The ferrets would eat the prairie dogs, making room for the burrowing owls that need prairie dog holes, drawing hawks and eagles, attracting more birders, who might buy a steak from an Audubon-certified ranch. “It’s a different philosophy,” May said in late November, standing at his machinery shop, near cages holding 15 priceless, endangered ferrets. But their ranching life is a thoroughly modern mix of environmentalism, opportunism and hustle. The Mays still sell purebred, grass-fed Limousin cattle, all 800 animals descended from one young heifer Dallas May’s grandfather gave to him when he was 13. When they agreed to host reintroduction of endangered black-footed ferrets, agencies offered money to help monitor their progress, though the Mays didn’t take it. Ducks Unlimited paid them carbon sequestration credits for letting prairie grasses grow. Saying no to leases for solar arrays or electricity windmills helped them win a valuable conservation easement. The black rails, and discoveries of other vulnerable species like lesser prairie chickens, helped persuade the Audubon Society to make May Ranch a certified bird-friendly ranch with instant name recognition. The Mays run a biology lab as much as they run a ranch. It’s an emerging way of ranching and farming, one that recognizes preservation of habitat amid global climate change can bring income and survival.

The most experienced birders check the black rail box on their life lists simply by hearing the birds’ distinctive chitter call.īut if the Mays can piece together all the available evidence that their environmentally progressive property has value, he and his family can sleep at night. Maybe that’s OK - you rarely actually see the black rail, either. May, 63, can’t always see a solvent future for the sprawling, drought-exposed, multi-generational ranch in the Lower Arkansas Valley. “We were not trespassing, but we were close,” laughed Andrew Farnsworth, senior research associate at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

People were apparently willing to journey to a dusty corner of Colorado to pay homage to his eco-friendly land management that avoids plowing and employs animals as recycling ruminants. Word was out that while rising seas and hurricanes ravage the birds’ East Coast habitat, the threatened species was cooling it in marshes and ponds that break up 15,000 acres of May Ranch’s dryland operation.

It turned out they were international bird experts from Cornell University’s famed ornithology lab, cradling enormous spotting scopes and hoping to see the elusive black rail. LAMAR - The day that Dallas May started to feel his family ranch’s fortunes solidify, after more than 40 years of raising cattle, was the day he got in his pickup to chase what appeared to be two poachers carrying weapons the size of rocket launchers. From getting the folks at Audubon to certify the ranch as bird-friendly, to selling carbon sequestration credits for the tall grass, the May Ranch near Lamar is modernizing stewardship.

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