Dear Friend of Great Plains Restoration Council,
Prairie dogs show us how to give thanks and CELEBRATE LIFE even in the midst of a very hard world.
Check out the photos below of our recent release of Gunnison's prairie dogs in New Mexico.
See how different from black-tailed prairie dogs these Gunnison's prairie dogs look, with their pink hands and paler fur!
We love them both -- and hope you do too. They need some friends.
All five species of prairie dogs are in danger of extinction. They are North America's ultimate underdog.
Great Plains Restoration Council (GPRC) is happy to announce a new and growing partnership with Commonweal Conservancy and the 13,000 acre Galisteo Basin Preserve in Santa Fe County, New Mexico, on the Southern High Plains.
GPRC has now brought on board our friend Paula Martin, of Prairie Ecosystems, Inc., as GPRC's Prairie Dog Grasslands Coordinator. She is perhaps the longest serving prairie dog reintroduction specialist. Our team uses the highest and most sophisticated conservation biology techniques yet developed for prairie dog rescue, reintroduction and long-term monitoring and survival.
2012 will be an exciting year. Partnering with Galisteo Basin Preserve will allow GPRC to begin realizing one of our core long-term objectives: a large-scale Reserve on the Southern High Plains, where both people and prairie wildlife can have refuge and help each other.
Our Plains Youth InterACTION program will assist.
Over the next year: plans for reintroduction of black-tailed prairie dogs, and the first small scale bison reintroduction.
When that happens, Galisteo Basin may be the only place where both Gunnison's and black-tailed prairie dogs live in the wild with bison as well as pronghorn antelope.
And youth and young adults from New Mexico will have their own Ecological Health project, in tandem with the Texas parks and preserves.
Would you like to volunteer? Please contact us. There is a lot of great work to be done, and it is good to get outside under the prairie's beautiful, blazing-with-light sky.
America's sun dogs literally exalt in their lives out here on the Great Plains, the land of sun, wind, grass and blue sky, even in the midst of danger and damage. We can all learn from them.
Happy Thanksgiving!
