Buffalo Commons -- Déjà Vu All Over Again

Updates

January 21, 2013: Buffalo Commons -- it's back.

Original Post

Link here to an earlier post on the Poppers and the buffalo commons.

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.