Restoring the Bison, Reviving the Prairie

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:00:00] So Peter, when you were a younger guy, did you ever play the video game, Oregon Trail? [00:00:05]

Peter Gros: [00:00:06] When I was a kid, we really didn't have video games. But I am familiar with the actual Oregon Trail that runs from Missouri to Oregon. Before the Intercontinental Railroad was completed in 1869, that trail was one of the only ways to get across North America on land. [00:00:24]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:00:28] The video game I used to play as a kid was definitely based on the real-life Oregon Trail. And one of the most memorable parts was traveling across the plains, seeing computer-generated images of tens of thousands of bison stretching to the horizon. [00:00:42]

Peter Gros: [00:00:43] The real Oregon Trail may have opened up the continent, but it had some devastating consequences for wildlife, including bison. [00:00:50]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:00:51] Today, unless you go to Yellowstone National Park or a few small corners of the American West, you'd be hard-pressed to see any wild bison. But a group of indigenous tribes and nonprofit organizations in Montana are working to change that. [00:01:04]

Dr. Daniel Kinka: [00:01:05] We went from like no land at all to more than a half a million acres between deeded and leased land set aside for conservation. Our bison herd has gone from zero to somewhere between eight and nine hundred animals. Other wildlife have rebounded now that they've had the space to do so. [00:01:20]

Peter Gros: [00:01:24] Today we take a look at a unique effort to repopulate the Great Plains and restore America's national mammal, the bison, to its natural habitat. I'm Peter Gross, wildlife expert and educator. [00:01:36]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:01:37] And I'm wildlife ecologist Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant, and this is Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, The Podcast. Episode 10, Restoring the Bison, Reviving the Prairie. Before we get too far into this episode, Peter, I have a question for you. Do you say bison or buffalo? [00:02:04]

Peter Gros: [00:02:05] I think the correct answer is bison. But many people over the years have referred to bison as buffalo. [00:02:10]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:02:12] Well, I actually asked an expert the same question. [00:02:15]

Dr. Daniel Kinka: [00:02:16] My opinion, they're synonymous. If you're a scientist, bison is the technically correct term, and if you're reading science papers, you will see bison. Bison's Latin name is actually bison bison, the plain subspecies is bison bison- bison so you're literally using their scientific name when you're calling them a bison [00:02:32]

Peter Gros: [00:02:33] This is Dr. Daniel Kinka, the Director of Rewilding at American Prairie, a non-profit organization focused on protecting prairie grasslands in Montana's northern Great Plains. [00:02:44]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:02:45] So believe it or not, Daniel Kinka and I actually go way back to when we were both early career scientists and had research fellowships together to do work on wildlife on the American Prairie. So, it was really fun to engage him in an interview here for this podcast because here we are years later still doing wildlife conservation and the American Prairie is doing better than ever. In fact, among the animals that they're reconnecting with the land are bison. Millions of which used to cover a huge portion of the North American West, from Mexico to Canada. [00:03:18]

Peter Gros: [00:03:19] But by the late 1800s, less than 1,000 bison were left in North America. As the bison disappeared, due to senseless slaughter and westward expansion, so did the prairie they depended on, because as it turns out, the prairie depends on the bison too. [00:03:35]

Dr. Daniel Kinka: [00:03:36] We think of bison as an ecosystem engineer, which is a type of keystone species, right? And what that means is they're literally by, just by existing, by doing what bison do on the landscape, they are creating the conditions, the habitats, the homes for other species that would not exist were it not for the bison. [00:03:54]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:03:55] Thanks to conservation efforts spearheaded in the early 1900s, bison managed to escape extinction. But that feedback loop between bison and the prairie was broken. American Prairie aims to fix that. [00:04:06]

Dr. Daniel Kinka: [00:04:07] American Prairie, formerly American Prairie Reserve, is an area of central Montana with kind of miraculously intact temperate short grass prairies. It's been largely untilled, which is to say it's never been turned into a farm of any sort, which makes it very valuable for conservation and preservation of biodiversity, right? So American Prairie the organization is trying to acquire private land in the region surrounding an existing national wildlife refuge and amass a huge amount of space that can be set aside for biodiversity management. It's not there yet, but we hope we get it to about 3.2 million acres. That's one and a half Yellowstone National Parks about the size of the state of Connecticut. But that's also the minimum amount of space that we think is necessary ecologically to have meaningful populations of things like bison and grizzly bears and wolves, et cetera, et cetera. What American Prairie offers is this message of hope. Which is to say, hey, the Great Plains were wild, really by anybody's definition, 200 years ago, right? And all the animals that called the place home still exist, if not on the prairie, somewhere in Montana, right, like the closeness to wildness feels, we're just so close to it, and it makes the work feel doable. [00:05:24]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:05:25] Earlier on, you talked about bison as ecosystem engineers. So, can you explain all the ways that bison impact and are connected to other living beings across the prairie? [00:05:34]

Dr. Daniel Kinka: [00:05:35] So bison are really incredible because they do this in like multiple ways over. The easy one is like an abundant food source, right? For like what was probably their apex predator, human beings are hunting bison and living off of bison, but also things like wolves are hunting by bison. But then there's all this other stuff that they do. Their hooves are kind of shaped in a very specific way that like probably kind of like tills up or scours the surface of the prairie in a way that helps seeds get a start. They do this thing called wallowing where they roll on their back probably to like, get off parasites or little bugs or something like that. We don't really know. It has something to do with the rut too. The males roll around in their own pee to make themselves apparently more attractive. But those depressions that they create by wallowing, they gather water in the springtime, and they turn into like these little mini ponds.

And that literally changes the vegetative community, the species of plants that grow around them, and then become these little like breeding colonies for like certain amphibians and different invertebrates. Bison wool is incredibly good at insulating, right? So, they've done research that shows birds that line their nests with bison wool versus something else. Have much higher chick survival, right? It keeps those eggs warmer and makes them more likely to hatch. And the big one that a lot of ecologists talk about is bison growing or managing for like a mosaic of habitat heterogeneity. The way you can think about this is bison graze in a way that's not predictable and not even. So, imagine your front yard is like way overgrown because you haven't mowed it in like six months. If you took your lawn mower and you just mowed a stripe across your front yard, right. You would now have kind of two things. You'd have like a lane of short grass with tall grass on either side of it. Imagine bison doing basically the same thing. Now that lane of shortcut grass, that's the perfect habitat for a whole range of species.

And the tall grass that didn't get mowed on the other side is perfect habitat for many other species, right? So now your front yard basically has two habitat types, whereas before it had one. This is what the bison are doing, or we think we're doing to the grasslands historically. And that's what made the Great Plains as biodiverse as it is or should be, right? Because they're creating mosaics of habitat out there and that increases the habitat's capacity to support biodiversity. [00:07:52]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:07:53] Daniel, you've explained the impact of bison on the ecosystem, but what about for the people who've lived on the Great Plains for many generations, dating back way before European settlers arrived? [00:08:06]

Dr. Daniel Kinka: [00:08:07] There's just no way to overstate the importance of that species to at least the people that are endemic to the plains. Bison, more so than any animal, is the animal which makes it possible for man to live on the plains the way he does. Remember that these people historically not only lived with bison as a primary food source, but they made their tools out of the animal's bones. They made their tepees, their shelters out of their animal's hides. I mean like their whole existence. They're moving throughout these large home ranges.

Following bison right so they're like literally what they do every day is dictated by the animal itself if you flash forward to today so much of bison restoration is actually being led by indigenous peoples on indigenous reservation land native communities are at the forefront the of the spear on actual bison restoration. American Puryas sandwiched right in between two kind of indigenous communities and works very closely with a network of reservations throughout the country working on bison conservation we learn a lot about how to do bison reintroduction from our indigenous neighbors so even today when we're talking about the importance of bison to indigenous peoples we're not talking about the past certainly there's a history there but this is very much a present-day thing and i think what's really truly beautiful and wonderful as Native American communities, the restoration of bison, particularly in these communities, is seen as coincident with the restoration of the human community itself.

So, bringing back bison is a way of restoring their identities in a way and vice versa. For a huge subset of Americans, this animal is something much bigger than ecology alone. It goes really to the heart of spirituality and culture, depending on who you are how long your family has lived in North America. [00:09:57]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:09:58] Can you talk to me a little bit about where we're at right now with bison compared to the low points in the past? Like talk to me about how that improvement has gone. [00:10:09]

Dr. Daniel Kinka: [00:10:10] Estimates vary, but somewhere between 30 and 60 million bison roaming North America kind of prior to colonization. Those millions and millions of bison are reduced to a couple hundred. So really starting almost immediately at the beginning of the 18th century, like 1901 to 1903 or something like that, Roosevelt and Hornaday are out there running around and they're like, oh my God, we're going to lose all these bison. And they put these programs into place, right? You get the national. Bison range in Montana is established around then. Yellowstone National Park had just been established.

The Bronx Zoo gets a couple of bison as a breeding thing, right? If you fast forward from there, I think today there's something like half a million bison on the continent again, but what's true of that half a billion animals is almost all of those are in production herds, which is to say they are being raised for meat. There's only like 20,000 or something like that bison that are in conservation herds and even fewer animals that could be said to be wild, like at a species level, lots and lots of bison, and we, you know, kind of miraculous comeback. We really brought that animal back from the brink. But ecologically speaking, they might as well be extinct because they're not doing that lawnmower thing that I talked about. They're not providing the wool for birds to make their nest. They're not wallowing on the Great Plains and creating these little breeding colonies for amphibians and invertebrates. They're fulfilling the role that bison always fulfilled. [00:11:32]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:11:33] Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, it makes it a little bit complex to tell, even for Wild Kingdom, to tell a story of bison conservation when we know that bison are, in many places, being raised as livestock, that they are being grown just for food, just to feed people. And I really appreciate that you're saying, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it is different. Bison is just part of your American Prairie world. Can you talk to us just about all the really cool critters that live on American Prairie? [00:12:03]

Dr. Daniel Kinka: [00:12:04] So if you were to have taken a trip up the Missouri River 200 years ago, you would have seen populations of bighorn sheep on the cliff surrounding the Missouri river, populations of both mule and white-tailed deer. You would have almost certainly seen a lot of grizzly bears on the bank, tons and tons of beavers and even river otter, gigantic, massive herds of bison moving through the escape, along with herds of pronghorn. You would have seen gigantic, like sky-darkening flocks of all manner of birds, migratory and otherwise, that call the Great Plains home, including some really big, showy, weird, charismatic animals like the greater sage-grouse.

You would've seen wolves following around those herds of bison and pronghorn, and prairie dog towns that stretch from one horizon to the other horizon in some cases, another one of our ecosystem engineers that's out there. And if you got down on your hands and knees... You would see all manner of endemic flora, so plant species, really pretty, delicate, short-lived little prairie flowers and things like greater short-horned lizards and all these weird little herps and like reptiles and amphibians that call the place home.

Basically, what I'm trying to say in the picture that I'm going to paint is the place was absolutely full of wildlife. My job. Anyways... Is to try and figure out how to bring all of that back. Bison are a huge component of that, obviously, and we can do a lot with bison, and frankly, the bison do a lot of rewilding for us when we bring them back. But it's also about creating beaver habitats so that beavers come back. It's about replanting prairie that was tilled up so that it can be productive, native prairie again going forward. It's thinking about how do you create tolerance landscapes so that it's feasible for wolves and grizzly bears to recolonize the region from the western part of the state to the eastern part of All of this is part of rewilding and all of this is part the work that I do and my colleagues do every day. [00:13:54]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:13:55] Okay, so a couple of times now you've mentioned grizzly bears, and I'm wondering, do you have any evidence of grizzly bears in the area these days? [00:14:02]

Dr. Daniel Kinka: [00:14:03] Grizzly bears, this very large, formidable species that was very abundant on the plains historically and is now entirely gone, has very recently started to come back. Like the mountains are full, basically, and so these grizzly bears are starting to kind of move east from the Rocky Mountains out into the plains, which, again, is their historic home.

They seem to almost like remember as a species that like, this is where they're supposed to go. I don't want to anthropomorphize too much, but like it's hard not to read End of this. Now they've got to cross a hundred or more miles of wheat field, basically, in the Golden Triangle of Montana to get to the Missouri River breaks where American Prairie is, right? So, they have a very hard road to follow, and yet they do, and they succeed. And so grizzly bears are very much rewilding themselves. Well, we had feedback from some of our visitors that they'd seen bear signs.

So, I set up a bunch of camera traps along the Judith River that runs through this property. There's some biodiversity, but nothing that looks like a bear. And I get to the last camera of the day, and it's like the end of the day and the sun's setting and the breaks, it's already kind of like over the horizon, and I'm there all by myself, and I pull this camera off the tree and I open it up, I take the SD card out, I plug it into my phone, I'm scrolling through it, there's just nothing, nothing, and then there, there's this one picture, perfectly framed of this beautiful grizzly bear, unassumingly looking over its shoulder at my camera with its eye shine in the dark, and I am sitting here going, You know, a week ago, where I'm standing, there was a grizzly bear. And before that, it had been probably 150 years since a grizzly bear had stood in that spot. Wow. That was a good day. I mean, like, that's the kind of thing that you just live for in my line of work. [00:15:43]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:15:45] Daniel, thank you so much for all of this information. It's awesome as always to talk to you and I really hope to see you out on the prairie in person sometime soon. [00:15:54]

Dr. Daniel Kinka: [00:15:55] Ray, it was so good to get a chance to talk to you again and talk about Bison and the things that get us excited. Thank you. Thank you very much. [00:16:01]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:16:05] Now it's time for conservation connection. We know that the more we can connect with animals, the more likely we are to protect them. [00:16:11]

Peter Gros: [00:16:12] Today, a story of ingenuity and a quick public service announcement from Jen Osborne-Elliott, the North American Area Supervisor at the Oregon Zoo in Portland. [00:16:22]

Jen Osburn Eliot: [00:16:23] The Northwestern Pond Turtle is a small turtle. They're only about, at an adult size, six to eight inches long. They are found from the Puget Sound in Washington, south into central California. They are having a lot of trouble with invasive predators. Introduced species such as bullfrogs and largemouth bass are really bad for them when they are young. Those species will swallow whole pond turtle hatchlings. And so one of the things that Oregon Zoo does is we help with a Head Start program and we'll raise turtles from the hatchling size to the size of a three-year-old turtle and make them bigger so that they can survive and then release them. [00:17:09]

Peter Gros: [00:17:10] Jen and the rest of the team at the Oregon Zoo are able to grow the turtles at an increased through a sort of geo-hacking. [00:17:17]

Jen Osburn Eliot: [00:17:19] In the wild, they would naturally bromate or go into a kind of a sleep during the winter. And in human care, we actually keep them from going to sleep and we keep them in warm conditions year-round. They have food throughout the year, whereas in the wild they would just end up in a state where they're not growing. [00:17:36]

Peter Gros: [00:17:37] In less than a year, these turtles in human care grow to the size of a three-year-old turtle in the wild, which will ultimately be a form of defense. [00:17:46]

Jen Osburn Eliot: [00:17:47] They're bigger, so they physically can't fit in the bullfrog bounce anymore. [00:17:50]

Peter Gros: [00:17:51] Jen has some cautionary facts about people taking turtles into their homes. As I've said, wild animals do not make good pets. [00:17:58]

Jen Osburn Eliot: [00:18:00] Turtles require a lot more work than what most people think. Unfortunately, one of the threats for pond turtles is that people will release non-native turtles when they realize that they can't care for them. Some of them can live 40 to 80 years, depending on the species, so they might have to go into long-term family planning. [00:18:18]

Peter Gros: [00:18:20] The lesson? Never release a non-native turtle into the wild. Better yet, make sure you consider the impact down the line when you're adopting your next family pet. Dogs and cats make good pets, never wild animals. [00:18:34]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:18:34] That conversation was recorded at the 2024 Annual Conference of the AZA, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums in Calgary, Canada. [00:18:43]

Peter Gros: [00:18:46] Thank you for listening to this episode of Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, the podcast. And remember, if we protect wildlife and the environment today, we can ensure magical moments in the Wild Kingdom for future generations. [00:18:59]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:19:01] Join us next week when we talk to Nikki Smith, curator at the Columbus Suen Aquarium, about polar bears. [00:19:07]

Nikki Smith: [00:19:07] They have very thick skin, and they have a dual coat of fur. So, they've got an undercoat, and all polar bear hair is hollow. Polar bears are actually clear. They're not white. The white fur is the way that our eyes perceive the light hitting the fur. [00:19:24]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:19:25] Next time on Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, The Podcast. [00:19:28]

Peter Gros: [00:19:36] Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, The Podcast, is a production of Pineapple Street Studios and Mutual of Omaha. Our senior producer is Stephen Key. Producers are Elliot Adler and Jenny Van Soelen. [00:19:49]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:19:49] Associate producer is Lisa Cerda. Editor is Darby Maloney. Executive producers are Barry Finkel, Gabrielle Lewis, and Jen Wulf. Pineapple's head of sound and engineering is Raj Makija. Senior audio engineers are Marina Pais, Davy Sumner, Javi Cruces, and Pedro Alvira. This episode was mixed by Davy Summer. [00:20:13]

Peter Gros: [00:20:14] Production music courtesy of Epidemic Sound and Hearst Media Production Group. [00:20:18]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:20:18] Episode Clips, courtesy of Hearst Media Production Group. Marketing and promotion by Emily Poeschl. This podcast is hosted by me, Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant. [00:20:28]

Peter Gros: [00:20:29] Peter Gross, a special thanks to Katelyn Williams, Sophie Radmelimich, and Stephanie Diaz. [00:20:34]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:20:35] Today's episode is based on the Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom series created by Don Meier. Our next episode will be out in a week. [00:20:43]

Peter Gros: [00:20:43] Make sure you listen on the Odyssey app, or wherever you get your podcasts. [00:20:43]