A couple dozen ranchers, virtual fence company employees, and agency rangeland specialists from the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, as well as from the Natural Resources Conservation Service and Colorado State University Extension, gathered on a brisk fall morning to learn about virtual fence, which might be the most significant technological innovation for improving grazing management on the range in the last century. We travelled through ponderosa pine, Gambel oak, and grass meadows to see how it is being used on a grazing allotment on the San Juan National Forest.

Welcome, Senators Bennet and Hickenlooper, to the last best part of Colorado.

I'm a rangeland scientist and conservationist. I used to manage a ranch in Montrose and Gunnison Counties. Now I live in southwest Colorado, almost on the bank of the Dolores River.

I testified to the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission, in the wake of the incident in which a man ran over a wolf and showed off the dying animal at the Green River Bar in Sublette Co.—and was cited only for possessing the animal while it was still alive (a mere $250 fine), and the Commission’s statement in response to the public outcry. Along with nearly fifty other conservationists (given two minutes apiece), I spoke about how the Commission should work with the state Legislature to revisit the Predatory Animal Management Area or “predator zone,” extend animal cruelty laws to wildlife, and increase transparency.

The Colorado "Born to be Wild" license plate (HB23-1265) was signed into law by Gov. Polis May 20 on the bank of the Colorado River in Glenwood Springs, near where wolves are planned to be released in 2023-2025. The new plate is a mechanism for resources to flow uphill and away from money, so to speak—from supporters of wolf restoration to Colorado Parks and Wildlife, and ultimately to the ranchers and rural communities who will be living with wolves.

The Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission unanimously approved the Colorado Wolf Restoration and Management Plan on May 3. The plan was developed by CPW with input from a Technical Working Group, comprised mostly of agency personnel from other states with wolves; and a Stakeholder Advisory Group, comprised of ranchers, outfitters, hunters, and wildlife advocates. It is likely that the plan will be revised in a few to several years.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife released the first draft of the Colorado Wolf Restoration and Management Plan on Dec. 9. The plan includes reintroduction logistics, recovery criteria, and a framework for management of impacts (positive and negative), including livestock conflict prevention and compensation. The plan was expected to reflect the recommendations of the Technical Working Group (agency representatives and experts from the Northern Rockies) and the Stakeholder Advisory Group (ranchers, hunters, outfitters, and wildlife conservationists), both of which recently concluded deliberations after meeting monthly for the last year and a half along with agency staff and a third-party facilitator.

Today is Indigenous Peoples’ Day. While it is meant to honor Native Americans especially, it also honors indigenous peoples everywhere, and – most importantly – the indigeneity in all of us.

The world’s long and bloody history of conquest continues mostly in more subtle ways, wherever one culture sees its way as the one true way. Yet at this very moment, we have one nation-state invading another, committing blatant ethnic cleansing of a tribal culture in the name of safety and security. It’s long past time to leave all that behind, heal the wounds of the past and find ways to build a better future.

Here’s a short film, produced by People and Carnivores about a range rider practicing low-stress herding, as part of their library of short films about coexistence tools. In this case, I worked with the range rider on part of the largest grazing allotment in the West, in the Wind River Range of Wyoming, where there are lots of grizzlies and wolves and more than a few dead cattle…. So the permittees agreed to try herding in one pasture system.

I traveled to the Montana state capitol with my friend Marsha Small (Northern Cheyenne, with the Native American Studies department at Montana State University) and a group from Indigenous Peoples Day Montana to testify in support of designating Indigenous Peoples’ Day on the day more commonly known as Columbus Day. Thanks to the folks at Indigenous Peoples’ Day Montana, Indigenous Peoples’ Day is already celebrated at Montana State University and in Bozeman, but not yet statewide.

I just had the honor of presenting the Excellence in Rangeland Management Award to my friend and collaborator, Whit Hibbard, at the annual meeting of the International Mountain Section of the Society for Range Management. The annual award goes to someone who is directly involved in managing land in western Montana or Alberta, and who has made a significant contribution to the sustainability of rangelands. Traditionally it goes to a rancher, but not necessarily.

In this project, Whit Hibbard and I—a rancher and a conservationist—applied low-stress approaches to herding and night-penning cattle at relatively high stocking density (SD) within a rangeland pasture in a larger grazing rotation.

Livestock – large carnivore coexistence practitioners can be more effective by expanding from a direct focus on carnivores and predation-prevention tools to the broader social-ecological context of ranches and rural communities, especially livestock management. Ranchers can apply many of the same approaches that work for rangeland health and livestock production to reduce conflicts with large carnivores.

Range riders can improve grazing management for rangeland health, livestock production, and coexistence with wildlife, potentially including large carnivores, by applying strategic grazing management.

From both ranching and conservation perspectives, livestock predation by large carnivores has traditionally been seen as a problem with the carnivores as its cause. For instance, much of the work done to reduce livestock-carnivore conflict has focused on keeping carnivores physically separated from humans and livestock, and on developing tools to manage the carnivores. A more holistic view is that carnivores are an inherent and valuable part of the system, some livestock predation is inevitable, and the root cause of excessive livestock predation is that conventional management has made livestock easier than wild prey for predators.

Grazing ecosystems are what scientists call complex systems: the whole is greater than the sum of the parts because of the relationships between the parts. The relationships form the web of life, so intricate that their individual and collective behaviors exhibit patterns that are beyond complicated: self-organization with emergent properties, unpredictability, and nonlinear dynamics., This panarchy of nested adaptive cycles between order and chaos is what land managers call “the real world.”

Walking as quietly as I can through the half-dark dawn of dark timber, I hear a cow elk mew, calling her calf. I freeze.

I consider the leap from hunting and gathering to herding and gardening a relatively short one in the trajectory of human evolution as well as my own. All flesh is grass, indeed. A life lived close to that reality is, for me at least, the existential experience of being alive. The same blood runs through deer, elk, cattle—and human, as well as bear, wolf, and mountain lion.

I’ve been blessed with some fascinating people as visitors to the ranch the last two weekends.

Two weekends ago my girlfriend came to visit, and we spent the weekend irrigating, moving and sorting cattle. At least she didn’t have to do any fencing. She is a biologist, botanist, working as a soil conservationist with the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service in Colorado, as well as a part-time writer. And she has a way of making this place even more beautiful than it already is, just by gracing it with her presence—especially if she’s helping with the ranch work.

Once a year, the managers of North American natural grasslands, shrublands, savannas, and deserts gather for a rangeland rendezvous where we discuss the science and art of land stewardship. This year’s Society for Range Management annual meeting, Winter Dance: Lessons from the Past – Strategies for the Future was held in Spokane, Washington, by the Pacific Northwest and Idaho Sections of the SRM, from Jan 28 to Feb. 3. The theme was a nod to our Native American friends, and it did indeed feature a dance.

Reports of the West’s death are greatly exaggerated. I spend a lot of time with ranchers and cowboys, and I just spent a few days among a herd of bison, the West’s most iconic grazing animal, at the Medano Zapata Ranch, at the foot of the Great Sand Dunes and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. A herd of bison grazing, trampling, and raising dust is a spectacular sight for anyone who loves Western rangelands.

I hope that this annual dispatch from the frontier finds you well, enjoying the holidays with your loved ones, and reflecting on a well-lived 2011—what a year it’s been!