Audubon Magazine, the Society’s bi-monthly publication, recently ran photographs from an assignment I shot for them in early September.  The project focused on the Haverfield family and their struggles with the county in which their cattle ranch sits.  The family has been embroiled in a long-running war over the presence of prairie dogs on their ranch. They are part of growing group of cattle ranchers that are pro-prairie dog.  They believe that prairie dogs contribute to increased biodiversity on their property, enabling them to graze their cattle in a fashion that mimics the movement and grazing patterns of pre-settlement buffalo.  Healthier grazing plots mean increased productivity.  But that, according to the Haverfields, requires the help of prairie dogs.

Needless to say, they are not exactly the most popular people in old school western Kansas.  The county, particularly county commissioner Carl Ulrich, contends that prairie dogs are a nuisance and should be eradicated. Many of the Haverfields’ neighbors feel the same way. In recent years, the county has exterminated prairie dogs from the Haverfield property using a number of methods, including gas and poison, before sending them the bill. The Haverfields have discovered a number of ’secondary kill’ animals, carcasses of birds and mammals that have eaten the poisoned prairie dogs and subsequently been killed themselves. Complicating matters, the US Fish and Wildlife Service has recently re-introduced endangered black footed ferrets onto the land, a natural predator of the prairie dogs. This move has heightened tensions between neighbors and led to a series of legal maneuvers on both sides to control the spread of the prairie dogs as well as the ferrets.

Ted Williams, Audubon Magazine’s writer for the piece, explains the situation in detail on the magazine’s site.  Particularly troubling is the county’s choice to use the highly controversial poison, Rozol, in their pursuit of a scorched-earth approach to prairie dogs.  The article is available here.  Get a cup of coffee for this one.  It’s worth the read.

MORE PHOTOS

To me, it’s strange how hotels flavor travel.  They’re like department stores in the sense that they want you to feel at home when you’re not.  Everything is familiar, everything is, by design, exactly the same as the last chain you stayed in.  The corner table, the phone on the nightstand, the hotel hangers that you can’t steal, fresh towels, continental breakfast and the deep red and brown wallpapers, the black-out blind and the sheer curtain that rests right under it  –they are the same in every other hotel in the country.  We’re creatures of comfort and, I guess, the biggest irony of travel is that we seek out things that are familiar when we’re somewhere unfamiliar.  It’s a kind of travel that has its place and, at least in the last few weeks, the kind of travel I’ve tried to avoid.

In the last month I’ve lived out of a rental car, slept in the bed of my pickup, seen what morning looks like in the parking lot of K Mart, Wal Mart, truck stops, rest stops, and skipped around security to sleep in a livestock stall at the Wyoming State Fair.  Stall #6, in the old building near the red barn, to be precise.  Guess it’s been an immersion of sorts, the way a place can just wash over you, the way you notice subtle changes, the quality of light, ambient sounds, the way the air feels on your face in the morning.  It’s approaching place as though it were a poem to be lived and not prose to be memorized and, for me anyhow, it puts my mind in the right frame to see the quiet, little things that are common to the greater tenor of our Americana.

MORE PHOTOS