American Prairie

Our new video is available for viewing on our website home page. Special thanks to Tom Brokaw for narrating the film and to Sandy Cannon-Brown and the Video Takes crew for producing it.

It provides an overview of our current progress and reiterates the vision we are pursuing with our partners at World Wildlife Fund.

Are there cougars on the Prairie?

"This place is so flat, treeless, desolate! It’s just a vast brown land of nothingness!"

A non-profit organization created solely for the purpose of building the American Prairie Reserve in northeastern Montana, APF is based in Bozeman, Mont. According to Scott Laird, director of field operations for APF, the temperate grasslands of the world are the least protected bio-landscapes in the world. As a result, there is a high rate of habitat loss continually taking place on the prairies in North America.

"We’re going to change the economics of the native grass seed industry," Arbuckle said. "The Seedster isn’t a combine or a stripper, but a new-fangled plucker. This harvester isn’t a better mousetrap; it’s the first one."

This fall American Prairie Foundation has opened over 5,000 acres of land to the public through the Block Management Program.

Nowhere else in the United States is conservation more possible and more essential than in northeastern Montana’s plains, says Jonathan Proctor, the southern Rockies and Great Plains representative of Defenders of Wildlife. There are no large national parks or monuments protecting the Great Plains (the Charles M. Russell NWR encompasses prairies only on its fringes) and only 1.5 percent of U.S. grasslands are publicly owned. Most of those are in national grasslands that feature cattle, not bison. "The plains are the least represented ecosystem in our national parks," Proctor adds.

The group’s plan—called simply the Prairie Project—is to create one of the largest and most innovative conservation projects on Earth, a grassland reserve replete with as many native species as can be sustained.

Of all the species living in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem of northwest Wyoming, the pronghorn is the only one native to the American West — elk, bison and even grizzly bears moved in from Asia centuries ago — but it is by no means the least exotic.