Privately funded nonprofit is building huge, controversial wildlife sanctuary in Montana

American Prairie Reserve's purchased and leased land is shown in green with white borders, adjacent to Upper Missouri Breaks National Monument and Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge. Together, these parcels complete a network of land larger than Yellowstone National Park, the second-largest national park in the Lower 48 states (NPR map)

"A privately funded, nonprofit organization is creating a 3.2-million-acre wildlife sanctuary, American Prairie Reserve, in northeastern Montana, an area long known as cattle country," Nate Hegyi reports for NPR, with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. "The reserve is facing fierce opposition from many locals because . . . the organization is slowly purchasing ranches from willing sellers, phasing out the cows and replacing them with wild bison. Those private properties are then stitched together with vast tracts of neighboring public lands to create one giant, rewilded prairie. The organization has purchased close to 30 properties so far, but it needs at least 50 more."

Local ranch owners who aren't willing to sell worry that they won't be able to hold out, as land prices increase and many ranchers have a hard time finding an heir to pass their land to when they retire. But wildlife advocates from other states and countries have given the project a lot of attention and financial support because, at 5,000 square miles, the sanctuary will be the largest in the contiguous U.S. once completed. Hegyi reports.

"The project's goal is to rewild this swath of the Great Plains and return all the animals that lived on this landscape more than a century ago, before white settlers arrived. Wolves, grizzly bears, thousands of genetically pure, wild bison," Hegyi reports. "The reserve is a new kind of national park, one that's free to the public and privately funded through both small donors and some of the wealthiest people in the world."

Sean Gerrity founded APR more than 18 years ago after he moved back home to Montana after running a Silicon Valley tech firm. "This wildlife habitat is going away and there is almost none left," he told Hegyi. "This is the last bit in the Great Plains, for the most part, where we can do a project of this size."