Chase a Wild Buffalo Stampede With These Heroic Cowboys | Short Film Showcase
[Music] Big day we're all been waiting for. Buffalo waiting; all of us are excited, a little nervous, but I guess we're ready—ready as we're going to be.
My name is Duke Phillips. I manage the Mana Ranch. It's um, a little over 100,000 acres located in the St. Louis Valley, Southern Central Colorado. We manage it in partnership with The Nature Conservancy, which is the world's largest conservation organization. Back some years ago, The Nature Conservancy established the MOs Saar as a conservation area, but we realized after trying to manage it ourselves that this landscape requires skills that The Nature Conservancy doesn't have.
Menop Ranch is one of the richest wildlife habitats anywhere and it's a home to one of the largest herds of BCE in the United States. We're trying to manage the herd as closely as we can to how they used to live in the wilds, but the landscape is different now.
In the old days, bison herds had the freedom to move wherever they wanted, but in our situation, we have limited space. So if the bison herd grows beyond what the land can sustain, they're going to overgraze it. In order to protect the land and to maintain the amount of grass that's available for the bison to have enough food, we need to keep the number of animals to a sustainable level. Our skills as ranchers come into play.
It's once a year we go out, 6 days or so, and we gather about 1,500 head of bison; actually about 2,000 if you count the calves. When we gather them, we pull out the animals we need to sell. That money is what we live on, what we run the ranch on for the rest of the year. So everything's at stake.
They've learned that the best way to move those animals is on horseback, and unfortunately that is running next to the bison over ravines and all that kind of stuff. It's very dangerous. I try not to think about it. Basically, what we're going to be doing is trying to guide them. We'll come down and we'll ease up to them really slow. At some point, as we get closer and closer, they're going to get up and take off, and then everybody's just going to rush them and get them into a full-fledged flight.
Our goal is to get the bison herd into a pen of corals. We spend months preparing for a week of bringing the bison in. We have a limited number of chances, so each run that we make, we've got to make sure that the fewest number get away, because once they're gone, they will not be brought in that year.
There's about 80 or 100 just, I guess, it's west of Tessa house, just north of the road. You ready? [Music] Boogie. [Music] [Music] Hey, hey! He! [Music] Hey! [Music] Probably the easiest thing to do out there is screw up. Make one little mistake and everything's over. We were trying to get them through this gate, but I was out of place, and so was everybody else.
What happened? You start peing out. It was going good for a bit; they pretty well outran us. I think we got maybe 20 head in out of that group, and there's maybe 120 in there. These buffalo are wild and they're not used to being handled. You can't forget that they live out there; this is their world, and you're going out into it to try to manipulate their movement. If you're not very thoughtful, you're going to get beat every time.
I was born in Venezuela on a ranch that my father ran for Nelson Rockefeller. Ranching has been a way of life for my family for several generations. I never imagined that I would be working with a conservation organization managing a bison ranch, and especially a wild herd of bison. But, as I have worked more and more closely with The Nature Conservancy, I realize how important our relationship is.
Our responsibility as ranchers has changed a great deal from raising beef to becoming stewards of the land. We will never have a majority of the landscape under some sort of formal protection. It's really ranchers that have a substantial portion of land under their stewardship, and really ranching that can be the right hand to conservation.
Well, we hope the way that we're managing Menot Ranch would be a model for other ranches of private ranch and a conservation community balancing conservation and economics, which has to [Music] happen. [Music]
When we gather them, we run them through the chute. We vaccinate year calves; we pull out the animals we need to [Music] sell—2-year-olds. A lot of people don't realize bison, as a wild animal, is extremely endangered. There are only 20,000 in North America now.
To give you some idea of the tremendous decrease in animals, it's estimated there were 50 to 80 million bison [Music] originally. The rest of the bison that don't get shipped off get turned back out onto the [Music] ranch. Ranchers have the potential of playing the biggest role in caring for the land because our roots go very deep there.
If we're going to survive into the future, if our kids are going to have the same options that we have, same liberties, we're going to have to figure out how we're going to manage the natural world without the parameters of nature the way it was before we arrived. To me, ranching is about living with the land. I feel a sense of honor of being entrusted with its care because I live on it and I am part of it; it's part of me.
Today's Thursday, our last chance to get something in. We lost twice as many as we normally have, but every year is different and we have to understand that.
Okay, thanks. Bye—100 head, Stevie boy! [Music] [Music] Ready? [Music] [Music] Now! [Music] What? That's as good as he can ever do it, right? [Music] There! [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]