Restoration project planned

VERMEJO PARK RANCH, N.M.

CNN mogul Ted Turner, has embarked on a restoration project across the American West. Since 1987, he has bought a staggering 1.7 million acres in Montana, New Mexico, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas, becoming the largest private landowner in the United States, according to Worth magazine. His current plans include restoring the buffalo and other native animals and plants, and tearing away the barbed wire to bring back the wide-open vistas that existed before the West was won.

Turner wants to preserve what this country looked like ``before white man was so bloody common across the landscape, before so many shopping malls and so many roads and so many subdivisions,'' says Mike Phillips, executive director of the Turner Endangered Species Fund.

In New Mexico, the billionaire owns almost 1.1 million acres, 1.5 percent of the nation's fifth-largest state. That includes the 580,000-acre Vermejo Park Ranch, bought from Pennzoil Co. in 1996 for a reported $80 million.

Similar projects are under way on other Turner holdings: restoring West Slope cutthroat trout at the Flying D ranch in Montana; reintroducing the blowout penstemon, an endangered plant, in Nebraska; restoring the red-cockaded woodpecker at the Turner plantation in northern Florida; returning desert bighorn sheep to the Fra Cristobal Mountains at the Armendaris Ranch in New Mexico; and raising endangered Mexican wolves on the Ladder Ranch in New Mexico.