Bison: Portrait of an Icon by Audrey Hall Essay by Chase Reynolds Ewald

Author:Audrey Hall Essay by Chase Reynolds Ewald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Bison-West (US)-Pictorial works 
Essays
Publisher: Gibbs Smith
Published: 2021-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

O’Brien’s son-in-law, Colton Jones, wears many hats at Wild Idea. He’s in charge of procurement and the mobile abattoir; with his wife, Jilian, he runs the Cheyenne River Ranch’s 1,000-head herd on 50,000 acres near Badlands National Park. “We want to raise bison in the most favorable condition for bison, in big open country,” Jones says. “We use them as a rehabilitation mechanism after the land had been used for industrial agriculture in the ‘30s and ‘40s. We introduce grass species and we use bison as a tool.”

Jones, who has a degree in biology, says in ten years on the Cheyenne River Ranch he’s seen a flourishing of wildlife diversity and density. “It’s been fun to see everything evolve and watch the land change beneath your feet,” he says.

We never used to see magpies; now we see them daily. Short-tail grouse are much more plentiful. Plants species diversity has increased; there are more native grasses and in drought years they do better. And the population density of wildlife has increased [such as with] pronghorns and coyotes and prairie dogs, which keep the grass consistently shooting up with new growth. Wallows [made by the bison] provide a place for water to pool and you see more wildlife around those areas. Even if a puddle is there for just a couple of weeks, it provides a place for a duck to stop on a fly-through. A lot of that is pasture management, but I believe that putting a keystone species back on the land is like putting a missing piece back into something that was broken.

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