Grounds Keepers

“The greatest part of venturing out into the wilderness,” Rod Frederick observes, “is that you can’t determine what kind experience it will deliver. I took my son to Yellowstone for a special father/son adventure his senior year in high school. Our plan was to track wolves. Soon after we set out we found ourselves enveloped by a herd of the park’s bison. They can range two miles in a day while grazing and we had the treat of a lifetime.”

“On a larger scale, the great migrations that spanned the North American Plains were driven by the buffalo’s never ending quest for food. Their movement was timed to when their primary food source, grass, would be most full of nutrients. Non-competing species such as the Pronghorn Antelope often migrated as well, feeding on a different portion of the stalk or type of grass all together. The relationship between animal and land was symbiotic, the buffalo maintained the Plains, the Plains maintained the buffalo.”