New reserve will give bison place to roam

BILLINGS, Mont. — When conservationists Curt Freese and Sean Gerrity look out on the rolling prairies of north-central Montana, they see grasslands largely unchanged by time — a haven for hundreds of birds and wildlife and the perfect place, they believe, for bison to roam again.

"Our vision is not a small herd on a few acres but to create that exciting, visual image that really gets people's hearts beating fast: 'Wow, look at those bison!' " said Freese, Northern Great Plains Program director for the World Wildlife Fund.

That vision will begin to take shape over the next week: On Thursday, 16 buffalo will be released on a portion of the nearly 32,000 acres that have been purchased or leased as the start of the wildlife reserve the conservationists see as, one day, growing to possibly hundreds of thousands of acres on the High Plains.

Gerrity and Freese say the goal is to replicate and preserve a thriving, natural prairie ecosystem that will bring people to Montana ranching communities that are, in some cases, struggling for survival.

They downplay the fear of some locals that the project is the start of turning Phillips County into a "Buffalo Commons," a place where traditional cattle operations are replaced by a sea of open prairie, populated by bison.

But Frank Popper, the man behind the controversial idea, said this project and others on the increasingly rural Plains precisely fit the notion of Buffalo Commons, even if those involved don't acknowledge it. The Buffalo Commons philosophy was to restore prairie and wildlife, like bison, on lands where agriculture is no longer sustainable because of dwindling population, drought or other factors.

Buffalo Commons remains a dirty word in some parts of eastern Montana and the Plains states, nearly 20 years after Popper and his wife proposed the idea. But Popper believes the once-fierce opposition has abated somewhat over the past decade, as conservationists ranging from Ted Turner to the American Prairie Foundation are essentially putting the concept into practice.

This seems to suggest "that the Buffalo Commons can happen, and there's plenty of room for existing ranching and farming," said Popper, who teaches land-use planning at Rutgers and Princeton universities. "Life goes on."

The Montana project began four years ago, after a global search for a grassland ecosystem that could support a bison herd and myriad other plant and animal species led conservationists to north-central Montana. There, the World Wildlife Fund found the basis for its prairie preserve — a patchwork of public and private lands neighboring a federal wildlife refuge, teeming with native flora and fauna and unfurling into a mostly pristine prairie landscape.