Eat Bison to Save Bison

Gastropod

This episode explores the dramatic history and ecological significance of the North American bison, tracing their journey from near extinction

Key takeaways

• Bison act as ecosystem engineers by creating wallows that serve as breeding pools for amphibians.
• The near-extinction of bison was driven by the high demand for hides (for industrial belts) and tongues during the railway boom.

Main topics

• History of bison near-extinction
• Ecological role of bison in the prairie

Notable quotes

They are the species that represents us as Americans.

Conclusion

While bison numbers have recovered from their lowest point, they remai

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:02) Oh, there they are. Oh, there are some babies, or little ones anyway. Nikki and I were in the backseat of a truck in Custer State Park in South Dakota, and this was the moment we spotted our very first bison. I'll Speaker 8 (0:15) see if I can get in front of them here since they're kind of on the move. Speaker 5 (0:19) Previously, my only acquaintance with bison was in the form of bison burgers and bison bolognese and other such tasty meals. But we had come to South Dakota to see real, live bison in this place that has been so central to our relationship with them over Speaker 2 (0:34) time. all because we wanted to tell a particular story. The story we want to tell, it's how an animal that practically defined Speaker 3 (0:42) the North American landscape and was absolutely critical to Indigenous communities, how the bison nearly disappeared, how they were brought back, and whether they can play the same role for the people in Speaker 2 (0:52) the land that once depended on them ever again. By the end, we promise you two will be swapping your beef burger for a bison burger. Speaker 5 (1:00) Although black bean burgers are also fine with us. This episode is supported in part by the Alpha Peace Loan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology and Economics. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Speaker 8 (1:15) I'm Mitch Purse, and this week on Confessions of an Elite Athlete, I'm sitting down with Matt Fries, goalkeeper for the U.S. men's national team and New York City FC. We discuss how to prepare for one of the biggest moments of your life. You can hear it all by listening to Confessions of an Elite Athlete on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 8 (1:40) Hey, it's me, Will Anderson, host of the new Music History Podcast, Monday Music Club. And on this week's episode, we're talking about pop music with the boys from one of my favorite podcasts, Switched on Pop. Charlie Harding and Nate Sloan are two of the smartest and sharpest minds chatting about music right now. And we got into how they got their start, what they love about pop music, and some recommendations on what we should be listening to. It's a great conversation. These guys are just... brilliant and you can find it by searching for Monday Music Club wherever you get your podcasts. Oh Speaker 3 (2:12) my Speaker 2 (2:13) gosh, she's right here. Is that bad? Is that okay? A Speaker 5 (2:16) youngish bison, it was maybe the size of a large pony, it had come right up to the back of the truck and was licking the wheels. If we'd have Speaker 2 (2:25) reached our hands out of the window, we'd have been able to touch it. Speaker 2 (2:29) Jeff Martin is assistant professor Speaker 3 (2:31) of Speaker 2 (2:31) bison biology and Speaker 3 (2:32) management at South Dakota State University Extension, and he explained one of the reasons the bison were so into the truck tires. The Speaker 1 (2:39) dust that's on the truck from the road has got minerals in it, so they're going to try and seek that out. And so they'll actually be licking the salt off of the vehicle as well because they're also seeking salt. Speaker 3 (2:51) But apparently these young bison were after more than just nutrients. That's Speaker 8 (2:55) a yearling. She's just curious. Your yearlings and two-year-olds, they're curious. They're young, wondering what we're doing. So lots of times they'll come up. They'll be the first ones to come up just out of curiosity. Speaker 5 (3:09) Chad Kramer is the bison herd manager at Custer State Park, as well as a private producer of bison under the name Kramer Buffalo. And although Chad and Jeff were totally cool, We were kind of freaking out about how close we were to the bison. We Speaker 2 (3:25) were right in the middle of a herd of about a couple of dozen, mostly mothers and their calves. I love watching it nurse. There's a little baby nursing as we're sitting here. Speaker 3 (3:33) Yeah, Speaker 8 (3:33) there's the far one out there is actually a pretty young calf that looks like it's probably just a couple weeks old. Speaker 3 (3:39) So they're not threatened by us right now with all the calves? Aren't they usually dangerous? Speaker 1 (3:46) The one young calf is furthest away. Mom has done that on purpose. Speaker 3 (3:51) I know I sounded really anxious, but you see signs everywhere in Custer that bison are dangerous wild animals and you should keep your distance. In fact, literally only weeks before we visited the park, a couple had been slowly following some bison bulls that they saw as they were hiking, and a bull turned, charged at the woman, and killed her. We Speaker 5 (4:08) were definitely not about to get Speaker 2 (4:10) out of the truck. And also, Chad and Jeff are the bison experts, so that reassured us. But still, we were... Barely breathing. But we were also reveling in being surrounded by Speaker 3 (4:20) all those bison and the landscape itself. The park sprawls over tens of thousands of acres in western South Dakota. The bison near us were wandering on the rolling golden slopes. There were bursts of wildflowers here and there. Nearby, also in Custer, the grasslands give way to the mountains of the Black Hills, where towering gray spires peek out from evergreen spruce and pine trees. The Speaker 4 (4:41) Black Hills are a sacred area for the Lakota. and our creation story comes from here as well. Zincala Rivera, Speaker 5 (4:50) she goes by Kala. She's Lakota, and she is a range ecologist for the Tonka Fund, a non-profit dedicated to bringing bison Speaker 2 (4:57) back to native land. Custer State Park has played and still plays a key role in the bison story. Speaker 8 (5:02) Custer Park started out as the Custer Forest and Game Preserve initially, and the bison were brought back in 1913. Speaker 5 (5:12) Chad also told us that Custer is known as the birthplace of the modern bison meat industry. It was the first place to auction bison for meat in modern times, and it still does today. But like Kala Speaker 3 (5:22) said, the relationship between bison and humans here goes back thousands of years. Rachel Hunter, she's the operations manager for the Tonka Fund. She told us Wind Cave National Park, which is also in Custer County, legend goes that Speaker 2 (5:34) this is where the Lakota people came from and where they first encountered bison. Rachel and Kala told us there are a bunch of different stories. stories around how Speaker 5 (5:42) connected the bison and Lakota have been from the beginning. Speaker 7 (5:45) Our people and the buffalo, we always consider the buffalo our relatives, so we don't think of them as just an animal. Speaker 4 (5:53) With native people, our life source was through the buffalo, providing food, clothing, even shelter. So they're very connected for generations and millennia. Speaker 8 (6:08) The buffalo meant everything to our people. They were our Walmart, our store. It was like everything, food, clothing, everything revolved around the buffalo. Speaker 3 (6:17) Bam Brewer runs the Charging Buffalo Meat House. It's a bison processing facility, and it's on the Pine Ridge Reservation, which today is the home of the Lakota. Speaker 5 (6:25) For millennia in America, Native peoples hunted bison to provide for really almost all their needs. This was happening all over North America because there were Speaker 4 (6:34) herds of bison everywhere. And so if you were to come across a herd, it would be very, very large, like thousands. And they would move in those groups across the country, over North America, Alaska, Canada, Mexico. They were in the southeast, southwest. And so what people don't realize is... how important they were to this land. And not just the Great Plains. It's hard to imagine, Speaker 3 (7:05) but they really were everywhere. West coast, southeast, everywhere. There are dozens of towns in America named Buffalo. There's one in South Carolina and Alabama and West Virginia. And of course, there's Buffalo and upstate New York. And like Kala says, Speaker 5 (7:17) there were lots of bison. Exact estimates vary, but historians agree there were tens of millions of bison moving around the continent in these huge herds. Speaker 6 (7:27) Someone who has done the math has estimated that's more than enough to circle the... equator if they were laid nose to tail. Michelle Speaker 3 (7:34) Nihouse is the author of the book Beloved Beasts Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction. You Speaker 8 (7:39) know, you read historical Speaker 3 (7:40) accounts where they say the hills were just... rolling black and brown. Explorers and colonists said on cold days, you could see the cloud of their breath rising from the plains before you could even see the animals. The pounding of their hooves was so loud you could hear it from miles away. People often mistook it for an oncoming thunderstorm. Speaker 5 (7:58) Basically, when Europeans first saw the bison, they were pretty gobsmacked. They started calling these big, shaggy creatures buffalo after the buffaloes they'd seen elsewhere. the water buffalo that makes mozzarella in Italy and the Cape buffalo in Africa. These other buffalo do have a little hump and a little shag going on. Not as impressive as the bison, but still. Speaker 1 (8:19) They are not very closely related to bison or modern cattle even. It's quite a distant relationship. However, they do have some characteristics of their skeleton and their features that look... Kind of like bison. So Speaker 3 (8:35) people started to call these North American animals buffalo. Speaker 1 (8:38) Even though around 1758 or so, Carl Linnaeus of the Linnaean taxonomic system, he coined the name bison for these animals. The Speaker 5 (8:49) word bison is related to the ancient Greek word for ox, and there was in fact a European bison already, mostly found in Eastern Europe. Linnaeus recognized that the American shaggy bovine was more closely related to Speaker 2 (9:02) this Eastern European bison than it was to the buffalo side of the family. But in any case, the word buffalo had already been used for a couple hundred years or so Speaker 3 (9:09) at that time, and so it stuck. Nikki and I are using the word bison. A lot of people call them buffalo. We're all talking about the same animal. And bison and their cape buffalo and water buffalo cousins are all in the greater bovine family, Speaker 2 (9:22) along with our domesticated cows. But for my money, and for Jeff's, the bison. are by far the coolest of the entire family. I Speaker 1 (9:30) mean, they're incredibly unique animals. They look like they're something straight out of the Ice Age. Speaker 2 (9:36) They're massive Speaker 3 (9:37) animals. The larger of the males can grow to about six feet tall and about nine feet long. The Speaker 5 (9:42) other thing that is a very distinctive feature of bison is their unique hairstyle. Speaker 1 (9:47) They're very shaggy in the front half, from the shoulders. all the way through their head. They're very long hair. They're called a cape, actually. And that cape is kept on most of the year. From the armpit all the way up through the chest and their neck is going to be very long hairs, probably like somewhere between four and eight inches long, some of these hairs. They're called guard hairs. Speaker 3 (10:14) And what are those guard hairs good for? Bison don't sweat very much, but the few sweat glands they have are secreted right into their guard hairs and coat those hairs to help them become waterproof. So Speaker 1 (10:24) it becomes a slicker for them. They're always wearing a nice, arable, but waterproof slick. And so it's really helpful in... Like today, it's going to be maybe close to 90 degrees today. It can get up to 100, 100 plus here. But then when a storm comes through, it's going to drop that temperature down to 60s and 50s within minutes as it blows through. And getting wet is a quick way to lose a lot of your heat, especially out here when you have nothing to protect you. So this is their protection. All Speaker 5 (10:57) of these distinctive aspects of the bison look. They're all to do with how the bison is adapted to its environment. But the other super cool thing about bison is the way they actually shape the landscape around them. Speaker 3 (11:10) We got out of the truck and headed over to see a very clear example of one of the ways that bison affect the land. Speaker 1 (11:15) Yeah, so we actually have two wallows. Three wallows that are right next to us. A Speaker 5 (11:20) wallow is a shallow, compacted dirt patch. It's a little bit of a depression in the grassland. Two of the ones we saw were old ones starting to get grassed over again, but we were lucky enough to see signs of a newish wallow in the Speaker 1 (11:32) process of being created. So you can actually see a scrape right here. That was a horn. that got horned through here. That's how they're excavating. They put their head down, turn it to the side, get the horn up against it, and start to scrape, digging up. Speaker 3 (11:46) Bison create these little shallow dirt pools so they can roll around in the dust to get rid of flies. As we watched, one actually started using a wallow that was a bit further away from us. Speaker 1 (11:55) And there she goes. Speaker 1 (11:58) See all that flying off of her? All that dust? That's the clay and the silt that she's picked up from the ground. And the wind took some of it away, but a lot