Great Plains Restoration Council “Serving our Youth, Protecting our Prairie Earth.”
Great Plains Restoration Council “Serving our Youth, Protecting our Prairie Earth.”
Major new development: Brand new 12,000 wildland preserve created on the old Rolling Plains of West Texas, where legendary Cynthia Ann Parker was captured by Texas Rangers, forcibly removed from her adoptive Comanche family and taken back to a town just outside Fort Worth.
The last 65 individuals of the Great Southern Herd – descendants of the buffalo that famed Panhandle rancher Charles Goodnight's wife insisted he help save – are stuck in a 330 acre cage in Caprock Canyons State Park in West Texas. GPRC is working with Texas Parks and Wildlife to get these animals some more freedom to roam so they don't lose their ancestral herd culture and behavior. GPRC's goal is to have a reintroduction of some of these animals into the new Cynthia Ann Parker Wilderness within a year and a half. Please help us free these rare, genetically unique Texas buffalo! Much preparation work, fencing, and restoration etc. needs to be done, and we need your help and resources to allow these animals the opportunity to move their bodies over a wild landscape and continue their families and culture again. It's the right thing to do; they have suffered enough.
Remelle Farrar, lifelong local rural resident and CAPW Project Coordinator, surveying the site where the first prairie dog reintroduction is to take place during GPRC's Plains Youth InterACTION Youth Summit July 2008.
Much work needs to done. Right now, we are meeting with Foard County and Pease River Partners to establish a restoration plan. The flat tableland top, above the canyons and valley floor, was plowed and much of it is in non-native Old World Bluestem, which needs to be removed and reseeded with natives. Down below, we are considering a mesquite remediation plan and likely some prescribed burning.
We are definitely incorporating plans for black-tailed prairie dog reintroduction on top, as well as, if we can get the colonies up to a significant size of some 4,000 acres, black-footed ferret reintroduction. (Black-footed ferrets are one of the most endangered mammals in North America because they depend entirely on prairie dog towns to live, and prairie dogs have been so wiped out.)
Much of what we need to do is get the natural ecosystemic processes moving again. Because the area is quite remote, it is an excellent haven for wildlife and wilderness, and will serve well in the long run for bison, fire and prairie dogs to again become part of the natural, age-old mosaic that kept the Rolling Plains healthy.
In the meantime, please help us with resources for restoration, including securing fencing for the perimeter so we can reintroduce bison. The remaining 65 or so animals of the Texas buffalo herd are losing their ancestral herd culture and behavior be being kept in ia 330 acre cage about 50 miles west inside Caprock Canyons State Park. Once we secure the resources, we will be able to move a family group from there into this new Wilderness.
All parties involved are very excited about this strong rural-urban cross cultural relationship. Foard County has lost much of its population and economy, yet by restoring and protecting its highest values, its wild backcountry, it will reap great rewards as a leader in ecosystem renewal.
Plans are for the Dark Skies to protected, and a new local sustainable economy to be built around wilderness recovery, wildlife protection, nature tourism, conservation biology, green design, education, research and more. There is potential for significant acreage expansion of the Cynthia Ann Parker Wilderness and Reserve, and we hope it will grow to many times its size in the next two decades.
Of additional interest is the new, state-of -the-art Comanche Springs Astronomy Campus built ten miles west of the Cynthia Ann Parker Wilderness by the Three Rivers Foundation. According to Robert Reeves, author of Astronomy Thrives in Texas,“The campus’ centerpiece is a 15-inch refractor housed in a 28-foot dome with an adjacent classroom. Other facilities include a 40-by-60-foot roll-off-roof observatory with a 30-inch reflector, a smaller outbuilding with one-of-a-kind 22-inch binocular telescope, one 10-foot dome, two 15-foot domes, and the Star Field – an area with 12 light-shielded, electrified concrete observing pads.”
When GPRC's Plains Youth InterACTION team was out there, they got to see very close up the craters of the moon, a green ring of a star that had exploded 15 million years ago and had its light still traveling, and a lot more. All this while, just beyond, the coyotes and other animals howled, whispered, snorted, grunted, whistled, sang, scratched in the dirt and went about their night in the silent, dark bush.
For both GPRC and Foard County, this is the beginning of a long, productive, mutually rewarding relationship. Please visit Foard County and show your support. This is the first county in the rural Great Plains to fully embrace such a visionary future, where eventually all native wildlife that once lived here before settlement will thrive again, and so will the local people and their economy, who love living here so much. Foard County is leading the way by bringing the buffalo back!
Good natural fresh water springs.
Olivia Woodward, one of GPRC's youth leaders.
A natural breakfast -- eating some of the native fruits of this Rolling Plains wilderness.
Dawn overlooking the area where Cynthia Ann Parker and her Comanche family were camped.
Lani and Kalula designing the first interpretive trail.
Sunset over the open plain as the coyotes begin to howl and the night
Photo of the Moon taken with a regular digital camera through the lens of one of the outdoor telescopes in the Telescope Garden.
Kalule and Kabongo, from GPRC's Plains Youth InterACTION program,observing an 11,000 mile long solar flare jumping off the Sun.
