Tag: Ricketts Consevation Foundation

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Protecting Vital Wildlife Near Yellowstone National Park

I’m happy to share that I played a role in an ambitious and successful campaign by the Greater Yellowstone Coalition (GYC). Thanks to their efforts, nearly 1,600 acres of vital wildlife habitat adjacent to Yellowstone National Park is now safe from the threat of industrial gold mining.

Alongside over 1,200 other individuals and foundations, the Ricketts Conservation Foundation helped the GYC successfully raise $6.25 million to end a significant gold mining proposal along the Yellowstone boundary. This area provides vital habitat for many of Yellowstone’s iconic wildlife, such as grizzly bears, wolves, and the famous Northern Range elk herd. Crevice Mountain also lies within one of the few designated places outside the park where Yellowstone bison can roam.


Ultimately, the GYC’s goal is to transfer ownership of lands and mineral rights to the Custer Gallatin National Forest, making them accessible to the public and permanently protected from future mining through the mineral withdrawal enacted by the Yellowstone Gateway Protection Act, a law passed by Congress in 2019. As a dedicated conservationist, I’m proud to help this wonderful organization protect the lands, waters, and wildlife of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

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Saving Trumpeter Swans of Yellowstone – Project Update

Image of Swans being released into the wild

One of the things I’m most excited about these days is the work the Ricketts Conservation Foundation is doing to support wildlife and wilderness areas.  And one of our most important current initiatives is The Swan Project, a multi-year partnership between The Ricketts Conservation Foundation and The Wyoming Wetlands Society to increase the number of Trumpeter Swans in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem.

Photos of Joe Ricketts Swan Project

The project kicked off in 2018 when we began the “Connecting the Dots” initiative.  There are close to 1,000 Trumpeter Swans in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, but they’re spread across a large area and act as separate subpopulations.  The idea was to jump start the connections between these subpopulations by introducing captive-raised birds in good habitat between existing subpopulations. 

As part of all this, we conducted aerial surveys of Trumpeter Swan habitat so we can now better monitor the population and locate our released birds. Recent flights have found new pairs of released birds in remote areas that would be difficult to access otherwise. These results confirm that the approach we’re taking is working!  It’s still early days of this ten-year project but these initial results give us confidence that The Swan Project will succeed in creating a single, interconnected population that will remain secure for the long term.

By working with another non-profit and several state and federal agencies, The Swan Project represents just the sort of private-public partnership I believe will be critical to the future of wildlife conservation while honoring our core belief that conservation is everyone’s responsibility.

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The Swan Partnership

Image of People releasing swans into water

I like nature.  And I believe deeply in the importance of conserving our natural treasures.  So several years ago, I established the Ricketts Conservation Foundation.  The Foundation has pursued some exciting projects already, like helping to restore Wyoming’s Common Loon population.

Building on the success of the loon project, the Ricketts Conservation Foundation has also turned our focus to another species that might otherwise fall through the cracks:  the Trumpeter Swans in Yellowstone National Park.

The Trumpeter Swan population there has been declining for the past 50 years, despite being protected.  In 2012 the Wyoming Wetland Society, a small non-profit organization based in Jackson Hole, began releasing captive-raised birds in the park.  The idea was to increase the number of breeding pairs in Yellowstone. But to ensure these birds didn’t remain susceptible to the challenges that small populations face, they needed to be connected with a larger, regional population. And the best way to do that is to connect the Yellowstone birds with other successful reintroduction programs in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming.

So in 2018, the Ricketts Conservation Foundation and the Wyoming Wetland Society formed The Swan Project.  Working with federal, state and tribal agencies, The Swan Project’s goal is to connect the existing restoration populations of Trumpeter Swans in these three states by 2028. I’m excited about this project and believe it will help to ensure that Trumpeter Swans remain within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem for future generations to enjoy.

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Flight of the Sandhill Cranes

Image of Joe Ricketts and family

During a recent weekend in March, Marlene and I took our grandkids to witness one of nature’s miracles:  the annual migration of the Sandhill Cranes.

Each spring over a half million of these majestic birds pause on a narrow stretch of Nebraska’s Platte River to replenish themselves during their seasonal migration.  The sight and sounds of this many cranes is, well, indescribable.

The Sandhill Cranes come from Mexico, Texas, and New Mexico, breaking their trip in Nebraska on their way to Canada, Alaska and Siberia. (That’s right, Siberia.)  It’s an epic journey of thousands of miles that these amazing birds make each year.

While the simple spectacle of all these cranes is fascinating enough, our experience was made richer still by the insights shared with us by Chuck Cooper and Sandra Douglas of the Crane Trust.

And, while they are not endangered today, conserving the natural habitats needed for the Sandhill Cranes is among the many issues my family and I consider when thinking about where The Ricketts Conservation Foundation should focus its attention.

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Nebraska City and Arbor Bank’s J. Sterling Morton Award

Photo of Joe Ricketts

I was born and raised in Nebraska City, and while I’ve done many things since leaving there when I was 18, something of that place stays with me to this day. It’s hard to put into words, but if I were to try, I’d say it’s the values of integrity and consistency – values I’ve tried to bring to my life and my work.

So it was a great honor when Grant Gregory informed me that Arbor Bank, which is headquartered in Nebraska City, had decided to bestow the J. Sterling Morton Award on me. The oldest state-chartered bank in Nebraska, Arbor Bank – or Otoe County National Bank of Nebraska City, as it was known back then – was the financial cornerstone for my family growing up.

Like everyone who grew up in Nebraska City, I was familiar with J. Sterling Morton. The founder of Arbor Day and a former cabinet officer who returned to the United States Treasury 20% of his department’s appropriated budget when he served as Secretary of Agriculture, Morton had a powerful commitment to environmental conservation and government fiscal responsibility that resonates strongly with me. Indeed, I’ve tried to champion the same values of environmental conservation (through the Ricketts Conservation Foundation) and fiscal responsibility in government (through Ending Spending), so it is a particular honor for me to receive an award that bears his name. I particularly like this quote by Morton:

There is no aristocracy in trees. They are not haughty. They will thrive near the humblest cabin on our fertile prairies, just as well and become just as refreshing to the eye and as fruitful as they will in the shadow of a king’s palace.