

Bison Day on the Land
Bison Day on the Land
Photo by Jack Dykinga, from www.wikipedia.org
Come join us for our last (and rescheduled) field event of 2017: a Bison Day on the Land! This will be an educational and interactive tour of Raymond Wildlife Area (RWA), 15,000 acres of open land managed by the AZ Game & Fish Department, east of Flagstaff on Rte 40. Bison have been at RWA since the 1940s, and this year they got a brand new herd of pure-bred bison. This trip will allow us to be some of the first visitors to the ranch with the new animals.
On this trip we will learn about these ancient native creatures, mangement of bison and the landscape, and how collaborative land and resource management plays into RWA's interactions with its neighbors: the Flying M and Bar T Bar ranches!
You can read about bison in the Fall 2017 issue of Ground Truth!
Please bring a brown-bag lunch, and:
- hat & sunglasses
- warm coat
- windbreaker and/or rainjacket
- plenty of water
- snacks
- long pants
- closed-toe shoes/boots

Book Club: American Buffalo
In 2005, Steven Rinella won a lottery permit to hunt for a wild buffalo, or American bison, in the Alaskan wilderness. Despite the odds—there’s only a 2 percent chance of drawing the permit, and fewer than 20 percent of those hunters are successful—Rinella managed to kill a buffalo on a snow-covered mountainside and then raft the meat back to civilization while being trailed by grizzly bears and suffering from hypothermia. Throughout these adventures, Rinella found himself contemplating his own place among the 14,000 years’ worth of buffalo hunters in North America, as well as the buffalo’s place in the American experience. At the time of the Revolutionary War, North America was home to approximately 40 million buffalo, the largest herd of big mammals on the planet, but by the mid-1890s only a few hundred remained. Now that the buffalo is on the verge of a dramatic ecological recovery across the West, Americans are faced with the challenge of how, and if, we can dare to share our land with a beast that is the embodiment of the American wilderness.
Rinella’s erudition and exuberance, combined with his gift for storytelling, make him the perfect guide for a book that combines outdoor adventure with a quirky blend of facts and observations about history, biology, and the natural world. Both a captivating narrative and a book of environmental and historical significance, American Buffalo tells us as much about ourselves as Americans as it does about the creature who perhaps best of all embodies the American ethos.
Please try to buy your copy at Bright Side Bookshop on San Francisco Street in downtown Flagstaff - all Diablo Trust Book Club members get 10% off book club books! Other locations that might have it are the Flagstaff City-Coconino County Public Library or Bookmans Entertainment Exchange.
Movie Night: Grasslands
Grasslands examines the unique natural habitat of the mixed-grass prairie through four seasons from the perspectives of the ranchers, conservationists, and aboriginal people who understand it best and live by preserving it. It is guided by a powerful metaphor / symbol: The re-discovered wallows of the re-introduced bison.
Popcorn and snacks will be provided, but feel free to bring your own!
This movie is 'paired' with our June book: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. We hope to see you at the book club meeting on Tuesday, June 27 from 5:30-6:30 at the Flagstaff City-Coconino County Public Library.