Heard the one about the accidental bison ranchers? The Nature Conservancy, which typically buys and holds land while various government agencies raise the money to purchase it, is taking a different tack with the 103,000 acres of the Medano-Zapata Ranch in the San Luis Valley. They’re managing the huge parcel as both a landscape-scale conservation area and a working ranch with a bison herd.

Students listen to Nature Conservancy rancher Tom Bragg explain the importance of minimizing stress to the bison, which roam the Medano-Zapata Ranch freely except for round ups: "Less stress means fewer injuries. We cake them (lure them with feed pellets) to the pen, then walkity-walk them into the chutes for sorting — keepers, heifers for market, injured. The equipment holds each bison still and moves its head for a blood draw."

Photo by Anne Christensen.

As Ranch Manager Tom Bragg explained to visiting CC students: “We thought bison sales would make up for the lack of endowments that Nature Conservancy land usually has. But it’s a bad market now for live bison.” Yet there’s potential, says Bragg. “Bison meat is the only red meat that some people with heart problems can eat — it has the same amount of fat as skinless chicken breast — and the market is stabilizing.”

At the market’s low point in 2002, the Nature Conservancy donated 708 animals to Native American tribes. “We only made $20,000 that year, but we made a lot of friends,” says Bragg. (The nonprofit Nature Conservancy is exempt from county taxes but pays them anyway, Professor Hecox notes: “They want to be good neighbors.”)

The ranch now breaks even, partly because Bragg has reduced the herd from 1,800 adults to a healthier 900 animals, all well adapted to the San Luis Valley. “We have a huge meadow that needs to be grazed or it will form grass mats and kill itself. Bison and elk forage and move around by themselves, where you have to move cattle around. There’s no winter feed with bison, they don’t need help calving, and they’re not disease-prone.”

But there are disadvantages, Bragg says. “We need more expensive facilities, because bison are bigger and stronger than cattle. We put in tall fences with spring cables to allow elk to jump over, a solar-powered charge wire and barbed wire to keep the bison put, then a low, smooth cable that antelope can go under. Everything can come and go as it pleases except the bison.” Touring the ranch, the CC group spots a herd of bison in the distance, but Bragg asks students to keep their distance.

The tour ends at the Medano homestead, where students pass around handfuls of garter snake babies, spy a great horned owl in a huge cottonwood, then peer at a porcupine on an elm’s lowest branch. Earlier, they asked tough, specific questions about forage animal units and the spinal dorsal processes that give bison the leverage to forage in deep snow. Now they’re appreciating nature hands-on. As they drive away, lightening flashes across the valley sky. The students ooh and aah at its beauty, then one reverts to investigator, asking, “What’s the charge differential, I wonder?”