Ask Bennington alumni to recount their most remarkable tales from their college years, and you're likely to hear yarns about outrageously imaginative faculty and fellow students; ingenious and unlikely social events; the "aha" moments that shaped their own work and lives.

But you'll also hear tales from across the country and across the globe-set in political campaigns and research laboratories, law offices and art museums, hospitals and theaters, newspapers and national parks. That's because, for each year they attend the College, Bennington students must go out into the world to complete seven-week winter internships in areas that fascinate them and complement their studies.

Field Work Term, going strong since the College's founding, brings new stories each year. Here's one such tale from FWT 2006. Stay tuned for more over the next few weeks.

Owen Lubozynski '07: Buffalo Field Campaign, Missoula, Montana

This winter, 943 wild buffalo were killed in the vicinity of Yellowstone National Park--further dwindling the population of "the last wild, genetically pure, unfenced bison left in the country," according to the Buffalo Field Campaign, where Owen Lubozynski '07 spent Field Work Term 2006.

Lubozynski was there to help document the hazing and killing of the buffalo, which occurs yearly as the animals migrate over park borders in order to survive the winter. The Montana Department of Livestock (MDOL), which coordinates the hunts (or "buffalo management operations"), believes the animals could transmit a disease called brucellosis to cattle grazing nearby. The Buffalo Field Campaign, a grassroots coalition founded by Native American and non-Native environmentalists, argues that there is not a single documented case of wild buffalo transmitting brucellosis to livestock.

The campaign to protect the buffalo and their natural habitat is carried out on many fronts: documenting actions against the animals, working with local residents to create "Buffalo Safe Zones," and engaging in grassroots efforts to raise awareness of the issue. Lubozynski--who spent a previous FWT at Farm Sanctuary in California--joined other volunteers in videotaping and photographing the buffalo hunts carried out by MDOL and other agencies.

"By the end of my era in the BFC cabin and on the buttes and bluffs where we patrolled," Lubozynski writes, "I thought of the group's people as the figures of tall tales. A modern mythology is spreading over the landscape there, and they are the new legend-keepers of the buffalo and some of the main characters in their stories. It was at once thrilling and sobering to walk with them and bear witness to the lives of the great bison.

"I have left behind a small legend of my own. One day a youth group from the Blackfoot tribe witnessed me attempting to cross-country ski in the woods. I was urgently trying to follow a hunt that I was photographing, and the gun-shots jarred what little balance I had right out of me. One of the teenagers filmed about five minutes of this epic struggle, and their leader honored me with a new name: Falls in Snow. That name waits for me, for the time I will return to drawls and the high plains of Montana (and how can I not?). I cherish it. It commemorates a period when I fell boldly, knew pain, and lunged forward to see and to record, so I could tell, so no death would be forgotten."

Click here to browse the Campus Feature Stories archive.