November 2, 2009, 3:27 pm
A long-gone species returned home Friday, not with a thunder of
hooves, but with muffled snorts and a short gallop from muddy pen to
grassy range.
A baker’s dozen of bison had been plucked from a herd of 500 in South Dakota and trucked to east-central Kansas 10 days before.
Once
here, they were crowded in a snug pen on the pasture that would be
their new home. The time in tight quarters was intended to bond them as
a new mini-herd and get them accustomed to the sights, sounds and
smells of the grassland around them.
Then in groups of threes and fours they were set free in their new home to, as the song says, roam.
“This
is probably the first time bison have been on this ground in 140
years,” said Alan Pollom, the Kansas director of The Nature Conservancy.
Although
the preserve is run by the National Park Service, much of the property
remains in the private ownership of The Nature Conservancy. The
nonprofit group paid about $50,000 to buy the 13 animals, ship them
south from Wind Cave National Park and circle the grazing land with an
electric “hot wire” and barbed wire to keep the bison from charging
into nearby cattle pasture.
From a biologic perspective, the
bison add a critical variable to restoring the land to a more natural
state. The brawny beasts work as sort of natural prairie tenderizers,
trampling taller grasses to allow shorter varieties to bloom, bruising
the ground in summer dust baths that turn to insect breeding grounds
when the rains turn those depressions to puddles, and scattering their
own special fertilizer.
