She dislikes change among her neighbours. Abutting her sprawling ranch on three sides is federal land that is being incorporated into a wildlife park. The American Prairie Reserve (apr) was founded as a charity in 2001 and aspires to become the largest park in the Lower 48 states. Already it stretches over nearly 420,000 acres (from 29 ranches it has bought so far), and will eventually grow and stitch together another 2.75m acres of public land. Its aim is for prairie dogs, sage grouse, coyote, bighorn sheep and other species of native plants, birds and mammals to thrive in a contiguous space the size of Connecticut.
For environmentalists, scientists and the apr’s donors—notably wealthy Silicon Valley folk—this is a bold, market-friendly experiment in massive conservation. The area is precious: one of only four vast, temperate, grassland ecosystems left on Earth (steppe land in Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Patagonia are the other three). This territory of shortgrass prairie could become America’s answer to the Serengeti, along the upper reaches of the Missouri River.
In the view of many ranchers, whose beef industry is worth $1.5bn annually in Montana, that is a grim prospect. They worry about more ranch land disappearing into the reserve. “They’d be idling 3.5m acres from food production,” complains Mrs Robbins. She helps to run a campaign against the “elite” apr, known as “Save the Cowboy”. It opposes the sale of ranches to the reserve and argues that the Bureau of Land Management is wrong to allocate federal lands to it. Its placards, showing the silhouette of a big-hatted horserider in an orange sunset, are ubiquitous in central Montanan towns.