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A long-gone species returned home Friday, not with a thunder of hooves, but with muffled snorts and a short gallop from muddy pen to grassy range.A baker’s dozen of bison had been plucked from a herd of 500 in South Dakota and trucked to east-central Kansas 10 days before.Once here, they were crowded in a snug pen on the pasture that would be their new home. The time in tight quarters was intended to bond them as a new mini-herd and get them accustomed to the sights, sounds and smells of the grassland around them.

It seems a perfect marriage of nature and commerce. As boats ferry oysters to the shore, pelicans swoop by and seals pop their heads out of the water.But this spot on the Point Reyes National Seashore has become a flashpoint for a bitter debate over the limits of wilderness and commercial interest within America’s national parks.The National Park Service has said it cannot renew the permit to farm oysters in a tidal estuary here, which lapses in 2012, because federal law requires it to return the area to wilderness by eliminating intrusive commercial activity.

Like the long tail of a sleeping dragon, northwestern Montana's jagged peaks snake their way across several hundred square miles of ancient glacial plains. At first glance, this slice of the Northern Rockies, with its massive flanks carpeted by Douglas fir, spruce and lodgepole pine, looks perfectly healthy.

Yellowstone National Park's scientific research on wolves got caught in the crossfire of Montana's inaugural wolf season when hunters killed two collared wolves just north of the park earlier this month. As the smoke has cleared, federal wolf officials are at odds over the effect of the shootings and Montana's game managers are re-examining how it will conduct its next wolf season - if there is one. Environmental groups have appealed Montana and Idaho's wolf hunting seasons in federal court.

Since retirement, my wife, Sherry, and I have been going to Yellowstone National Park two or three times a year. We tell our friends we're addicted to the park. In many ways, winter is the best season. Although bears are not seen, many other animals can be spotted and photographed more easily. You don't have to stay at one of the lodges in the park. By staying in a motel in Gardiner, Mont., you can get off-season rates of less than $50.

-->If each year was a page, Glacier National Park's storybook would stack as high as 400,000 copies of the entire Harry Potter series. Spanning 1.6 billion years, Glacier's tale is one of tremendous pressure, bubbling lava, rifts in the earth that separated even the hardest rock and diamond-sharp icebergs carving peaks and valleys.

Yosemite, Yellowstone and Grand Canyon get the publicity, and the visitors. But there are plenty of lesser-known national parks that offer gorgeous vistas and pristine back country, far from the maddening crowds. Joshua Tree, Big Bend, Capitol Reef, Isle Royale, Kenai Fjords and Theodore Roosevelt are national parks that may never be the stars of a Ken Burns documentary. But each offers its own charm, and you won't find a traffic jam at any of them. In fact, Kenai Fjords in Alaska and Isle Royale in Lake Superior

Opponents of a plan to kill hundreds of deer at Valley Forge National Historical Park are asking members of Congress to halt the effort before the shooting starts.Officials at the park, the site of the Continental Army's 1777-78 encampment, want to reduce a deer population now estimated at 1,277 to between 165 and 185 over four years. They say the herd is eating so many plants, shrubs and saplings that the forest cannot regenerate.

The spectacular Many Glacier Valley has long been understood as one of the nation's most biologically important crossroads, the place where mountain slope meets prairie meadow, where three great drainages converge and several vegetation zones overlap. It is home to a remarkable assemblage of wildlife, and also to hundreds of thousands of Glacier National Park visitors who each summer clog the roadways while craning their necks for views of Rocky Mountain critters. Vehicles idle bumper to bumper, traffic stalled in "bear jams" and "sheep jams," even mundane "coyote jams."

The National Park Service will hold an online lottery this week to distribute tickets for the National Christmas Tree lighting ceremony in December. The lottery opens at 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday and runs through 11:59 p.m. on Friday. Nearly 10,000 free tickets will be distributed, including 7,000 standing-room tickets for the first time. The tree lighting is scheduled for Dec. 3 at 5 p.m. on the Ellipse near the White House.

Sometimes — especially these past couple of colorful weeks — Liz Weintraub forgets she's exercising when she's out hiking the wooded property at the Carl Sandburg Home.Weintraub has been faithfully hiking a three-mile round-trip trail to a mountaintop summit at the Carl Sandburg National Historic Site in Flat Rock for the past four months as part of her fitness routine.

In this place where the prairie meets the Ponderosa Pine, the rainbows are brilliant. For a brief hour, rays of sunshine win the battle with a cold South Dakota mist, and the result is a full rainbow — its arc touching two points on the rolling range.

Mandatory shuttle service in Zion National Park has ended for the season but weekend visitors are still urged to use the shuttles on a voluntary basis. The park shifted to shuttle-only traffic for March-to-November visitors nine years ago to alleviate congestion and to benefit the environment.

A great editorial from today's New York Daily News: It was 123 years ago today that Manhattan office boys first rained ticker tape down on a parade, creating what became a grand New York celebratory tradition.The occasion was the dedication of the Statue of Liberty, Oct. 28, 1886, President Grover Cleveland presiding. The city, reported The World newspaper, "was one vast cheer."

Looks like Billy Carter's gas station in Plains, Ga., is about to be recognized as a national historic landmark. If the U.S. House gives its OK this afternoon to HR 1471, the  National Park Service site honoring President Jimmy Carter will be doubled to include the Billy Carter Service Station museum.