On the windswept plains of Kansas, in central United States, a great and mighty experiment is taking place. It’s on the same lands where just 150 years ago, mass slaughters of bison nearly brought the species to extinction.
Now, it is helping the bison and other wildlife species make a comeback. “The prairie is the most endangered ecosystem in North America,” said Matt Bain, Western Kansas Conservation Program Manager for the Nature Conservancy. “And so, all these native species that depend upon it are worth conserving. No other ecosystem has undergone such conversion and is still threatened.
“There is no more important landscape to preserve.” In the Flint Hills, the Smoky Hills and Osage Hills of America’s heartland, prairie chickens, meadowlark, and Henslow’s sparrows call out to the horizon. Bison dot the prairie like a scene from Frederic Remington’s Old West. They are considered historic grazers.
The 2,000-pound giants walk across ridges and clearings, noses to the ground, biting blades of grass, grunting primordial sounds, deep and guttural, while the prairie birds and insects flit and fly across the grasslands. This is the America early explorers and first Kansans saw. This is the experiment the Nature Conservancy is nurturing. Out here. Out west. There is only wilderness. At night, few man-made lights interrupt the sky’s horizon.
“There are some deep, black spaces out here,” said Bob Hamilton, preservation director for the Nature Conservancy of Oklahoma. The Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, near Pawhuska, is in Oklahoma’s Osage Hills and is the largest protected example of tallgrass prairie in North America at about 40,000 acres and 6,000 buffalo. This year marks the preserve’s 30th anniversary.
The legacy
In all of the symbols of the Old West, none are as iconic as the bison. When early travelers first saw the vast herds of American bison that once filled the Great Plains, they were, at best, flummoxed; overwhelmed by the sheer size and numbers. Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado would write in 1541 when he came through that the Plains were filled with such a quantity of bison “that it is impossible to number them.” Three centuries later, George Martin, a printer and secretary of the Kansas State Historical Society, concluded that being close to the sheer size of the herds sounded like “a continuous roll of thunder.”
No other animal has such a legacy in the United States. For in America, it is the national mammal. And, in Kansas, not only is it the state mammal, but is featured on our state quarter, our state seal and sung about in our state song, “Home on the Range. In North America, the scientific name of the animal is “ Bison bison. ” The word bison is Greek meaning ox-like animal. The American bison is native to North America, South America and Europe – the two subspecies are the plains and wood bison. Buffalo, ( Bubalus bubalis ) such as water buffalo are native to Africa and Asia. However, in the United States, many people use the term buffalo and bison interchangeably, which is technically incorrect.
A culture that decimated herds
More than 25 million to 60 million bison once roamed across the prairies. But for 19th-century American homesteaders and entrepreneurs — who called them “buffalo”—the animals were a nuisance. The bison stood in the way of garden-like farms and the 19th century western mindset favored organized garden over untamed wilderness. Ridding the Great Plains of the bison would be more than a simple act of conquering the wilderness.
It would require removing not only the animals but the people of the prairie. The bison became the spark in cultural conflicts between Plains Indian tribes and the U.S. government.
Many of the tribes saw the buffalo as a sacred animal – using almost all elements of the bison in their daily lives. With the loss of the bison, Plains Indians struggled for survival.
Homesteaders often only saw the bison, the Indians and the seas of grass as obstacles.
“There was only the enormous, empty prairie, with grasses blowing in waves of light and shadow across it, and the great blue sky above it,” Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote of her family’s homesteading experience in Kansas in “Little House on the Prairie.” Immigrants, Civil War veterans, women and former slaves all came to the Great Plains out of a sense of starting over.
Some walked. Some came by covered wagon. Others rode on trains. In their path, stood the great herds of bison and endless prairie. The federal government launched a campaign to eradicate the animals following the Civil War. In less than 20 years, the buffalo culture was replaced by cow-towns and cowboys.
Bring back the bison By the 1890s, many of the Native American tribes that had populated the Great Plains had been relocated to Oklahoma and the ranks of the buffalo had been reduced to less than a thousand.
The last buffalo killed in Kansas was in April 1887 in Cheyenne County. In the late 19th century, C.J. “Buffalo” Jones, a Garden City, Kansas buffalo hunter and promoter, was credited with saving the animal from extinction. He also was among several ranchers who tried crossing cattle and bison to create the “cattalo.”
He captured a dozen wild buffalo and began building his own herd to sell to parks and zoos. He became friends with President Teddy Roosevelt and was appointed the first game warden of Yellowstone National Park. Slowly, the numbers grew.
In recent years, genetic testing has shown that some cattle genes appear to be present in more than 95 percent of bison tested. However, there are still some bison considered genetically pure of domestic cattle – those include bison from the Wind Cave bison herd in South Dakota which was initially started from 14 bison from the New York Zoological Society. The Nature Conservancy is currently working in partnership with Wind Cave to form a dozen satellite herds of the genetically pure animals across the United States.
There are approximately 362,000 bison in North America, according to National Bison Association website.
The Flint Hills projects
In North America, a huge sea of grass and wildflowers once stretched from Northern Texas through Manitoba. It has largely been plowed up, paved over or built upon. Between two and four of the nation’s prairie remains.
And, much of it is in the Flint Hills of Kansas and the Osage Hills of Oklahoma. The Konza Prairie Biological Station in northeastern Kansas is an 8,600-acre research prairie lab. Since the 1970s, it has examined the three main drivers that lead to healthy prairie and maintenance – grazing, fire and variable continental climate changes.
Its mission is to understand what’s happening on the prairie, preserve what’s left and do outreach and education with the public. The word Konza is named after the Kaw or Kansa Indians for whom the state of Kansas is named. “Mostly, what we have found is that prairies before Europeans came through were likely mosaics,” said Eva Horn, assistant director of the Konza station. She has her doctorate in behavioral ecology. The Konza station, located south of Manhattan, has a herd of 400 buffalo that was originally part of a herd established at Fort Riley, Horn said. Its DNA has some cattle genetics.
The Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve near Strong City has a herd that varies between 75 to 100 head of buffalo. But the genetics in these Flint Hills bison are descended from Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota.
The Nature Conservancy has a goal to build a herd of genetically pure bison with more than 1,000 animals – healthy reproductive adult bison. “The reason we want to get to that level is to maintain genetic diversity for the long haul,” said Brian Obermeyer, landscape programs manager for The Nature Conservancy at the Tallgrass Prairie preserve near Strong City.
“This is an obtainable goal,” Obermeyer said. “We are not that far off in building the herd to that size.” So, what’s happened to the prairie since buffalo once dotted it by the numbers? Nearly all of it has been gobbled up by other uses – farm land, feedlots, towns, highways, oil fields, fences and wind turbines.
In these parks, the Nature Conservancy is developing partnerships with area ranchers and communities. Its doing research to compare differences with other grass-eaters, such as cattle – and the impact the animals have on the grasslands.
“I think in the past we have overexaggerated how much superior the bison are versus cattle,” Obermeyer said. “There are a lot of similarities. Bison are 95 percent grass-eaters. What that means is that they are going to be a little gentler on some of the plants than cattle might be. But cattle can be managed in such a way that it doesn’t have as much impact.” Bison create wallows, which are small depressions in the land when they roll on their backs to scratch, deter biting flies and help shed fur. Those wallows can be temporary wetlands when rain come. “They have the potential to create more wildlife benefits,” Obermeyer said.
Western Kansas partnership
In western Kansas at the Smoky Valley Ranch, lesser prairie chickens and quail call out along with western meadowlarks.
The 17,000-acre ranch borders Little Jerusalem, a new state park that features more than 250 acres of giant limestone formations. The land’s history dates back more than 85 million years ago to when this part of Kansas was a huge inland sea. Both the ranch and the park are home to ferruginous hawks, migrating golden eagles, pronghorn antelope, cliff kites and prairie dogs.
The ranch has a bison herd of 200 animals – from Wind Cave — that roam over 4,000 acres. “This is the kind of place we hope will inspire people to think about how important and unique the prairie is,” said Matt Bain, the Western Kansas Conservation Program Manager for the Conservancy.
“As an eco-system, it draws attention to how impressive and how many treasures there are out here on the prairie,” Bain said. “Little Jerusalem is breath-taking, and the plants and animals out here are the same way. They are all worth conserving.”
The prairie in the Flint Hills is mostly tall grasses. But the prairie in western Kansas has short and mixed grasses. One of the premier animals besides the bison on the prairie is the prairie chicken. Once billed the “Prairie Chicken Capital of the World,” the Flint Hills now hold dwindling numbers of the birds. The prairie chickens are often an indicator of the health of the prairie, Bain said. Annual prairie burning, close grazing, invasive trees, and the encroachment of civilization are all factors in their decline.
Another animal that has become a keystone species is the prairie dog.“The prairie dogs and their presence indicate a lot of biological diversity – many other species depend on that habitat for their survival,” Bain said. Included in the prairie dog habitat has been the re-introduction of blackfooted ferrets on the conservancy property. Bison fit into the mix as one of the three ecological drivers in maintaining the prairie – grazing, fire and weather, which preferably, out west, means prolonged dry periods, Bain said.
The ranch also manages in roughly 13,000 acres a herd of 800 cow/calf pairs each year. But the most important work the Nature Conservancy is doing, Bain said, is developing partnerships. The philosophy of the Old West applies on the preserves, Bain said. “You have to work with your neighbors,” he said. “You can’t go about conserving what’s left of the native prairie without the relationship with other ranchers. Neighbors are more important than somebody that is a hundred miles away. Trust is important. You’ve got to make sure what you are doing is not negatively affecting your neighbor. That relationship is critical for what we are doing.”
Preserving ‘a living ark’
Oklahoma’s Bob Hamilton said The Nature Conservancy’s successful formula for preserving the prairie is recognizing diversity. “We have catalogued about 760 different plant species on our property,” Hamilton said. “And, I think, only about 20 percent of those species are the grasses. The rest of the 80 some percent of plant species are broadleaf plants, wildflowers, what some people call weeds – to me, a weed is a judgement. They are all part of the ecosystem.” The more diversity there is with plant species, Hamilton said, the more diversity there is with insects, birds and mammals such as bison. And, it is all about keeping an eye to the future.
What is now the bread basket of America once was the tallgrass prairie. The wheat fields of Kansas, the corn fields of Nebraska and Iowa were once where big bluestem, little bluestem, switchgrass, and Indian grasses waved across the horizon.
Those grasses created the backbone of the prairie, Hamilton said. “We are all about building a living ark and maintaining all these different habitat types so all these species can keep coming along on the ride with us,” he said.
The prairie, Hamilton said, is all about space.
It’s about an unfettered horizon.
And, it is about inspiration.
“I mean, if you are not inspired, you are not alive,” Hamilton said.
