There is a tiny adobe cabin nestled in the sand dunes of far eastern New Mexico. No real road leads to it, just two faint tracks among the mesquite, love grass, blue stem, and cholla cactus. The dimensions are 16 feet by 20 feet with a small courtyard on the south side. A faded blue doorway, three windows, and a small stove pile protruding through the roof. For water, we tapped into a buried stock-tank line that ran behind the dying elm trees of the original homestead. There is a simple shower in the northwestern corner of the cabin, but there is no indoor toilet. By any standard it is Spartan living, but that is the way we planned it. The plan was drawn up in 1987 on an old, oak, kitchen table that I still use as a writing table. Erney, my oldest friend, and I built the outhouse in portable sections in the workshop on the old Broken Heart Ranch, where we lived together for twenty-five years. The vegas, bond beams, and the fourteen inch square column that holds up the roof came from a little sawmill in the Black Hills. It all fit into a battered horse trailer that made it to New Mexico with only two flat tires. The building site was on Jim Weaver’s newly acquired ranch where I had been spending part of each winter since sometime in the late 1970’s. Jim’s New Mexico Ranch is not what most people picture when they think of New Mexico. There are no mountains in sight. No fancy Santa Fe architecture, arts colonies, ancient pueblos, or timeless Spanish culture. This is hardscrabble Roosevelt County, New Mexico, settled by Arkansas homesteaders in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, organized in 1903, and dried out before 1930. The population had risen to 12,000 by 1910 but was only 6,500 in 1920. When Jim found this place in the 1970’s the land had been long ruined by homesteaders, ignorant of the needs of the fragile landscape. They scratched out farm fields in the sandy soil and begun communities, but by mid-century those fields had blown into massive sand dunes that supported very little life. Most of the people had moved away. The few that remained on the land were practicing a brand of farming that depended on government subsidies and a personal austerity seasoned with skullduggery. There was very little to recommend Roosevelt County, New Mexico to entrepreneurs. But for a few people interested in birdlife it has always been a Mecca. I was in my early thirties, working seasonal jobs and toiling over my second book about bird migration and the Great Plains. The idea of the book was to travel south with the lark buntings, raptors, waterfowl and meadowlarks. I’d made the trip many times before and I knew that, when I got to Jim’s ranch most of the birds that had left South Dakota, would be there waiting for me. In addition to the migrants there would be the year-around residents: birds like bobwhite quail, road runners, thrashers, white necked ravens, and probably the world’s greatest concentration of lesser prairie chickens. In those days there were tens of thousands of prairie chickens on Jim’s ranch alone and, in my naiveté, I could not see that it would not always be that way. But, of course, environments are always in flux. The few circle irrigators that I passed on my early, eight hundred mile trip from South Dakota to New Mexico seemed like insignificant straws drilled down into the immense and inexhaustible reservoir known as the Ogallala …