TALLGRASS PRAIRIE NATIONAL PRESERVE, Kan. | 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.
Then in groups of threes and fours they were set free in their new home to, as the song says, roam.
“This is probably the first time bison have been on this ground in 140 years,” said Alan Pollom, the Kansas director of The Nature Conservancy.
Although the preserve is run by the National Park Service, much of the property remains in the private ownership of The Nature Conservancy. The nonprofit group paid about $50,000 to buy the 13 animals, ship them south from Wind Cave National Park and circle the grazing land with an electric “hot wire” and barbed wire to keep the bison from charging into nearby cattle pasture.
From a biologic perspective, the bison add a critical variable to restoring the land to a more natural state. The brawny beasts work as sort of natural prairie tenderizers, trampling taller grasses to allow shorter varieties to bloom, bruising the ground in summer dust baths that turn to insect breeding grounds when the rains turn those depressions to puddles, and scattering their own special fertilizer.
“Their trampling and wallowing opens up the grass canopy,” said John Blair, a Kansas State University grassland ecologist. He is also director of the Konza Prairie Long-Term Ecological Research site near Manhattan, where another small herd has helped pound the landscape into a more natural state.
“If you compare the land with and without grazers,” Blair said, “you find the grazers bring diversity” — and with that a heartier and more native environment.
There was, of course, a time when the ground shook under the bison thundering across the continent. Estimates of their numbers in North America run from 30 million to 70 million in the late 1500s. By the start of the 20th century, perhaps fewer than 1,000 survived, hunted by whites for tongues and humps, hides and sport — and to break the Plains Indians of their way of life.
The persnickety take exception to the American insistence on calling them buffalo — that’s a different family populated by the African cape buffalo or the Asian water buffalo. Our bison are more akin to cattle and goats.
They are, indeed, close relatives to Guernsey and Angus breeds. Some surviving bison were bred with cattle to keep them going and, in an experiment with uneven results, to develop a new line of livestock.
A handful — a group no larger than the fractional herd now trodding the Tallgrass preserve — were caged for display at New York’s Bronx Zoo.
Their captivity proved to be a serendipitous incarceration. That genetic pool never mixed with their crossbred cousins. So when, decades later, biologists set out to establish the herd that grazes at Wind Cave, the world still possessed purebred bison.
Today the continent is home to roughly 450,000 bison, a little less than half of them in Canada. Most are destined for the dinner table. The U.S. slaughtered 70,000 last year, double what it had five years before.
To reach Scott Canon, call 816-234-4754 or send e-mail to scanon@kcstar.com.
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