Scott McMillion / Photos Ami Vitale
In Northeastern Montana, not far from the Canadian border, the volcanic uplift of the Little Rocky Mountains is visible across 100 miles of prairie. Layered with granite and ponderosa pine, speckled with aspen that turns brilliant gold in the fall, and blanketed in a white comforter in the winter, this “island” range bathes in watercolor hues come dawn or dusk. And from the foothills of the Little Rockies, where the trees peter out, the Matador Ranch runs southeast across mile after mile of prairie grassland to the eroded scars and sculpted sandstone and wind-bent ponderosas of the Missouri River Breaks. It’s grazing country all the way.
At 60,000 acres, the Matador, which The Nature Conservancy has owned since 2000, is the largest private ranch in the region. But even with all that land, Brian Martin, the director of science for the Conservancy in Montana, has been thinking about the ranch’s role in keeping an even larger landscape intact.
Here on the prairie, small but important creatures need big spaces. There’s no better example than the greater sage grouse. Not much bigger than a chicken, sage grouse are what biologists call a landscape species. They depend not on a patch of turf but on a sweep of ground and sky big enough to provide a reliable variety of habitats: sagebrush of one size for nesting and another for winter survival, broadleaf plants for rearing chicks, bare ground for mating rituals. These birds, an important food source for everything from foxes to eagles, often fly scores of miles to find what they need.
But the sage grouse, along with a suite of other prairie species like prairie dogs, long-billed curlews and migrating pronghorns, are finding that their world isn’t as big as it used to be. It has been whittled down by roads and fences and, most severely, the plow. And a smaller world can bring trouble for both humans and birds. Lose the bigness and you lose birds. Lose birds and you invoke the restrictions of the federal Endangered Species Act. This isn’t a theoretical problem: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is scheduled to decide whether to add the sage grouse to the endangered species list by 2015.
But the Conservancy is using an innovative idea to preserve the open range and keep the prairies functioning for increasingly rare creatures—as well as for the scattering of ranchers who’ve made a home here in the sagebrush. As big as it is, the Matador remains a relative postage stamp on the prairie. So the Conservancy is working with its ranching neighbors to operate a grass bank, a conservation tool designed to save the prairie far beyond the ranch’s borders.
“We don’t want random acts of conservation out on the landscape,” Martin says. “We want large blocks. For the landscape-scale species we’re interested in, that’s what they require.”
Southern Phillips County, Montana, isn’t HOME to a lot of people, but the prairie here is no stranger to controversy and mistrust. “I’m 50 years old,” says local rancher Dale Veseth, “and it seems there’s always been a fight.” . . .
http://magazine.nature.org/features/ranching-rebooted.xml#sthash.JeBnY2ek.dpuf
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