42: Bison
I write to you from Arapahoe, Ute, and Cheyenne land. I am interested in learning about the different animals that live in the place where I was born. I want to mention that biological classification as taught by western science has its roots in racism, sexism, and transphobia – here’s a good explainer about why.
Bison (Bison bison) are only distantly related to the buffalo, and they are the largest land mammal in North America.
I had to add “land” in there after a discussion with someone who tried to “well actually” me that orcas live on the North American plate and therefore…
I have been struggling with writing this one (clearly – it’s taken me several days!) because there is just so much to say. Eventually I would up making a list of short things that struck me as interesting.
I’d start with this video, which is about the partnership between the Eastern Shoshone and the National Wildlife Federation to restore bison to Shoshone land.
The western part of North America, especially the Great Plains, were once covered with unimaginably massive bison herds – as one person says in that video above, “We had our own Serengeti and we annihilated it as a means to annihilate the Native people who were here.” It is hard to imagine, but when we look at the Plains landscape today – like driving through eastern Colorado – we are seeing a ghost town, an entire ecological world that evolved to live in symbiosis with massive groups of massive animals who are no longer there. The European-origin cattle who now populate much of that region are indiscriminate grazers who destroy native vegetation and allow intrusive plant life like the invasive Russian thistle – the iconic tumbleweed of the “Wild West”, not a native plant! – to take hold. Bison walk differently than cattle, and don’t trample stream beds the way cattle do; they also require less water and can survive in the desert-like conditions that characterize much of the region without the help of intensive, manmade irrigation. Most of all, the Native people of the Plains lived their lives in concert with the bison, traveling with the herds and making their livelihoods in a relationship with them. People of European origin moving westward deliberately hunted bison nearly to extinction in order to destroy the Native way of life. Other Europeans, like the infamous Lord St. George Gore, hunted them excessively for sport. Gore is said to have killed 2000 bison on his own, along with thousands of other Coloradan animals, including elk and bears. In a frenzy of excess and bloodlust, he left the carcasses to rot.
Oh by the way, there’s a really beautiful mountain range named after Gore, and you can support changing that name to a Ute word here.
Growing up in the Denver area, I did not realize how rare bison are today, because every time we drove west on I-70, I saw the herd at Genesee. I didn’t know then that it was one of the earliest bison conservation efforts. Genesee Park was the City of Denver’s first mountain park, and in 1914 they brought in two bison from the Denver Zoo, followed by a few animals from the last remaining wild bison herd in the world in Yellowstone National Park. Because of how nearly extinct bison were in the early 20th century, most of the bison alive in the world today have cattle genetics from cross-breeding attempts to both domesticate and save the species. Not so the herd that still lives today at Genesee:
“Today, the appearance of the Genesee Park bison, with their prominent shoulder humps (like those you might see on the back of a nickel), along with DNA testing, indicate that the herd is indeed a rare vestige of the original American bison. Their behavior shows few cattle traits (rare for bison), and they engage in what is regarded as ancient bison behavior: They’ll form a circle with bulls on the outside if a coyote approaches, and if one member of the herd is cut, the other members will roll in the blood, presumably so predators don’t know which among them is weakened.”
Also, someone has a really cool job:
“The majestic beasts are managed by Denver Mountain Parks. Supervisor Matt Brown, who lives in a historic 1860 home on site at Genesee Park, cares for the animals daily and is on-call 24/7 to tend to their needs.”
Bison are ruminants, and like cattle, they have four stomachs. The humps on their back are for knocking heavy snow aside in order to forage. They migrate across the landscape because of their grazing habits, and are also drawn to recent burn areas because they are denser in fast-growing grasses rather than long-growing wood species the bison would have to dodge around to get their meals. Bison take a very long time to digest – it takes food 80 hours to travel through their digestive system! This means that they can eat grasses with relatively low nutritional value because their bodies are able to extract every last bit of food value.
Here’s the herd at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge with the Denver skyline behind them: