The Prairie Keepers by Marcy Houle

Marcy Houle creatively tells of her experience studying the great abundance of buteo hawks in the Zumwalt prairie of Oregon. As The Zumwalt is a unique place for several reasons. First, the 200 square miles of untilled, wild land that makes up the Zumwalt is almost entirely privately owned by cattle ranchers. Second, it is home to an extraordinarily high concentration of buteo hawks. Buteo (beau-tee-o) hawks are known for their ‘broad, round tipped wings; husky-bodies; and wide-fanning tails.’ The buteos are generally dependent upon uncultivated and unpeopled prairies.
Houle is a wildlife biologist and student working to discover why the buteos are found in such large numbers in the Zumwalt prairie. As she explores the prairie through hikes and drives documenting everything from nest productivity to the abundance of Belding’s ground squirrels, which the buteos feed upon, she comes to a startling realization the is disbelieved by both the ranchers and environmentalists who are on opposing sides of the land use debate. The ranchers generally lay the blame on the government organizations and environmentalists for trying to take away their land and way of life. In the meantime, the opposing point of view that the ranchers are destroying this last segment of native wilderness is the original assumption the Houle expects to discover from her studies of the Zumwalt.
This book was a very interesting read and left me feeling generally hopeful. The discoveries Houle makes along the way as she studies the prairie and interacts with the ranching community are hopeful that perhaps the cattle industry and native prairies can, in fact, co-exist and even cooperatively work together. She also shows the points of view of the government organizations, such as the Bureau of Land Management, Department of Fish and Game, and the U.S. Forest Service that also have stakes in the land-use debates. The variety of reactions the results of her studies turn up is fascinating considering that the results are not what anyone would have expected. This discovery is a hopeful one and is inspiring even as the family ranches are vanishing into posterity.