Updates
January 21, 2013: Buffalo Commons -- it's back.
Original Post
Then, this, today from The Bismarck Tribune: more than 250 buffalo to be auctioned today in South Dakota!
More than 250 buffalo will be sold at the park's annual auction, including 43 2-year-old pregnant heifers. The auction follows September's jaw-dropping roundup in which more than 1,000 of the beasts stampeded across the prairie.
The sale raises money for the park system while reducing the herd to a sustainable size — something that is especially important after a mild winter and dry summer left the grassland parched and at risk for over-grazing, said Gary Brundige, the park's resource program manager.
"We'd started to rebuild (the herd) a little bit, but this past year we were probably two-thirds normal on rainfall," Brundige said. "So we upped the sale a little bit more than we'd initially planned."
The auction, set in picturesque Black Hills prairie, is part of a carefully planned bison management program. The park aims to keep the herd at about 1,300 bison. Each September, cowboys and cowgirls.
ls help corral the rumbling animals in a stampede that draws thousands of spectators from across the world.We're not quite where the Poppers expected us to be by 2012, but we're slowly getting there.
Punctuated, of course, by a few oil wells.
