Francis "Boo Boo" Bird has been raising cattle on the Blackfeet Nation for twenty-five years. He knows every pond, every spring, every low spot where water collects after snowmelt on his land north of Browning, Montana. The island confused him.
"There's one pond, there's an island in there this year and I never knew there was an island in there."
Bird said this last August. The water had dropped so low during the five-year drought that land emerged from what used to be reliable water. Springs that ran for a quarter century went dry. Potholes that always held water through summer turned to cracked mud and dust.
You spend twenty-five years learning a piece of ground. Then the ground changes the rules. The water you counted on disappears. Islands appear where there shouldn't be islands. People with seventy, eighty years of memory told Joe Kipp, who ranches roughly 5,000 acres nearby, they'd never seen prairie potholes go completely dry. Now the old-timers are seeing it too.
Glacier County's cattle inventory dropped nearly 20 percent between 2017 and 2022—from 44,000 head to 36,000.
The Blackfeet Tribal Business Council declared a state of emergency in June 2025, citing "severe unprecedented low rainfall, dwindling reservoir levels and significantly reduced stream flows." Breeding decisions, bloodlines, decades of work.
By mid-July 2025, grass for feed saw only 40 percent of normal growth in Kipp's area. "In our area it takes 3.5 acres per month per cow," Kipp explained. When grass doesn't grow and water disappears, you either sell cattle or watch them die.
Deciding which animals to sell means deciding which bloodlines to abandon. When cattle have to travel more than a mile and a half to reach water, Craig Iron Pipe of the Blackfeet Agricultural Department explained, "they start losing body condition and they're not going to be able to breed back for the following year." Bird is seeing fewer calves in early spring, lighter weights in fall. Each animal represents choices made years ago about genetics, about building a herd that could survive Montana winters and produce calves that would bring decent prices in fall.
Now you're deciding which of those choices to undo. Which breeding decisions to reverse, which parts of the operation you built over decades to dismantle. You're making these choices with information nobody has. Is this a bad stretch or the new normal? Will next year be better or worse?
Iron Pipe calls it an "economic catch 22." Sell cattle now to conserve resources and you lose the income you need for land leases and operating costs. Hold the herd and hope conditions improve and you risk dead cows and deeper financial losses if the drought continues. Every choice is a bet on a future nobody can predict.
"You don't get your paycheck till you sell your calves in the fall," Bird said. "And so especially with hay and input costs, we're just keeping par. We put a little in our pocket. People think we're hitting a home run, but when you look at our balance sheets, not really."
Bird was installing stock tanks and a solar-powered pump after waiting four years for government financial assistance approval. Four years. By the time the bureaucrats finished studying his application, he'd already taken the financial hit out of his own pocket because waiting any longer meant more dead cattle. Lance Williamson, another Blackfeet rancher in Heart Butte, watched Chain Lake dry into a puddle in 2025, the lowest he'd ever seen it. The lake his cattle depend on became a puddle.
Iron Pipe named what ranchers don't talk about much in public:
"People don't understand what producers go through. It's a lot of anxiety and depression."
Kipp agreed: "I can see how the depression would set in."
Montana's 2026 snowpack offers no clear answers. December 2025 brought record precipitation, but unseasonably warm temperatures meant much fell as rain at lower elevations rather than snow that would melt slowly through summer. Streamflow forecasts indicate slightly below normal runoff.
Ranchers are making irreversible decisions with incomplete information during an ongoing crisis. Sell too many cattle and you can't rebuild when conditions improve. Hold too many and you risk catastrophic losses if the drought continues. Can cattle ranching continue here at all? Are they the generation that couldn't hold on?
Bird keeps discovering things he never knew existed. Islands in ponds. Dry springs. Empty potholes. The ground stopped following the rules he learned over twenty-five years. You're making six-figure bets on a future that doesn't resemble the past you studied.
The water might come back. The grass might grow. The calves might come heavy in spring. Or the islands might stay, the springs might stay dry, and the operation their families worked for generations might not survive another decade. They won't know until it's already happened.