells, stock dams, dugouts, or hauled water. With insufficient grass the rancher must feed hay or transport the herd to less or unaffected areas.
The trick in all of this is a balancing act. Times of plenty are easy, tending to lull the owner into a sense of security, which he or she has no right to have. Times of dearth are anything but easy, tending to create a sense of panic, which, again the rancher has no right to have. In times of the old, open range the roller coaster of plenty and dearth must have been an excruciatingly slow and horrific movement between heaven and hell; climate managed everything good or bad. In these times of closed ranges, human beings try to alance on the tight wire of management stretched between the high points of the roller coaster ride, staying alert in times of plenty, being creative in times of dearth.
The management of this ranch has a three-fold responsibility also: to our range, to our animals and to our customers, a responsibility to balance on the scale of producing high quality meat–no matter what the climate may bring to us and to maintain our herd in balance with our necessarily closed range.