About a week ago I was returning to the ranch and stopped at a popular restaurant near Chamberlain, SD for lunch. There AI happened to run into an old friend that I had not seen for about ten years. After we finished the basic getting caught up with our lives and what we had been up to during the intervening years, he invited me out to the farm he had bought North of the Missouri River breaks near Chamberlain.
He knows of my interest and concern for wildlife and land management for same, and he wanted to show me what he had done with the farm place he had bought several years ago. His renovations and restorations spread across everything from remodeling the house to building some new buildings and converting the typical SD east river row crop and hay farm to a wildlife intensive location; so he plants food plots for the wild life, principally pheasant and deer. His main interest is hunting, and enhancing the prospects of that, but simultaneously he spends more time just watching than he does in hunting. His joy is in seeing the way things work with the interactions of wildlife; so he tries to feed his passion by accommodating the wildlife.
Anyway we went on a tour of the place and I could see the extreme care he had taken and, of course, the expense he had gone to in facilitating his dream to build something substantial and sustainable for the land and its inhabitants–and not just exploit the land for personal profit. In this effort he has established shelter belts of trees, food plots, mostly of Milo, and put in small dams in natural drainages to hold sufficient water to carry the wildlife and not large enough to inhibit the natural water courses unduly.
What interested me mostly was that he had not done all of this for personal profit other than the joy of his own interest and love for wildlife. I do not see that kind of thing very often, but there it is.
My point is this, since this is one of the few times I do not write about buffalo and this ranch. It is really nice o see someone doing something similar, though different, from what we do here–attempt to enhance the native land for the native species because it deserves to be done. I must, therefore, applaud his efforts. So congratulations to my friend and his wife for what they are trying to do and thus far it looks successful. Yes, congratulations.