26 July 2006
Conservation Efforts Give Historic American Bison a Future
Action to save species viewed as America’s first environmental success story
Washington -- No North American mammal is identified more closely with the United States than the American bison, popularly known as the buffalo. Its enormous size and overwhelming numbers captured the imagination of early explorers and came to symbolize the exotic allure of the American West.
In the early 20th century, the American bison was poised to follow the mammoth and the wooly rhinoceros into extinction. Its rescue is considered by many to be the United States’ first environmental success story.
In 1875, zoologist William Hornaday, who had traveled extensively seeking American bison for zoos, wrote a book predicting the extinction of the buffalo within two decades. The impending doom of an American icon so galvanized public opinion, especially among Easterners who romanticized the American West, that leading citizens like President Theodore Roosevelt lent their energies to saving the species.
The American Bison Society, with Roosevelt as its honorary president, was founded in 1905. It was one of United States’ first environmental organizations, and helped trigger a broader environmental movement that resulted in creation of the U.S. National Park System. (See related article.)
In 1908, Roosevelt signed a law creating the National Bison Range in Montana. The act set aside rangeland to provide a protected habitat within which wild buffalo herds could be re-established. A wild herd comprising 21 bison was settled in Wyoming in Yellowstone National Park. That herd, now numbering more than 4,000, is the largest group of free-range bison in the United States.
With help from private bison owners, the American Bison Society restocked a number of wildlife preserves, both public and private. By 1929, the group reported 3,385 living animals – far short of the millions in the 1800s, but a conservation success story nonetheless.
Once found in most of Canada and the United States and even in parts of Mexico, the American bison’s wild range now is limited to Yellowstone National Park and other wildlife refuges in the U.S. Midwest and Canada’s Northwest Territory.
The U.S. government manages approximately 6,000 head of bison on federal lands. American Indian tribal authorities manage another 5,000 animals. Between 80 percent and 90 percent of the American bison population is ranched on private land, according to the National Bison Association, a trade organization.
Bison raising recently has become a viable enterprise for small farms and ranches. Selling bison meat has become a $650 million industry, according to the Department of Agriculture (USDA), which predicts bison ranching “could have a small but significant future as an important niche in the livestock market.” Bison meat is a nutrient-dense food higher in protein and lower in fat, cholesterol and calories than other meats, and buffalo tend to be more self-sufficient than domestic cattle. The USDA reported that 12,580 bison were raised on Wyoming ranches in 2002.
Thanks to the efforts of both the public and private sectors, the American bison, a magnificent animal with a major role in U.S. history, seems assured of a place in America’s future as well.
AN ICE-AGE SURVIVOR, U.S. ICON
The American bison belongs to Earth’s megafauna, enormous mammals that thrived during the ice age but mostly died off with the onset of warmer climates and the expansion of forest areas. In Africa and Asia, the elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus and giraffe adapted to the changes; in North America, the American bison was the sole survivor of the age of giant mammals.
The early hunter-gatherers, with primitive hunting techniques and small populations, likely had little effect on the overall numbers of buffalo roaming the American plains. Even as the number of American Indian hunters increased, bison seem to have been harvested in a sustainable manner for economic, cultural and religious reasons.
When the Europeans discovered the New World, prime buffalo habitat covered 3.25 million square kilometers and hosted between 30 million and 60 million American bison. Some ranged well beyond the plains – the Spanish explorer Francisco de Coronado reported “hump-backed cows” covering what is now Arizona in the early 1500s and settlers at Jamestown, Virginia, recorded buffalo sightings in the 1600s.
Explorers Merriwether Lewis and William Clark were overwhelmed by the size of herds they passed during their explorations in the early 1800s. Decades later, author Thomas Farnham, traveling the Santa Fe Trail in 1839 with guide (and later Wild West show producer and performer) Buffalo Bill Cody, found himself in the midst of a herd that covered 3,510 square kilometers, an area nearly the size of Cape Verde.
But the great herds, estimated at 40 million in 1800, had dwindled to a group of less than 600 by 1900. A casualty of U.S. westward expansion, bison were slaughtered by the millions for their skins and tongues (considered a delicacy) and as part of a deliberate strategy by the U.S. Army to deprive warring American Indian tribes of their food source.
The American bison appears on Wyoming’s state flag and on the Department of Interior’s official seal. The buffalo once again graces an American coin, restored to the nickel – on which it appeared in mintings from 1913 until 1938 – by the Bison Nickel Restoration Act of 2004. The new five-cent coins entered circulation March 1, 2005.
