A Wing and a Prayer: the Race to Save Our Vanishing Birds: The Race to Save Our Vanishing Birds by Anders Gyllenhaal

Author:Anders Gyllenhaal [Gyllenhaal, Anders & Gyllenhaal, Beverly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

The Greater Sage-Grouse, with a population spread across eleven Western states, sits at the center of a decades-old struggle pitting the health of the species against the regional economy. The males, adorned with what looks like a fur stole, put on a riotous mating performance in the spring.

9

COEXISTING WITH THE BIRDS

Flint Hills, Kansas

The day of his high school graduation, Josh Hoy tossed his saddle, an old army sleeping bag, and a few clothes into the back of his silver Nissan Stanza station wagon and headed west to look for work as a cowhand. He had plenty of experience—and it started at an early age. One of his first memories was of getting up at 3:30 a.m. for a cattle roundup on his grandparents’ ranch, the Flying H, near Cassoday, Kansas. A handful of old-time cowboys gathered in the kitchen telling stories over his grandmother’s breakfast of chicken fried steak, hash browns, and biscuits. Then they saddled up and rode off together—with Hoy on his own horse. “I was probably six or seven years old,” he says. “That made a big impression on me.” By twelve, he was working on ranches around his home in the Flint Hills of southeastern Kansas. After he got a driver’s license, he started taking ranching jobs around the state, spending all the time he could outdoors. “The natural world was just everything that mattered to me,” he says. So when he was done with the classes that never held his interest, he knew what he wanted to do.

For the next ten years, Hoy traveled to fourteen states in the Midwest and West, working as a hired hand, usually for $40 a day. Home became his station wagon. “I lived in that thing for years,” he says. Despite his leather chaps and wide-brimmed hat, Hoy never looked the part of a cowboy. He was on the chubby side, and he’d always looked so awkward on a horse that some ranch managers took one glance and shook their heads. But Hoy was a self-starter, a quick study who paid close attention to details. In time, he came to see his travels as an education—in what helped a ranch thrive and what ultimately led to failure. He watched as some ranchers found ways to hold on to their land in the old, traditional ways while others saw the path to success as mechanizing, fertilizing, and spraying herbicides and pesticides. “When you work on all these ranches, especially the big corporate places, it’s just soul killing,” Hoy says. “What I saw were all these ranches just chewing up nature and spitting it out.” He started thinking about running his own ranch and began to envision a different path, a simpler and more profitable one. He intended to clear out fences to allow open grazing, handle the cows on horseback, and avoid expensive chemicals. “I worked on several hundred ranches, and I bet there are only ten of them left,” Hoy says. “They all had generational change or they went bankrupt.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.