2 thoughts on “Let Bison be Bison: Recovering the Prairie”
A note about The Nature Conservancy: In the past, people who didn’t know what TNC was about would donate land that they personally wanted to preserve. (I have heard personal complaints years ago of people who didn’t know that the specific land that they donated to TNC wasn’t added to the conserved land.) It doesn’t work that way. If you have a nostalgic reason to preserve some land, set up a dedicated trust or other legal agreement, don’t depend on TNC to be a free trustee service.
An important feature of developing and maintaining habitat is contiguous land, including natural “infrastructure” like streams and ponds. To that end, much of the land that is donated to TNC is sold or traded for other, more useful parcels (or to fund their existing projects).
Since so much of their work is property-juggling, it is low-overhead for them if you want to donate land that you don’t expect to be made or kept wild (like so many charities that have mechanisms to handle donations of stock or in-kind gifts).
Chicken people with land like to shift their chickens across the terrain via mobile coops called chicken tractors, giving them fresh supplies of bugs and leaving behind their fertilization.
A note about The Nature Conservancy: In the past, people who didn’t know what TNC was about would donate land that they personally wanted to preserve. (I have heard personal complaints years ago of people who didn’t know that the specific land that they donated to TNC wasn’t added to the conserved land.) It doesn’t work that way. If you have a nostalgic reason to preserve some land, set up a dedicated trust or other legal agreement, don’t depend on TNC to be a free trustee service.
An important feature of developing and maintaining habitat is contiguous land, including natural “infrastructure” like streams and ponds. To that end, much of the land that is donated to TNC is sold or traded for other, more useful parcels (or to fund their existing projects).
Since so much of their work is property-juggling, it is low-overhead for them if you want to donate land that you don’t expect to be made or kept wild (like so many charities that have mechanisms to handle donations of stock or in-kind gifts).
Chicken people with land like to shift their chickens across the terrain via mobile coops called chicken tractors, giving them fresh supplies of bugs and leaving behind their fertilization.
https://cdn.itsoverflowing.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Modern-Barn-Chicken-Tractor.jpg
A bison tractor would have to be pretty damned big, so I suppose with bison it’s probably easier just to set up pre-fenced rotational grazing.
😉