Reversing An Epic Fail: American Bison

The Good News website (bookmark worthy for daily reading) recently shared a story about the first wild bison release in the U.S. There are many herds fenced in public and private bison herds today, although the bison may only encounter a fence line every year or so. Experts say this still alters their natural behavior.

The Blackfeet Indians released 30 bisons onto their tribal lands. This is the first opportunity for this magnificent animal to roam free since being nearly wiped out during pointless massacres back in the 1700-1800s. You can watch the release below for a thought-provoking glimpse of a bison stampede on an open prairie.

A few of my most memorable vanlife trips were the two visits to Theodore Roosevelt National Park in the badlands of South Dakota. The herds there seem more accessible than at Yellowstone National park, making for some amazing nature life moments. Pictures and videos scattered below that I took while there provide some armchair delights of these majestic animals. And for the record, they are bison, not buffalo. Bison are native to North America and Europe, whereas buffalo are African and Asian animals. The buffalo name became popular in print during the 1800s and went uncorrected for a long time. You can read more about this misnaming and other bison facts here.

I visited the park once in my Subaru Outback camper conversion, the second a more comfortable stay in my camper van. Both times bison were numerous, and each filled with memorable moments.

The first visit with the Subaru involved tent camping, and twice I had to walk clear of my campsite to watch a bison herd of ~40 walking through the campground. A bison cow and calf wandered through my campsite and laid down within a few feet of my tent! They stayed for thirty minutes, then moved on. Talking to the camp host later, he said a herd once came through a group of tent sites, spooked, and bolted. One poor camper stayed relaxing in his tent when suddenly all hell broke loose as a stampeding bison's foot snagged his tent lines. Dragging him and his tent about 40 feet, the bison’s foot finally untangled. No doubt saving the man’s life, yet leaving him with one epic nightmare.

On my second camper van visit, I saw a bison herd of ~30 settling in near where I camped. A dozen campers (myself included) had to walk away from our campsites until the herd moved on an hour later. The wait was not a total loss, since we could leisurely watch these noble beasts relax and eat grass.

During these shared moments and dozens of other encounters driving the park roads, the bison seemed tame and docile. Visitors often mistake this ease to mean they’re approachable. With male bisons sometimes reaching 2,000 lbs. or more, would not take much to injure a human getting too close. Despite all the signs and warnings to entering visitors, the park staff told stories of too-close encounters, all the human's fault. I saw more than a few moments when visitor-bison encounters could have easily ended badly. Fortunately, most of the stories ended in only light injuries. Over the years, however, more than a few cars have left the park needing a bit of body work!

The most amazing bison moment I witnessed, however, came on the way to my first visit to Teddy Roosevelt National Park. I stopped to camp at the free Sage Creek Campground (video by other) within the Badlands National Park. Nestled in a valley surrounded by rolling hills and those amazing black hills rocky outcrops, the campground was a large open oval. Inside the oval is a grassy inner circle larger than a football field, yet would make a poor one from the prairie dog village there.

Hiking during the day, I saw several small bison groups of a dozen or fewer animals, and once a lone outcast male. Later that evening, while in the campground preparing dinner, a large bison herd (at least 200, by my estimate) moseyed down the valley toward the campground. Most of the herd stop to graze outside the campground, but about a third wandered into the inner grassy circle inside the campground. Much to the noisy consternation of the prairie dog locals, the bison lingered and munched what grass they could find, occasionally eyeing barking prairie dogs with indifference.

We in the human herd kept our distance, either standing on the ring road around the camps, on picnic tables, or in pickup truck beds. Amazing sight, but the best was yet to come.

With a loud snort from one bull in the group outside the campground, both the bison in the inner campground circle and the group outside broke together into a stampede. In seconds, the thunderous sound of hundreds of pounding hoofs and raising clouds of dust surrounded us in a brief snapshot of old west memories. An uncommon park site (per the ranger I talked to the next day) of a classic bison herd stampede. They head back up the valley from where they first came, and within a few minutes the stampede was over.

The bison stampede experience awed and humbled me. This Smithsonian bison page states bison once roamed North America in herds as a large as a million animals. I imagine witnessing a massive bison herd of hundreds of thousands (or more) roaming the plains (or stampeding) in the 1700-1800s would have been an epic lifetime moment. Today we see paintings and read descriptions, and of course, there are Hollywood movie depictions. But those lack the sounds and smells I experienced that day watching the stampede.

The Good News story that led to this post is certainly a feel-good moment. Through conservation efforts, bison came back from the brink and now number close to 1% of those original pre-settler herds (about 350,000). Even though the 30 released by the Blackfeet Indians is a comparatively trivial number, it is a step in the right direction.