One Acre at a Time
Ben Romans, DU
Jay Volk can stand near the southwest corner of the pasture and see it all come together on a single acre of his ranch. Thirty-five miles north of Bismarck, North Dakota, in the famed Prairie Pothole Region, a small ephemeral wetland glistens with the year’s spring rains. The shallow pond is ringed with sedge and horsetail. Along its edge, the fringe of lush wetland plants gives way to a rise of western wheatgrass, needle-and-thread, and big and little bluestem. Just beyond, hummocks are clad in buckbrush and purple prairie clover, prairie rose, and prairie smoke.
Mallards and gadwalls regularly nest around the wetland, which is situated on the edge of the rolling knolls of the Missouri Coteau—a broad band of high-priority habitat that supports some of the highest densities of breeding ducks in North America. Volk has watched Hungarian partridge and ring-necked pheasants raise broods near the pothole. There are even a few sharp-tailed grouse leks close by, where the birds gather to dance and attract mates.
Ben Romans, DU
It’s all there because Volk recently installed nearly 10,000 feet of new barbed-wire border and cross fencing with the help of Ducks Unlimited and the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service. The fencing allows Volk to rotate his cattle from pasture to pasture to prevent overgrazing. That encourages wetland and prairie plants to thrive, prairie potholes to fill and hold water, grassland birds to raise their nes
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