[00:00:00] Speaker A: When Lewis and Clark traveled up the Missouri river in the 1800s, they encountered bison herds stretching to the horizon, grizzly bears roaming the plains, and wildlife in numbers they could barely believe.
100 years later, and it was all gone.
But in central Montana, the wildness is returning, and it's happening faster than you think.
Welcome back to Rewildology, the nature podcast that explores the human side of conservation, travel, and rewilding the planet.
I'm Brooke Mitchell, and I'm so excited for today's In Betweener show because I've wanted to have this organization on since the launch of the show.
In this conversation, I'm sitting down with Daniel Kinka, Ph.D. director of Rewilding at American Prairie, a nonprofit working to rewild 5,000 square miles of Montana's Great Plains to create the largest nature reserve in the continental United States.
Danny and I talk about the science of rewilding, not just bringing back species, but restoring the ecological processes that allow ecosystems to function as they're supposed to.
We discussed bison and large carnivores like wolves, bears, and mountain lions. Why prairie dogs are the unsung heroes of the plains and the tangible hope you can see happening on the ground right now.
You'll walk away from this conversation with a clear understanding of how large scale rewilding actually works, and most importantly, what you can do to support wildlife restoration wherever you live in the world.
All right, everyone, let's dive in. Here is my conversation with Dr. Danny Kinka.
[00:01:51] Speaker B: My name is Daniel Danny Kinka, and I am the director of Rewilding at American Prairie. It's a dream job for me. I've worked with the organization for eight years. Tomorrow. I joined the organization immediately after finishing my PhD in Ecology at Utah State University.
And as you alluded to, my path to ecology, rewilding, restoration ecology is maybe a little unconventional, although, I don't know, everybody has different paths. But I actually did my first, my undergrad and my master's degree in psychology, specifically psychology and then cognitive neuroscience. So I very much kind of came through, like the side door, through the window into ecology. I started out in a completely different discipline.
For most of my adult career, my adult life, I wanted to be a research professor. And it wasn't until very late in graduate school that I realized that I didn't actually want to do that. That's not the job that I thought it was. And I didn't know what I was going to do. But I was very, very fortunate to find this role at American Prairie. And then, even though I didn't really know what I was looking for. It kind of smacked me in the head. And I was like, well, that's what I'm looking for. I mean, I want to use that training that I've had as a SC in multiple disciplines to do something applied and meaningful. And like, I was trained as a researcher. I, I adore research. I have unlimited respect for the people that do it, and God knows we need more of it. But I, I'm, you know, I would rather be on the doing side than the researching side. And I, I realized that pretty late in my career, but thankfully I still ended up being in the right place at the right time to find what has become.
What has become a dream job. Yeah.
[00:03:18] Speaker A: So let's stay in the history scheme of things.
Let's let the foundation here. I think a lot of people have a general understanding that the Great Plains of North America are different than what they used to be.
And could you give us a little bit of a history lesson? Why is that?
Why, when, you know, the flyover states, as they're called, why do they look like they do now and how did they previously used to look?
[00:03:51] Speaker B: Right. So there's a couple things there. Let's see. Let me break that down.
You called it flyover country.
That is a bit disparaging to the people that live here. But there's a reason why people think that.
And I think it actually gets at what I would consider the heart of the problem, at least from an ecologist Marie Rewilder's perspective.
The Great Plains specifically, if we're talking about North America, but really grasslands generally, if we're talking about globally, are human habitat. And I don't mean now in terms of farms and ranches, but this is where we Homo sapiens evolved, was in grasslands, tropical grasslands. But still, we are a species that is very at home in open spaces. And if you refer to Roderick Nash's book, we're really bad at conserving our backyards. Conservation is always something that's over there and rarely is it here. And that's a very human thing. And as a result of us being a grassland species, I would say we kind of like forgot to conserve grasslands until it was already a heavily degraded space. Now we've come back to that and we've made a lot of progress.
But to go back to your original question and kind of touch it, what I think is the other side of that coin, people will disagree with me, but I think one of the things that makes the great grasslands generally, but the Great Plains specifically And the northern Great Plains even more specifically, which is where I work, where American prairie exists, the greatness of that landscape, the thing that should be the natural heritage of Montanans and Americans in the world, the thing that we forgot and lost, that made it special was its wildlife, the spectacle of wildlife, its wildlife abundance. What Lewis and Clark saw when they came up the Missouri river, what Native American peoples, many tribes of Native Americans throughout history would have pointed to and said, this is heritage, this is culture, this is spirituality. This is the place. What George Catlin described is like when he called for maybe the first, the first conception of a national park, a nation's park, according to George Catlin, would have been not Yellowstone, not the Grand Canyon, but the Great Plains. Not because of its landscapes beauty, but because of its wildlife beauty, its spectacle. Greece has the Parthenon, North America had the American Serengeti filled with large existing surviving megafauna that survived the Pleistocene. And that was something special. And so for me, and I know I'm not alone here, to the extent that the Great Plains, the heartland of the American continent of North America, feels like flyover country to most people, I would ask you and your listeners to think about what would Yellowstone be without Old Faithful? What would the Grand Canyon be without its canyon? What would Glacier national park be without its glaciers?
Flyover country, which is what the Great Plains is without its wildlife.
[00:06:47] Speaker A: And so why is the wildlife no longer there? If you just want to give a little bit more of a history lesson, where did it all go?
And why do we not have the same numbers that we used to? Which of course we'll get to like the whole American prairie story next.
But the setting, the foundation or setting the scene is why is it not back? Where did it go and why is it not back.
[00:07:14] Speaker B: Foreign?
It's important to understand the history here, but it's also important to not get caught up in feeling helpless or ascribing blame to peoples who are long since dead, all of them.
But the history of the Great Plains from an ecological perspective is a history of loss, destruction and defunation. So the removal of wildlife, in the case of maybe the most iconic plain species, the bison, that was as a result of overhunting, but probably almost certainly also as a tactic of war to subjugate native peoples who lived almost exclusively off of that animal, not just as a food source, but as a source of clothing, as a source of shelter, as like the center of their life ways. One of the ways that the US army chose to subjugate those people was to Remove their, their, everything, their, their grocery store.
And as a result you see the decimation and almost extinction of the bison.
That story for bison involves tactics of war and pretty ugly stuff. But we can extend the same story less in terms of a tactic of war, but just in terms of over hunting or maybe extraction would be the better way to think about it. To all of the area's large to medium mammals, right? People removed these animals wholesale when the large ungulates, so the large prey game species were removed. Wolves and grizzly bears and other large carnivores started to switch to predating on livestock because they had nothing left to eat because their food source was removed. This is when cattle start to move into the country in a big way. Cattle are a non native grazer. They were grazed unsustainably. Wolves and grizzly bears started to eat them. They were persecuted and driven to extirpation out of the region. And when all the large carnivores and all the large herbivores were gone, people started to direct their ire to things like prairie dogs, which were also seen as being in competition with the non native domestic grazer in the form of cattle. And by the way, beaver got trapped off probably at the very beginning as an extractive resource for fur to make hats and everything else, you name it. So we get to it from, in a shockingly short amount of time, right? I mean when Lewis and Clark see this place, it's like 1804, 1805 and Lewis and Clark are coming up in Missouri. These are the first written accounts and in a, in a, in a language that's recognizable to a western audience of the, of the biodiversity and the megafauna of the Great Plains from then until about 1830, when you've got guys like Catlin and Audubon and all these people coming out and seeing that stuff, this seems to be relatively intact as a kind of baseline from 1830 to about 1920, probably maybe a little sooner than that. So like about a hundred years. And really the majority of this takes place in the latter part of the 19th century. So like the late 1800s, we go from the American Serengeti to wall to wall cattle ranching with very little megafauna surviving, mesofauna surviving. I mean like basically anything bigger than a prairie dog is gone. And that exists as the status quo until, I don't know, the 1970s or the 1980s when you start seeing NGOs and nonprofits and conservation organization and even conservation minded ranchers and landowners start to think differently about Land stewardship, land tenure, the importance of the Great Plains, of ecosystem services, biodiversity, et cetera. And so progress starts to be made towards conservation. We have a long way to go, but there is a bit of a bright spot towards the end of the last century in terms of like making some progress towards conservation. But more or less when we're talking about the wildlife story, when we're talking about wildlife abundance, things have not changed significantly since they, since they were 100 years ago.
[00:10:45] Speaker A: And to bring with all of that now that we have context to it, that is why I feel that American Prairie is such an incredible story and a leader in rewilding the Great Plains, the West.
This, what used to literally be American Serengeti. And if someone hasn't read Dan Flores's incredible book by the same name, like you must to have true concept and scale of the amount of biomass that used to be supported by the grasslands of North America. It's just, it's mind boggling to even think about or to read some of the accounts of Lewis and Clark and a lot of those expeditions that went through went to out west and wrote down or even to see the paintings of some of the artists that were out there. It was just, it's, it's, I don't, I try not to get like super pessimistic or angry, but I'm almost, sometimes I'm almost mad. I'm like, how dare you take that away from us like in our generations and we will never get to experience that. But anyways, that's a personal thing I need to work through and why I'm so glad to talk about the American Prairie.
So could you talk a little bit more about this?
There might be some people who've heard of what American Prairie is, but tell us all about it. Where is American Prairie? What is it? How did it even start? And what is the big goal of the organization?
[00:12:08] Speaker B: Yes, thank you, Brooke. Happy to move on to the kind of messages of hope here.
And yes, my employer, American Prairie, the place where I'm very proud to work, is a conservation organization, a non governmental organization that exists just in central Montana where we are purchasing ranches when they come up for sale in an effort to amass 5,000 square miles of protected conserved area for the prairie that we can both rewild, restore and open up for public access. That's the mission, plain and simple. And manage that in perpetuity for the benefit of the world, for the benefit of the people who deserve to see a wild quote unquote, American Serengeti. As we put the pieces back together there, drilling down a little bit to the next level that exists, the mission is based on building out an existing protected area. There's already 1.1 million acres of protected area in the second largest national wildlife refuge outside of Alaska, the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge. It exists smack dab in the middle of the American Prairie project. And when we talk about 5,000 square miles, which is also 3.2 million acres, we include that national wildlife refuge in that number. So, like, there's already a full third of that land mass that's been set aside since the 30s as a protected area, explicitly as a wildlife refuge. And so the kind of very simple message of American Prairie is like, can we make the CMR the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge? Can we make that bigger? Right? And can we expand their capacity to do.
To be a wildlife restoration or to be a wildlife conservation project by doing rewilding on former range lands outside of that? And so the way that works is when a ranch comes up for sale in the region, and they come up for sale, just like houses in your neighborhood or any other kind of real estate, right? When they come up for sale and we can afford to do so, we're completely supported by philanthropy, right? Donations, basically from people like you and your listeners and, I don't know, people all over the world that's a. That enjoy what we do when we can afford to. And when things are for sale, we seek to purchase those ranches and then we basically immediately convert them from having their primary mandate be commodity production, right? Think not thinking of the land as in service of generating a profit through livestock production, cattle or whatever, but in terms of managing and maintaining and restoring biodiversity. And then also being used and thought of is public access space. It's still private land. It's not public land. But we manage it like public land in the sense that it is open for the public to enjoy, to come. Camping, recreating, wildlife watching, stargazing, etc. That's a primary component of the mission as well. So once those lands are purchased, and most of these ranches out here contain a very sizable chunk of public land that they lease from primarily the federal government, through the Bureau of Land Management, to a lesser extent the state government in the form of the Department of Natural Resources Conservation in Montana, right? So a ranch could be as little as 10% private land and as much as 90% public land. In fact, that's largely the case out here where it's disproportionately public land. So An American prairie buys these lands. We also acquire more or less the first right of refusal for those public grazing lands as well. And what we do is we say, well, we would like to retain those. Those lands are typically thought of as in service of production. But bison are classified as livestock in the state of Montana. And bison are kind of our flagship rewilding species. They're not actually classified as wildlife in the state of Montana. They're private property, they are livestock. We own them. And to in some senses we are basically a giant bison ranch. And so we can conserve, rewild, restore, open up public access on those private lands. And we do, starting with day one. But a majority, a large size of like our holdings is these already existing public lands. They're open to you to camp and Star Watch and all that stuff. Today you don't need permission from American prairie to do that.
They are also typically part of a cattle ranch. And when American prairie acquires them, we can and seek to turn them into a kind of bison ranch, essentially replacing the non native domestic grazer cattle with the native indigenous large bodied grazer in the form of bison, our nation's mammal, an ecosystem engineer, a keystone species, which actually does a lot of the work of rewilding for us. And that extends onto the the public's lands in addition to our private lands.
[00:16:27] Speaker A: Oh, how cool. I didn't realize that that bison is like considered essentially like a commodity, like it is a livestock animal.
And so that would make sense then how able to keep those leases because it's like, oh, we're just switching the cattle type from the domestic to a wild one. But it's for the purpose of rewilding that is very interesting and so cool.
So let's actually for us to understand the bigger picture of how this actually works, this whole rewilding thing, because I think that as rewilding is starting to grow as a concept, maybe the first things that come to mind are, you know, plant restoration and like a mega herbivore, like a bison or something like that. And many places around the world that are starting to do rewilding. But it is way more than that. There are so many pieces that go into one true all encompassing rewilding project. And so, and just looking at the pillars of American prairie, like you guys do so many things and so I would love to get into that and maybe you can even use one of these land acquisitions as an example. So like let's start on day one.
Like how do you as a director of rewilding tackle this like you're like, okay, we are going to acquire this amount of land.
How do we make it into a version of its previous thriving self?
What do you do to tackle such a big task?
[00:18:02] Speaker B: Typically, so they're all different, Brooke. And I mean, I don't. We can get into the weeds if you want, but I feel like. But like, generally speaking, at a very simple level, ranch in the project area. So, like, somewhere near the wildlife refuge is for sale. American Prairie seeks to acquire it if it becomes our property. And myself and my colleagues will go onto that property and say, like, okay, what is the status of this thing? So it's kind of like keystone species, ecosystem engineers, game species, and then generally habitat restoration.
And habitat restoration for us is often focused on how do we restore habitat in a way that supports rewilding. Right. I'll take my professor hat off in a second. But, like, understanding how we do rewilding. And the model of rewilding at American Prairie is based very much on a definition of rewilding, which I don't think is fringy. People have different definitions. But, like, American Prairie's model of rewilding goes like this, right? Rewilding, as opposed to kind of like vanilla conservation, is based on restoring ecosystem functionality by the return of ecosystem processes driven by wildlife recovery. Let's break that down, because I know that's a mouthful, right? Ecosystem functionality. Does the ecosystem function the way it's supposed to, and is it resilient? Let's think about that in terms of grasslands, right? A functional, resilient grassland should be diverse, should be heterogeneous, Right? Which means, like, as you walk across the prairie and cover miles, you don't see the exact same prairie everywhere you step. Some places this species of grass or forb is going to be more prevalent. Other places it will be here. There's gradients of dryness. There's things like prairie dog towns that, like, fragment the landscape. That diversity of the landscape drives the diversity of the biodiversity of life. So, like, a functioning grassland needs to be diverse. What is the ecological process that keeps this thing messy and wild and changing and dynamic and not static and not homogeneous. Homogeneous. There's a lot of answers to that question, but let's focus on what we do best. Bison grazing. And this is why they are a keystone species, is really bison in combination with prairie dogs and fire are the ecological drivers that keep the prairie heterogeneous. Right. Bison graze in a somewhat stochastic way, which is to say kind of randomly. It's like if you started your lawnmower and then you took your hands off it and it just did circles around your front yard. You can think of bison grazing naturally on, you know, without us forcing some kind of grazing regime on that as looking something like that. You add in some wildfire or prescribed fire on top of that in prairie dogs, and now you get this quilt of prairie, right, this mosaic where some of the areas get grazed very heavily in a given year. Some of the areas don't get grazed at all, and other grays get meat grazed in kind of a medium level. Now you've got a more diverse habitat which supports more biodiversity. Rewilding, yes, is about wildlife reintroduction, wildlife recovery, but it's always in service of those ecological processes which underpin the functionality. That's rewilding in a nutshell.
[00:20:55] Speaker A: Incredible. And I like an example. Just listening to you say that even just breaking it down into these pillars makes it sound so simple. But simple does not mean easy.
[00:21:09] Speaker B: No, of course.
[00:21:09] Speaker A: What is the, what is the time scale on this? Like, how long does it take to even get acquire a piece of land and then start the rewilding process? And then I guess this, this next part goes into monitoring, which I didn't even expect to bring this up yet, but I think that it's important to understand. Like, how do you even know when a piece of land is quote unquote, rewilded?
How do you know that it is where you as a director want it to be at?
[00:21:43] Speaker B: Your question is basically, how do you do long term monitoring? How do you confirm that you are succeeding in rewilding? How do you know that you're doing what you said you're going to do? Important question and surprisingly difficult to answer. What does success look like? I think a simple metric might say, well, we should count biodiversity, right? Like is biodiversity increasing? Okay, that's reasonable. And that's actually a way that oftentimes ecological monitoring is done. It's counting species, basically. Well, in our case, most of the species are actually still present. They're just in very low abundance, right? That's still biodiversity. It's just kind of a different kind of biodiversity than most people talk about. It's not species diversity. It's like relative abundance of species. So you could say, okay, well, it's a little more complicated. We don't want to just count the total number of species because we really shouldn't expect that to change over time. Most of this stuff is here. There's just too little of everything.
So let's count abundance. Well, that's difficult to Do. And then it also. Now you're talking about ecology, not biology. What is the appropriate relative abundance? Right? Like, what is the right ratio of bison to prairie dogs to wolves to grizzly bears to coyotes to sage grouse?
Nobody knows the answer to that question. As fascinating as it is at American Prairie, we think of rewilding, again, as thinking about the restoration of ecological processes. So in terms of monitoring rather than counting species or trying to measure relative abundance, those things are important. I'm not saying they're not, but, like, if the core of rewilding is ecological processes, and the operating hypothesis is those are gone or degraded, which is degraded, the functionality of the system and its resistance and its resilience, can we look for those processes themselves? And increasingly, that's what we're doing and interestingly, also doing with some of our partners in rewilding internationally, working on other temperate grasslands globally, saying, like, we borrowed these ideas, they're not mine. But like, working with that community of practice and rewilding globally, particularly in grasslands, we could say, what does it mean to have restored ecological functionality down in Argentina, where they're restoring jaguars? That might be. Can we find trophic cascades again, that are driven by the reintroduction of an apex carnivore in the form of a jaguar that is, you know, regulating different trophic layers before.
Below it, Right? Just so your listeners understand. I think they probably maybe already do. But trophic cascades, people know this story about, like, wolves in Yellowstone, right? But it's like you restore an apex predator. Now, before there was too many elk, now there's fewer elk because you're regulated by the wolf. Fewer elk means they're not overgrazing the landscape. Now there's more grass, things start to return, like beaver to the creeks. It's different for every ecosystem. It's the same idea of these cascading effects at different trophic levels. You can think of that as the trophic levels just being parts of the food pyramid.
We can't really do that. We're not there. At American Prairie, we're not ready to think about the restoration of apex carnivores because there's not enough elk, right? We don't have enough herbivores to really think about trophic cascades. For us, ecological processes of primary concern are, again, that heterogeneous grazing, that landscape management that keeps the prairies fresh and dynamic and always changing, changing in a way that provides habitats for all the little birds out there that need some very specific type of habitat. Ungrazed grass, super grazed grass, whatever, all of that is available, even though they'll probably find it in a slightly different spot every time they come back each year. Right. So what does that process look like and how do you document it? That's what we're working on now. Can we show that the prairie is not just holding animals, holding more animals in some relative abundance, but like, is it diverse? Is the structural diversity of the grasslands returning as a result of our interventions, as a result of our rewilding? That's what we started to do. Looking at species composition on these properties. There's a lot of ways you can do that from a methodological standpoint, but from a philosophical standpoint, the shift has very much been not counting animals necessarily not counting relative abundance, but looking for ecological processes where before they did not exist, or they were like limping along and barely functional.
[00:25:41] Speaker A: That's also why I love rewilding.
It's looking at all the facets, it's looking at everything as a whole. It's like, how is this ecosystem supposed to actually function and work? Because if everything is functioning, then that automatically means that the pieces are there, because it can only function if the pieces are there. And so it's like this holistic idea. It's not just.
I think a lot of people are, as we're starting to understand rewilding, they're like, how is this, Isn't this just restoration? Like, isn't this just this? It's like, no, actually it's. It's way bigger than that. There are so many other pillars that are involved to make it, or to, you know, make an ecosystem and an area back to what it. I don't want to even say back to, because there's no way we can go back in time and restore these areas to the pristine of what they used to be. Like, that's just not possible.
[00:26:35] Speaker B: And it's not the point.
[00:26:36] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's not the point. It's like, can we get it close enough where this can function on its own in a thriving way, where wildlife and people can be on this land and thrive together? Like, that is how I view rewilding, and that's why I love it so much, is because it's all of those facets together, especially the human side, that's really important.
But before I go to the human side, so my big love is carnivores. Predators, they, they always are, they always will be. It just is. My thing is there. I don't even know how exactly I want to ask this question because you, you brought up that there's not even enough prey yet to have thriving predator numbers on American prairie. Is that a bigger goal? Is that going to be like a success pillar? It's like, oh my gosh, we have reached carrying capacity of grizzlies and wolves. Like, we know, and coyotes are back. Like, this is how we know that we're to a certain point, like, yeah, how are you viewing the predator story too?
And all of this mosaic of ecosystems and wildlife and everything.
[00:27:49] Speaker B: So specifically to our large. I mean, same Brooke, like, I did my PhD with large carnivores. Before I was a PhD student, I was working Grand Teton national park tracking wolves. Like, there's always going to be a soft spart in my heart for these large carnivores. So the ones that I like to think about, I love elk, I love bison, I love pronghorn. They're super cool. But like, yeah, it's hard not to think about things like grizzly bears all the time, but everything in balance. But you asked. So let's talk about the large carnivores, right? So there's carnivores and then there's carnivores.
Let's talk about just the big ones. We can talk about black bears, mountain lions, even like coyotes in a little bit. But like the, the big ones, they're like, missing really, like gone. You know what I mean? Not just in low abundance, but like functionally not present in the system are wolves and grizzly bears out here.
They're both capital C carnivores. Technically, that's what they do. But they're very different kinds of carnivores. Right? Like wolves are, are, are meat eaters, they are hunters. Grizzly bears are like the. One of the world's best omnivores and they will eat anything that is edible. Right. And so to your question about, like, can we focus on one versus the other?
I do think that for something my concern and the reason why we don't focus on, quote, unquote, wolf restoration or wolf conservation specifically is not only because that is politically fraught and nobody likes to have these things imposed on them, but much more importantly, I would say because we're not ready for that. But from an ecologist perspective, they are there sort of to, to regulate other wildlife populations and to keep things in balance from the top down. We don't have that balance to regulate right now. There's way too few elk throughout the region. Like, way, way too few elk. Maybe like wolves favorite prey species and there's a lot of domestic cattle. And so if, you know, a wizard could wave a magic wand and just say, like, presto, there's wolves back at American Prairie today, what would happen?
I suspect, due to lack of food, natural food resources, wolves would, through no fault of their own, start to get themselves into trouble. That doesn't do anybody any good. Not ranchers, not conservationists, not the wolves themselves.
Yes, wolf restoration, full ecosystem restoration is a part of American Prairie's mission. But one step at a time. You have to rebuild those quote, unquote prey populations or ungulate populations first before you can entertain something like wolf recovery and what that would look like in a meaningful sense, in a rewilding sense, in a way that supports ecological processes and therefore underpins ecological functionality.
I wish that was different, but that is the case. That said, elk restoration and cervid restoration is a big part of American Prairie's work. And someday this, I think, I'm sure, actually the scene will look very different. Are we ever going to reintroduce wolves? No, we can't. That's not our job. And we wouldn't want to even if we had the authority.
But there's wolf populations just inside the state of Montana, if not throughout the northern Great Plains, and they're very, very good at colonizing. Presumably they would. But let's switch tracks and talk about, like, the other big carnivore, right? Grizzly bears, which, like I find myself talking about a lot because I love them. They are not a keystone species.
They are not an. They are not a quote unquote apex predator. The way that in. In the trophic cascade sense, in the way that we think about wolves. They don't regulate ecosystems through trophic regulation the way that, like a wolf would, at least in North America, you can find other apex predators throughout the world. Obviously, grizzly bears don't do that. They are super generalist, super omnivores. Historically.
Probably why there's so many grizzly bears running around the plains is because there were so many bison out here, and we have tens of thousands of bison at any given time. Bison die every day from natural causes, from predation, from whatever, right? And so grizzly bears are there to clean that up. Now, we don't have the same bison populations that we did historically. But if bison are, excuse me, if grizzly bears are better thought of as a scavenger than a quote, unquote predator, a hunter, then I think there is a lot of food resources that a grizzly bear could find in the American prairie habitat today, insects, berries, mushrooms, carrion. So already dead things that can be scavenged. I do think ecologically American, the American prairie eco region can and should support grizzly bears today in a way that I. I just don't feel like is true for wolves. We're not ready for wolves. Other rewilding has to happen first before we can get to that. That's part of the mission, but it's iterative. It has to take place stepwise when it comes to things like grizzly bears. I think the sage is set for that now. The same would be said for coyotes. Although coyotes are probably in more or less meaningful abundance today. They're like the most resilient thing on the planet. Right. Despite like, hundreds of years of persecution, They've only, like, multiplied. So, like, I don't worry too much about the coyotes. I'm always happy to see them, but I don't think they need recovery. Right. Mountain lions are another interesting case. It is much more of an obligate carnivore hunting species. But thankfully, the mountain lions in the region probably more often stick to habitat that we don't typically associate with cattle and more associate with things like mule deer and bighorn sheep. They like rough, rugged, ambush terrain, and so they're not overlapping with, like, the problematic domestic species that they shouldn't be eating. They're mostly sticking to spaces where there are prey species that they can eat. But there's too many deer and there's not enough deer in elk, which means there's not enough mountain lions in the region either.
But could there be? Yes, I think it's that, like, you can have nominal, meaningful populations of those things today.
[00:33:15] Speaker A: So I guess if we were to take this more big picture, where would you start? Say American prairie is in their rewilding goals, like how close or how far or what is the status of things.
[00:33:32] Speaker B: Right now better than it was because.
And there's still work to do. But I think one of the things that's really attractive about the American Prairie project to me, certainly, but to many people is that it's not.
We're not talking about, like, centuries of restoration here.
It's. It's always been kind of baked into our model. Our hypothesis that because so much of the plains out in, in this particular region are like, in like, in the tall grass prairies of, like, Illinois and stuff like that, they're gone. I mean, it's been largely tilled up for cornfields, wheat field, whatever. Right. And the shortcrust parade's always Been too dry to do meaningful farming, right. Which always been like ranching country. It's a habitat not exclusively, but largely. Predominantly is kind of right side up. So we're not doing restoration of the prairie grasses we do in small spots, but that's not like core to the mission, right? We're doing the kind of rewilding thing. How do we restore wildlife passively so that we can restore these ecological processes? That's largely done first. You need space to do that, right? You need, like, land to put bison on or to do beaver restoration through, you know, riparian restoration, those types of things. We've made a lot of progress with that. You know what I mean? 20 years ago, well, a little like 25 years ago, we. We didn't have any land at all. You know what I mean? Fast forward to today. American prairie is a great. In excess of 600,000 acres outside of the CMR, right? I mean, it's a lot of space that you and your listeners can come visit today, can come see, can come enjoy, can see the wildlife and the wildness that exists today. Now, as we go about building that back out, 25 years ago, there was no bison in the region outside of the Native American, the, you know, the Native American Indian reservations that are nearby, the Fort Peck and the Fort Belknap Indian reservations, who we work really closely with in terms of restoration, you know, community revitalization and bison restoration. But outside of that, there wasn't any bison. If you fast forward to today, we have hundreds of bison on multiple American prairie properties that you can come see that are out there doing the work of restoration and rewilding right on the ground. There's more prairie dogs than there used to be. There's probably more birds than there used to be. The riparian areas are recovering largely because they're not getting overgrazed on properties where there's bison. And they're being regulated and restored on other properties so that you can bring back birds, species and beaver and fish, all this other stuff that's associated with that. American prairie is wilder today than it was when we started this project. Are we done? No. But I do think you could see functional recovery of the ecosystem in my lifetime. I don't know how old you are, Brooke. You look like you're about to see within spitting distance of my age before you die. I think that we will made significant progress towards rewilding at American Prairie, and I think we might even be close to functional ecosystem, functional ecosystems levels, the right number of bison, enough elk out there to do meaningful things. Maybe the passive natural recovery of even like the biggest, hardest things to restore. Things like wolves, things like grizzly bears, both so you and I and everybody else can come enjoy that and see the American Serengeti. But also importantly, through the lens of rewilding as driving that engine of ecological functionality. This isn't a project that will take centuries. There's some parts that will take a long, long time. Right. Ecological restoration for the creeks takes a while. Trees take a long time to grow and there's no trees there now. Right. Like the cottonwood seeds that germinate today because they are downstream of a beaver dam analog that we built. I won't survive to see to maturity. That's okay.
Most of the work that we do in terms of rewilding is the kind of things that you could see a difference in between your visit this summer and your visit in a couple summers from now. That I think is what makes us really exciting. Like rewilding is a very present, very now kind of phenomenon. In addition to being positive and proactive in terms of its thinking and not scarcity mindset, but actually saying, like, to hell with just protecting what's left, let's build more of that thing that we care about. It turns out that that building can be done in shockingly fast order and without, in many cases, direct intervention. Yes, we can buy bison, we can manage bison, we can grow our bison populations, we can extend those onto new acres relatively in a very direct way. Right. As like the quote, unquote, owner of that animal. Right. Wildlife restoration is not something that we have direct ability to influence. Right. We're not wildlife managers. We're not the state, we're not the feds. Wildlife are a public trust. They belong to you and they belong to me. And that trust is supported by trust managers in the forms of federal and state agencies. We're not that at American Prairie. I have no jurisdiction over wildlife. That said, through habitat improvement and through increasing tolerance, support for wildlife, economic incentives for higher wildlife densities, community work that supports the idea that wildlife thriving wildlife are not only a benefit to, but critical to the cultural historical lifeways of the plains. Not just the indigenous lifeways of the plains, but the European non indigenous lifeways of the plains as well, have always been built on a frontier mindset, a wild mindset. And that that wildness is supported by more wildlife getting that idea out there in meaningful ways that shows support for communities, economic incentives, jobs for kids when they get out of school, ability to keep people on the land not as traditional Ranchers, maybe, but in support of stewardship, which has always been core to the ideology and the mindset of the land, the region out here, this is part of rewilding as well. And all of that does not require us to be literal, quote, unquote, wildlife managers. We can increase the habitat value and allow the wildlife to recover themselves. And we can get out of the wildlife's way by making a world where coexistence is not only palatable, but desirable. The wildlife will do the rest of the work for us. That happens surprisingly quickly. Elk have babies every year. Deer have babies every year. Pronghorn, prairie dogs, they all make more of themselves every year, some of them very, very quickly. If we can create the conditions where more of them can grow and we cannot limit their capacity for growth, the wildlife recovery will happen. And it will happen in a timescale that is visible, present, and enjoyable to you, me, and the rest of the public.
[00:39:43] Speaker A: Oh, that is so exciting.
As someone who just spent, like, a lot of time in the Yellowstone bubble, so I did was in Montana and. And I did get to go to a massive ranch that had 1500 head of cattle for that project. And it was very enlightening in so many ways.
I love that there's something that we can go see and do and smell and touch the grass and like, it's real because, yeah, we just think of rewilding. At least I do, since I talk to so many people around the world. I think it's really easy to think of rewilding is happening over there.
[00:40:21] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:40:21] Speaker A: And this is an example of it happening here and that it is possible.
There's a lot of work to be done and some pushback, which I would actually like to get into that now is this concept of rewilding and the American prairie and all this kind of stuff. It is new. And anytime we have something new, sometimes there might be pushback. There's a lot of support. It's back and forth. So could you talk about that a little bit more?
What have people's reactions been to this new way of doing, I guess you could call it conservation, this kind of work, this restoration, conservation, living with wildlife work. How has the American people responded, how has the international group, you know, community responded to this project that is so innovative for.
It just is Like, I don't know of any other project like this in a. In the US at all. So how. How is. What's the reaction been?
[00:41:24] Speaker B: Like, yeah, I mean, positive in many ways. Right. Like, I'm fortunate. One of the good parts of My job is I get to work with scientists across the world. Rewilders, quote, unquote, across the world. And like American Prairie is seen, rightly so, as a contributor to this kind of new movement in conservation, if you want to think about it that way, or this next chapter of conservation globally, not just on the grasslands, but in all these different habitats. Right. And we have many, many supporters, largely domestically. There's some internationally. But like, most of our support comes from within the country. When I talk about support, I mean philanthropic support, the donors who make this work possible, land buying, rewilding, public access, all of that is an indication of support. People like what we do. Rewilding is a message of hope, but like, there's not a lot of other folks. If we look in North America, but if we look internationally, we do see this kind of swelling movement towards messages of hope and conservation.
Large landscape rewilding, backyard rewilding. But this idea that, like, we don't just have to hold the line. It's not always one step forward and two steps back. It's not fortress conservation. And like the walls getting knocked down, it's saying we can put these things back together. We're not trying to restore the past, we're trying to restore functionality. And we have not lost the ability to do that in many places. If you can restore the Great Plains, which are a heavily, heavily degraded ecosystem, then you can restore a lot of different stuff that's not as heavily degraded. Right. I mean, it's not just preservation, it's proactive restoration. Right. And people like that. And you can evidence that by the amount of people that are willing to support us financially, the more people that are willing to come out and see the place and like, engage in the public access mission, see their natural resources for themselves, come to Montana, not just for Yellowstone and Glacier, but to see the Great Plains and the Charles M. Russell and Upper Missouri river breaks and American Prairie as well. That's evidence. And then the interest from the scientific and the rewilding community all suggest that, like American Prairie is a popular idea with popular support domestically abroad within the state of Montana.
For most people in the, in the region, this is not something they've ever seen in their lifetimes or probably in their parents or their grandparents lifetimes. It's different.
New models are of change are always rightfully so, greeted with a fair degree of skepticism. I think that's fair. There's local issues and frankly, local concern about the what American prairie is doing and what that means for their lifeways, their cultures, their sustainability. Their kids ability to grow up in the county that their parents that they were born in, go off to college and come back to the county that they were born in and have productive things to do when they get back here which are, you know, sustainable and culturally appropriate to those people's life ways.
Those are reasonable concerns. You would concern. You'd be concerned about the same thing. It's a very human thing to worry about. Right. And to the extent that people should have to worry about, have existential concerns, basically, and oftentimes. I think what the criticism of American Prairie boils down to is we are afraid that your existence precludes ours. The existence of an American prairie means that, like, I don't know, they're not going to be enough money to support rural services and there's not going to be anything for the kids to do and there won't be any ranches left in Montana or something like that.
I don't mind to sound too dismissive, but frankly, those things are not accurate. They're not what we're trying to do, either intentionally or as a byproduct of what we're trying to do. In fact, I would argue it's actually quite the opposite.
American prairie offers diversity, not just ecologically, but sociologically, economically. These things are engines, drivers in the region. I have an image of a future of the region where, like, there are productive things for people to do. And I'm not just talking about like selling coffee and opening coffee shops, but being range riders, being stewards in the tradition of cowboys, old fashioned cowboys who were protectors of, of wildness, protectors of the open range. People who thrived and in their own way coexisted with the wildness of the region until maybe we overdid it a little bit. Right? But like, that is a culturally appropriate life way and one that I think American Prairie supports.
That's my vision for the future. And I think a version of that is the American prairie vision for the future. We have not successfully communicated that to our neighbors yet, but we are invested in doing that right now. Showing that, like rewilding supports the region, supports the lifeways and the cultures of the people's grandparents who settled out here and made a go in a very tough place and never cut down those trees by the creek because they understood the importance of those things to ecology and managed their cattle in a way that kept the grass right side up and never did the easy thing of tilling it up or whatever. Right. Like honoring those legacies of stewardship. I was trained as an Ecologist. My view on this is probably different than somebody that grew up as a kid on a ranch. I get that. But I would argue that at the end of the day, I think many of us have the same goals in mind.
It might not be using words like rewilding and restoration and conservation, but things like stewardship and coexistence and preservation both of like open space where people can breathe and think and see wildness and enjoy that and live amongst it not as visitors, but as residents.
I don't think those things are incompatible. So it is incumbent on us as American Prairie to communicate that message more effectively. That rewilding is for everybody, that public access is for everybody, that these things benefit what we see as an important community and important life ways. Right. Like, yes, there's a lot of, there's a long, ugly history of ecological degradation and destruction, but that's not today. We're just living with the consequences of that. I don't think that benefits any, anybody. Not me, not the visitors, not conservationists, not scientists, not the ranchers, not the land stewards that are out here.
I truly believe in American Prairie feels that like restoration and public access is ultimately good for the region. Not because it like, you know, is an economic driver for the engine of the region. All this thing. Yes. But that it is essentially we can. Restoring ecological resilience is part and parcel with restoring sociological resilience and economic resilience. They're all different sides of a. Whatever three sided die, three sided coin. I don't know, the analogy fell apart. You get what I'm saying? Right? But like they're all intertwined and we can do all of those things at the same time. I would like to restore point of pride as a rewilding ecologist to the people who enjoy seeing the wildlife on their properties, who enjoy the legacy of their families for making a go of it and staking it out on the frontier when they watched their neighbors who couldn't do it and disappeared over the generations and preserve that legacy of wildness of the frontier, which by the way is filled with wildlife for them and for me and for everybody else in perpetuity. So, yeah, we've gotten some pushback. There's signs. You'll see them if you come out to the region. But like, I think this is, I think it misses the point and, and we take responsibility for that. We're, we're working on doing communications in a different way so that we can reach those audiences and explain that like, hey, your concerns are not unwarranted. Anybody would be worried about that. But that's not what we're doing. You know what I mean? Like, that's not how we see this. It's not. That's not what we think is the outcome is going to be. And we'd much rather do this together than separately.
[00:49:03] Speaker A: That's such a great response, and I love that you brought up also range writing, because I met some incredible range writers and one who's actually a PhD scientist, and he really helped me put in.
Put it in perspective for me that these range riders could be, like, the ultimate protectors of the plains. Like, they are out there every single day seeing the wildlife they can help monitor. They can, like, be some of the first people to flag that if something's wrong or if something's going right. Like, they know this land better than almost anybody because they are on it every single day with their cattle. They know the seasons, they know the patterns. And I didn't even think about that or know about that. Is this just. We don't see the classic quote unquote cowboy anymore, but that's what they are. You know, we're calling them today range riders, but they are. They're cowboys and they know this land so well. And that was so enlightening to me. And if we can get more passionate range riders out there who are on the planes every single day, just what that could do for. In so many different ways.
So I love that. I'm really glad you brought that up because that was, that's. That was super enlightening to me, meeting somebody who did that, who was actually a scientist, who was a PhD, who grew up in a city, and now he is literally a range rider on this massive ranch. And that was, it was. It was incredible to learn from him.
And so if we want to take this up a bigger level here and really just, like, dial out, you know, like, you know, expand out.
Why. Why is it important to do this on, like, a broader scale? Like, if we're thinking about climate change and, like, biodiversity goals, where does American prairie that is in the Great Plains?
Why is this important? If we think if somebody is listening to this in Europe, how could this affect them that we are restoring this part of the Great Plains and maybe even onward to some bigger chunk of it?
How is this important to the global community?
[00:51:17] Speaker B: Yeah, I think this question has different answers depending on how you think. They're not mutually exclusive. I don't want to sound like I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth, but, like, people approach this issue Differently. Right.
Let's start with maybe the version that I find. Well, it doesn't matter what I think, right? If you want to think in terms of like big picture natural crises and how to avoid them, things like climate change, things like global biodiversity loss, huge, looming, massive, largely unaddressed threats, right. American prairie contributes in some way to mitigating those losses, mostly the biodiversity, but even climate change a little bit, right? Like, prairies are really, really good long term storage carbon sponges, but only if they're right side up and they're not tilled up to become farmland and they remain diverse prairie to some extent grazed by large, large grazers. Although we're still just kind of learning about how like rewilding impacts ecosystem functionality in a way that aids in carbon sequestration on the prairie. I'm not an expert in that. I'll leave that aside. I think the science is pretty young on that. But like, probably rewilding looks like it can actually contribute to driving carbon storage in a way that helps mitigate climate change, certainly biodiversity loss, right? We're not dealing with turning back or mitigating extinction at American Prairie. Almost none of the species that we work with, with the exception of maybe the black footed ferret, a couple others are like really in danger of extinction. They suffer from being in too low abundance, which means they're not doing anything meaningful from an ecological perspective. That's part of the biodiversity loss credit crisis, although, albeit one that's maybe a little less salient, less urgent when we're thinking about like actually preventing species loss, extinction on the planet. But it's part of that as well. So for your listener in Germany or Japan or Vietnam, you know, yes, this is something that's meaningful in terms of like quote unquote, ecosystem services, right? Keeping carbon in the ground, mitigating warming, keeping biodiversity present, mitigating another, whatever mass extinction event in, in this century or something like that, we contribute to that we're a meaningful contributor. But both globally and regionally, right? Rewilding supports like the resilience of the plains. So when like there's a crazy blizzard or a crazy drought, which has like always been the case out here, there's enough biodiversity and enough diversity in the landscape that it can, it can weather that kind of stuff. I mean, literally, it can weather the storm. That's how the prairies evolve. Their diversity is the primary component of their resilience. And to the extent that we reduce their diversity, they become less and less resilient to natural disturbance that benefits the ranchers that Live around here. The people that need to get their water from somewhere. Right. Like, those are ecosystem services that are not just meaningful globally, but certainly meaningful in people's backyards.
That's like the economist's answer, I would say.
I think an answer that I personally find more compelling is that we have an ability to restore something that we lost through no fault of anybody that's alive today.
I grew up in the national parks. Thanks, dad. It's what made me who I am today. That preservation, which is very much like part of American culture. Right. Was something that was ingrained very deeply into me.
The thought that we're losing the glaciers in Glacier National Park. There's no rewilding solution to put glaciers back in Glacier National Park. They're declining, shrinking, melting due to global climate change, and we have not come up with a functional, palatable way to address that. They'll be gone in yours. In my lifetime.
The Grand Canyon went through an event where it almost got damned right. Like, the Grand Canyon could have a reservoir in the middle of it. And thanks to heroes of mine in conservation, that was not the case.
If we had lost those things, when we lose the glaciers and glacier, there won't be any undoing that.
When we, our forebearers, undid the greatness of the Great Plains and the diversity, there was a window left open to restore that. I think it's incumbent on us. And, like, don't you want to live in a world whether you live in Montana or you live in New Jersey or you live in India?
Don't you want to live in a world where there's a place that you can go and see bison herds thundering over the horizon? You can go see the quote unquote Wild west as it existed in a period of time. See that wildlife spectacle. I hate this term, the American Serengeti, if I'm being honest. Dan Flores book is great, but. But this idea I find off putting because it's like we're so lost in terms of, like, our natural hair, our connection to our natural resources in North America. The only way that I can get a fifth grader to imagine a wild American prairie is to invoke images of a wild African Serengeti. That's a mistake. It shouldn't be that hard to ask people to close their eyes and say, imagine a prairie. And. And instead of them imagining Little House on the Prairie and a white picket fence and a red barn and a whole bunch of cows, they imagine bison and they imagine wolves and they imagine sage grouse and they Imagine thundering quiet, dark skies, the majesty of the plains. That's gone. But we can put it back. And putting it back means that people will be able to close their eyes and imagine that we can get back the thing that we lost for the benefit of everybody, so that people recognize the value in wildlife wildness, what that means for them at an individual level, at a community level, at a global level, while addressing these big, scary existential crises of biodiversity loss and climate change.
[00:57:08] Speaker A: So then what gives you hope? Why are you still doing this? Because that what you just said is so big, it's almost overwhelming to think so how do you get up every single day and do this?
[00:57:18] Speaker B: Rewilding is local. If you want to make global change, you do start in your backyard, right? I can't. You can't. This is why it's such a bummer to think about things like climate change and species loss, right? There's very little we can do as individuals if we think about those in terms of the global problem. But all of us have the ability to act locally in one way or another. I am just exceedingly fortunate to do something very cool that brings a lot of meaning to my life every day and contribute to a mission and work with colleagues who I respect, support. I love what I do.
Everybody has a version of that, big or small, that they can influence themselves. What gives me hope is there are more bison now than there were when I started eight years ago, not 25 years ago when there are none. I can see it. I can go back to my old house, which was on our oldest management unit, the first ranch that American Prairie ever bought, and I can compare that to the surrounding land. And I can see the creek healing. I can see new trees growing where there was new trees, no trees before because of the beaver dams that we put in. I can see bison on unfenced internal pastures, giving big large acres available them to move and do what they do. You can see elk there occasionally now, which is almost unheard of in an open prairie. Right? The prairie dog towns get bigger. You can see burrowing owls. We're this close probably to being considered for black footed ferret reintroduction. That will probably happen in the next several years. That's a big, big deal. These things are present, you can find them. It's getting wilder all the time. These are not things that we. These are not investments that we make today that we will never see. The dividends of rewilding can be seen in short amount of times in terms of success. There are setbacks, certainly There are things that prevent progress. Like, I have frustrating days just like everybody else does. But most days you can see it happening. You can feel it. You can hear it happening. In terms of the wildness getting wilder out here, that's extraordinary. There are grizzly bears walking back into central Montana on their own. There's a lot of conservationists throughout the state that don't work for American Prairie, that are working very diligently to make a world where coexistence with grizzly bears is not just a western Montana thing, but a Great Plains thing. And credit to them. But the bears walk out here on their own, through wheat fields, through hostile environments, finding their way back into a system. How many people would have thought that that was possible? That's a message of hope.
Did American Prairie do that unilaterally? No, of course not. The bears did most of the work and a lot of other conservations upstream, so to speak, of us, helped that. But would it have been possible 25 years ago?
Not in the way that it is now. That's meaningful. That's not just like, hey, there's flowers here that I didn't see before, or hey, there's more sprigs, pivots this year than there were the year before. The long eared owls are back. I love seeing long eared owls. There's freaking grizzly bears walking back into the plains. Brooke, like, if that doesn't get you excited and give you hope, I mean, well, we might be in different lines of work.
[01:00:16] Speaker A: Well, I can definitely say that it excites me as somebody.
Well, I mean, you can see my wall. I have predators everywhere and I was out there to record. When I was out in Yellowstone, there was an episode, a whole episode on coexistence. So we are definitely on the same page here. I can just the thought of that, what that bear had to go through and then all of the people who have made that happen, made that possible, just like you said.
[01:00:38] Speaker B: Right.
[01:00:38] Speaker A: And then for those of us who want to support all of this work, how is it possible for me, for somebody in Canada or Mexico or India, like you said earlier, how can we help this rewilding project and American Prairie if we really want to get involved?
[01:00:57] Speaker B: Thank you.
American Prairie is only able to do what it does thanks to donor support. Frankly, if it's just within your means and you like what we do, we welcome your support. You can go to americanprair.org it's not hard to find a donate button. Thank you in advance.
If that is not within your means or you already donated and you're looking for something else to do. Come visit. Public access is a huge part of what we do. There's not.
I don't think rewilding should happen in a vacuum or happen in some far off desert or tundra in a place that you will never see it. Yeah, that's important. But like, come see it. Come see the rewilding now. No, you're not very likely to find a wolf track if you come out to American prairie unless you're very, very, very lucky. But you will see some of the darkest night skies on the continent. You will hear true quiet. And by quiet, I don't mean silence. I mean the absence of human sounds and the abundance of natural sound. You will find endless trails to hike on, ride on. The Missouri River Breaks is just a massive amount of largely unexplored territory. If you want to feel like an explorer, an adventurer, like you're walking somewhere where nobody stepped foot in 20 years, if at all, go to the Missouri River Breaks. Go to the Charles and Russell National Wildlife Refuge. Come through American Prairie. Come see that your support in terms of visitation helps us do what we do, but also just makes us feel good because we're building it for you all and we want you all to see it. And then lastly, if that's still not enough or if traveling is not within your means and donating is not within your means, you can think about rewilding both in Montana, where we work and thank you. If you're a Montana particularly, but also in your own backyards. I mentioned very briefly, and I don't want to get into the politics or the policy here, but, or the North American model of wildlife conservation, but wildlife belong to us. They're held in trust for our benefit, at least as Americans. Right? Like they belong to us. They belong collectively to us. If you'd like to live in a wilder world where you live or in Montana or somewhere you else you'd like to visit, there's people you can call, there's things you can do, there's letters you can write. And I'm not talking about calling an intern in your congressman's office and having that very sad, unsatisfying experience of feeling that like you're just yelling into the void.
Everybody in North America, in the United States, if you're listening, you have a wildlife biologist. You probably don't know it, but there's some wildlife biologist who covers your territory. They have territories, they support the wildlife management in whatever region you live in. Even if you live in a City, you have a wildlife biologist, right?
They hear all the time from generally hunters. And again, that's fine. Hunters are the kind of like typical classical constituents there. They're the people that say like hey, we'd like more elk or we don't think there's enough, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But they don't just manage game species for hunters, they manage the public's wildlife for the public. Consumptive or non consumptive in terms of users.
Call them.
Ask them what it would mean to have a larger bat population. Ask them what they're doing to combat like white nose syndrome. Ask them what it would mean to have a more robust, functional pollinator community. You probably want to talk to the non game biologist in those cases, right? Talk to them about an animal that doesn't have horns or antlers, right? Or do, if that's what you're into. But I promise you, they are not used to hearing people call them about animals that don't have horns or antlers or can't be thought of as a trophy.
Talk to them. Ask them. Ask them about those urban coyotes. Ask them about what the pathway to recovery is for the pallid sturgeon in the Missouri River. These are good people. They went to school at the same universities that you and I did and some of your listeners went to. They learned the same stuff we did. They're out there trying to do their best for the wildlife and for the public. They don't know how to do that if they don't hear from you. You want to live in a world that has more elk? Call the people that manage the elk for you and say like, hey, what would it mean to support coexistence in a way that would allow us to have more elk or more white tailed deer or more mule deer or more pronghorn? What would it mean to have prairie dogs not be eking out in existence at 2% of their historical range, but truly have them more and more spaces? All of these wildlife are managed for you by public servants who are almost exclusively well intentioned, good, kind people. Call them, call them.
Tell them what you want. They work for you.
[01:05:12] Speaker A: I could not agree more, Danny. That was so good. Especially that last part of reaching out to our wildlife biologists. I mean there's probably several listening who are, you know, somebody who is, you know, federally or state employed that are wildlife biologists or they want to be, or they're studying to become that. And how can we best support them too? Because you're right, they do kind of get forgotten. They're like just we, if anything is government level, we're like, oh, we can't touch that. It's like, but you might know somebody who does that. And so, like, how can we all come together in that way to help the wildlife no matter where we live? I love that tip. That, that's really great.
[01:05:51] Speaker B: And it's just like, just maybe not to put too fine a point on it, but like, be nice, you know what I mean? Like this, it's not an embattle. It's not us versus them. This is, that's not how this works, right? And you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, not to get political, but like, I think we live in a very polarized world and people think like, oh, a call or voicing my opinion is essentially like an act of combat. This is not the case. These people are good people. They want to do what's what you think in terms of wildlife, but they can't manage for your quote unquote interests for your wildlife if they don't know what they are. So people shouldn't be scared to do this. They're generally great, smart, interesting people. And in my experience, and I don't think this is unique, people light up when you ask them about an animal that they care about but nobody ever asked them about, right? Like elk and bighorn sheep and all that stuff are awesome. Everybody likes thinking about them. They're majestic, they're cool animals, right? But if you call up and ask them about beaver, the only time they ever hear about beaver is when somebody wants them removed, right? Like, these people are wildlife biologists that went into this discipline because they love wildlife. If. So if you call them on a random Tuesday and you ask them about wildlife that they don't normally get to talk about, salamanders, frogs, fish, whatever, they'll be thrilled.
Most cases. So this is not an unpleasant experience and it's not one that you need to, like, get your arm around for. It's a pleasant conversation. And if you don't like one on one conversations, generally there's public meetings about these things. Look it up. Go to your local state wildlife agency's website. Look at the next time they're holding a public meeting. They do these things all the time.
Go introduce yourself. Tell them what your interests are in terms of wildlife. Ask them how you can help.
[01:07:28] Speaker A: So good. Danny. Oh, this is incredible. I feel like I could talk to you all day.
Just. Yeah. So if you have any last closing comments, just please go ahead and share them here. How can somebody follow you or follow American Prairie if they have want to have if they have further questions and they would like to reach out, what is the best way for somebody to follow you and American Prairie's work?
[01:07:52] Speaker B: The best way to follow me at this point is probably to follow American Prairie, and I would encourage you to do so. If you're if this is the first time your audience is hearing about American Prairie, please go to americanprair.org, look into it, think about planning a visit, donate if it's within your means, but learn more about what we do and find what excites you about the mission. I'm guessing most of your listeners will find some part of the mission very attractive. There's ways to sign up for our mailing list. There's ways to get involved. We've got social media channels that you can follow our work on. They're generally pretty lighthearted. You can see some of the restorations work that me and my team are up to on any given day. You can see what we're doing with bison. You can see public access stuff. You can see the terrible mud that we get when it rains a little bit out here and how much adventure that lends to, you know, exploring it during the shoulder seasons out here. There's we have pretty robust media channels and outlets. You can Google us, you can find any number of news articles. And thank you, thank you in advance for your interest and maybe your support as well.
[01:08:44] Speaker A: And thank you, Danny, for taking the time to come on Rewindology today and share your incredible knowledge with us and helping us have the more of a North American model of what rewilding could look like with a leader like American Prairie leading the way. And hopefully we'll have more and more projects that we can sit down and chat with and collaborate with in the next five, 10, 20 years and we could have a wilder America. That would be amazing.
[01:09:11] Speaker B: Here's hoping. Brooke, thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity. Thanks for having us on.
[01:09:18] Speaker A: Thank you for joining me on this wild adventure today. I hope you've been inspired by the incredible stories, insights and knowledge shared in this episode.
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