Okay, So today it's time for a feel-good-story.
And believe me, this is going to be a good one
because I just found something and I loved it.
And when I'll show it to you, I'm sure you do the same.
But first things first:
The bison or buffalo, as most of us call it, even though it's not
the same species, is still widely seen as an emblematic American symbol.
While it symbolizes freedom and vastness of a promised abundance
in the American West,
this highly romanticized animal looks back on a difficult past.
And today there are only a few pockets left
where this iconic animal still roams free - sort off.
But this is about to change.
Let me show you what I'm talking about. Look at this.
Just the mere look of this gives me joy.
For the first time in nearly 150 years, these buffalos were released into the absolute wild.
And why does this mean so much?
Well, this shows that the people,
after so many decades, have started to understand the importance
of this keystone species to the landscape and the environment that surrounds it.
The king of the prairie is finally back where it belongs.
You might say now, especially if you're American,
that there are so many bison living in several places across the U.S.
And yes, it's true.
But when I say for the first time in 150 years
into the wild, I mean, the real wild prairie.
No fences, no parks, no rangers. No nothing - the wild.
Of the total of approximately 500,000 bison is alive today
the vast majority is ranched.
These are farmed bisons with traits of cattle.
Only 20,000 still live on wild grassland,
and all of them are fenced or restricted within some sort of parks or preserves.
There are no longer any truly free roaming bison on the North American grassland.
So as you can see, it's not about protecting the bison itself.
The species is no longer considered endangered.
In fact, bison protection and conservation efforts are nothing new.
They are deeply embedded into the reasons
that made them disappear in the first place.
The cause lies in the past as so often
so let's go back in time when approximately 30 to 60 million bison
roamed across the United States and Canada, primarily in the Great Plains.
It was like a black sea that covered the American grasslands.
This was the original range of the buffalo mapped out in 1889 by William Temple Hornaday,
an American zoologist and conservationist at the US National Museum.
It shows this vast ocean of animals, this great bison savanna spreading
all over the continent, 30 to 60 million of them.
But for all its imposing strength
and sheer vastness in numbers, the bison turned out
to be a vulnerable species, at least against a staggering force.
The Euro-American conquest.
With settlers moving westwards, a cultural change swept across the prairie
and with it a belief system to conquer a wild landscape and develop it.
There was a constructed ideal, a noble goal at the time
depicted in all sorts of artworks and allegories of the period.
It was the idea that the United States is destined to expand its dominion
and spread values, beliefs and the political system across the entire
North American continent, masking out all political implications from that time.
And if you take a closer look at these artworks,
you can discover a ubiquitous detail in most of the paintings
the development of a land with modern machines and bison
being hunted, fleeing from their conquerors.
Buffalo were hunted by the millions, but not only to settle and develop the land.
Also for economic reasons, there was a huge demand
for their hides or skins predominately needed to make belts for modern machines.
Hunters simply skinned off their hides and left the rest on the prairies to rot.
The wasteland was so scattered with bones of buffalo
that the entire prairie looked like a graveyard.
And it culminated in this
a famous photograph of bison extermination.
Men, standing on a gigantic pile of bison skulls,
taken outside of Michigan Carbon Works in 1892.
I mean, I mean, I.
I can wrap my head around this.
The relation to the man on the front.
The average grown-up man in 1890
was around 5.5 or 169 centimeters.
So this must have been a 28 feet or 8.5
meters high pile of buffalo bones.
So in 1886, William T. Hornaday headed west
on a mission for the Smithsonian Institute in search of Bison.
But he didn't find any.
The “Sea of Bison” was gone,
so he started working on this map,
showing the ocean evaporation
into a couple of scattered little puddles.
The total population of wild bison plummeted
to somewhere between 300 and 800 individuals.
He started working on a plan
to raise awareness and shout out for the protection of the species.
He brought a couple of life bison to zoo in Washington, D.C.,
Hornadays plan worked, being close to the animal
and looking them into the eye changed minds on Capitol Hill.
Congress decided to establish federally protected herds where they were
left in Yellowstone, Montana, and Oklahoma.
Yellowstone National Park was the first one in America,
and it was created above all to protect the only few wild buffalo left.
The park started with only 23 individuals, and it has done its job well.
So well, in fact, that throughout
the 20th century than a herd consistently exceeded the number of 4000 bison,
a number large enough to provoke fears of overgrazing the park.
So the rangers had to create a firing squad to keep this number in check.
What was left to fate, though, was the original North American grasslands.
The European settlers recognized the potential of the rich soils of this land,
some of the richest on the planet, and converted the entire prairie
into agricultural crops, soil depletion, droughts, and a totally fractured
the ecosystem where the inevitable consequences.
Yet today, almost 150 years later, the tide's turned.
The demands to rebuild a vast shortgrass prairie and eventually restore
the complex and productive grassland ecosystem
replenished with its native species, is stronger than ever.
And bison
were an integral part of these grasslands before they were abruptly removed
from the Great Plains.
They were a keystone species, an organism that helped define the entire ecosystem.
Buffalo are the largest land animals on the American continent,
and these gentle giants spent most of their time grazing the wild bison herds
that once roamed the prairies, where so large in numbers
that they could never stay in one area for long.
So the plants of the prairies adapted to the periods of intense grazing.
Bison typically only eat grass
so it allows a diversity of plants to flourish on the prairies around them.
Their heavy, sharp hooves help to erode the soil and slice up
the vegetation, allowing it to decompose and regenerate faster.
A long term comparative study
from Kansas State University showed that over 30 years on land grazed
by bison, richness of native species doubled. The presence of bison made
the prairie ecosystem more resilient to drought.
And since the early 2000, conservationist organizations,
like American Prairie have been working to create a fully functioning prairie,
complete with herds of bison roaming
across the landscape and playing their historical ecological role.
The task is not easy.
While the American Prairie population started with only 17
and are still in the hundreds.
At least 5000 bison would need to be able to roam freely
across 450,000 fenceless acres.
And Yellowstone plays an important role in this.
Unlike their ranching cousins, which are mainly the result
of 20th century attempts to cross bison with cattle.
The Yellowstone animals are wild and genetically pure
descendants of the original herds, and the excess number of animals there,
can now, instead of being culled, serve a greater purpose.
And you might say that in
some areas cattle can actually be used to simulate the behavior of bison.
That's true, but there is a vast difference.
Bison do so naturally - the way bison graze creates
more forage, nutritious for the ecosystem, and in winter bison
use their gigantic heads to clear away the snow and get the grass underneath.
That allows extra sunlight and increased moisture and lush growth in spring.
Apart from that, bison are much better at tolerating the extreme
weathers of the American grasslands, which is extremely important
during the high summer temperatures.
While cattle seeks out the shady places and cool water of the creeks,
eating and trampling vegetation and concentrated spots.
Bison just continue to graze.
However, there are still hurdles and major challenges to overcome.
The usual suspects of such endeavors like land costs and conflict with local farmers.
And these bison, they still have a lot to learn in their new home.
Vital natural elements of the wild prairie, such as Fires are still absent, but will return
with the naturalization of the land.
And over time
they will have to start following
ancient routes and rhythms of migration in order to find the new grass
that keeps growing with the patterns of wildfires and rainstorms.
But as I told you at the beginning of the video, this is a positive story.
And that's because wildlife biologists are more than confident that these herds
will eventually master the needs of the prairie again one day.
So the first steps of the return and the signs of a truly wild prairie with
its dominant megafauna are already here, and the hopes are staked even way higher.
The American Prairies dream is that one day all their bison
and the ones from the reservations and wildlife refuges nearby in the U.S.
and Canada may become a vast herd again, roaming across 3 million acres, a bit
like in the old day when the bison truly was the cornerstone of the American West.
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