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By Jennifer Winger
Bob Hamilton adjusts his cap and fixes his gaze on the jagged seam of earth and sky on the northern boundary of the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in Oklahoma. From here, waves of prairie roll nearly a dozen miles straight into Kansas.
“Look over that hill,” says Hamilton, who is the director of this 40,000-acre Nature Conservancy preserve. “There’s our gang of outlaws.”
In a fog-bound field a mile away, nearly a thousand bison mill about, probing the ground for grass and sedge. Six feet high at the hump, the animals can weigh up to 2,000 pounds. Some bulls measure nearly 12 feet from nose to tail. Clouds of fine steam erupt around their muzzles as rhythmic hot breath meets the cool prairie air.
Hamilton turns to a loose knot of cowboys standing at the entrance to a red ironwork corral. “It’s time to go out on safari,” he says. “Let’s see if we can catch us some buffs.” The cowboys, buzzing from their morning coffee, lope toward a handful of white pickup trucks parked nearby. They hoot and holler and rev their engines, proving they don’t need horses to have horsepower. Then they peel out onto the prairie, kicking up rocks and dirt.
The trucks careen over the rutted landscape in ragged formation and head straight for the herd. Roused by the noisy trucks, the bison stir from their grazing and begin to trot away, and then to stampede. In no time the trucks are fully surrounded by the animals, sandwiched between a mess of hide and hooves.
The cowboys react quickly, maneuvering their trucks to hem in the herd and to direct it toward the corral. The trucks fishtail, narrowly avoiding one another and the massive animals tearing across the prairie.
Bison can run at speeds of up to 35 mph, and at distances over a mile, they can outlast a racehorse. That’s just one reason why the wranglers at Tallgrass use trucks: Horses may be synonymous with the Old West, but trucks put a protective layer of steel between the cowboys and their one-ton quarry.
Out of the chaos, the corral comes into the cowboys’ view. Two trucks flank the herd, while two more trucks spur on the bison from behind.
When a few bison peel off from the group, Joe Bob Briggs, whose truck is outfitted with a glasspack muffler to give it the sound of a hot rod, makes a hard right and uses the growl of his engine to drive the errant bison back to the herd.
Goaded on by the cowboys, the bison charge through the open gates at ground-trembling speed.
“It ought to be illegal to have this much fun,” howls Briggs, as he hops out of his truck and joins the other cowboys in flushing the last ornery bison into the corral on foot.
But this roundup isn’t just for kicks. The bison at Tallgrass are a key component of an unparalleled restoration experiment. Each fall, the cowboys round up the bison from the preserve’s open plains and funnel them into holding pens, where they wait for a turn in the squeeze chute — a barred hydraulic enclosure that immobilizes the bison for a quick medical exam.
It’s clear that bison need grasslands to survive, but Hamilton suspects that the inverse is also true: These grasslands need bison to really thrive. While both cattle and bison can be used to effectively manage grasslands, Hamilton is working to substantiate just how bison — because of slight differences in diet and behavior — are a better fit for these native prairies.
But he needs more evidence to build a rock-solid case for this theory. That’s one reason he has brought back bison to their old stomping grounds at the preserve, which is home to the largest protected remnant of tallgrass prairie on the planet.
One problem remains, however. Hamilton isn’t really certain that his bison are, in fact, pure bison. Like their prairie habitat, bison have grown less wild since the days before the West was won. Thanks to breeding efforts in the late 19th century, bison are not only treated like livestock; the majority of them may actually have cattle in their blood: Nearly 90 percent of herds sampled so far have at least one animal that has tested positive for cattle genes.
So this year, when the bison are led through the squeeze chute at Tallgrass, their checkup will include more than branding, brucellosis vaccinations and electronic tagging. The wranglers will also harvest DNA samples that will help Hamilton find out whether his prairie experiment is testing out a herd of wild bison or its watered-down genetic cousin: beefalo.
Nature picture credits: Photos © Ann E. Cutting
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