It’s Important To Protect The Bison, The “Original Climate Regulator”

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Their hoofs sounded like rolling thunder two centuries ago, when tens of millions of the enormous animals roamed and dominated North America. They’re bison, the largest land mammal on the continent, known for their long shaggy brown fur, beards, really big heads with short black horns, and humps on their shoulders. These grazers were nearly extinct by the early 1900s. Today, rigorous recovery efforts continue to protect the bison.

Officials find themselves moving beyond historical respect for this species that roamed our lands for thousands of years. Now restoration efforts encompass complex socio-ecological landscapes. Bison herds being restored to Native American lands have the potential to provide the food sustenance, cultural reconnection, and ecological sustainability imperative to meet future climate challenges.

To protect the bison, however, is a complicated proposition.

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Future climate projections of warming, drying, and increased weather variability indicate that conventional agricultural and production practices within the Northern Great Plains of the US will become less sustainable, both ecologically and economically. It is critical to identify models of sustainable land management that can improve ecological function and socioeconomic outcomes for the Plains communities, all while increasing resilience to a rapidly changing climate.

Bison first arrived in the Americas somewhere between 300,000 and 130,000 years ago. For more than 10,000 years, Native Americans hunted and lived alongside an estimated population of ten or more million Plains bison roaming between the Rocky and Appalachian Mountains. Bison were an integral part of life, and many origin stories tell of the connection between the people and their kin, the “buffalo.”

With the near extinction of bison by colonialists in the late 1800s, though, and relegation to reservations, Native Americans were left without their primary cultural food source. Re-establishing bison on reservations can contribute to change in Native American communities in multiple ways, according to a 2022 study in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution:

• Spiritual, by healing the spirit of the buffalo and the people
• Cultural, by restoring people’s connection to their heritage, including enabling food sovereignty and security on reservations
• Economic development (e.g., tourism, bison hunts, sale of live bison, or bison meat)
• Ecological, by supporting ecosystem resiliency through sustainable bison grazing

While all these reasons are valuable, it is the last — supporting ecosystem resiliency — upon which this article focuses. Ecosystem resiliency is the capacity of ecosystems to deal with disturbances — by resisting them, recovering from them, or adapting to them — while retaining their ability to deliver services and benefits now and in the future.

To protect the bison is to engage in animal conservation and ecological protection. Bison nurture the entire ecosystem, one that is increasingly under threat from climate change.

Tribes Seek Autonomy to Restore Prairie Landscapes

The Fourth National Climate Assessment described the dramatic and consequential weather that the southern Great Plains experiences: hurricanes, flooding, severe storms with large hail and tornadoes, blizzards, ice storms, relentless winds, heat waves, and drought. Its people and economies are often at the mercy of some of the most diverse and extreme weather hazards on the planet.

The Assessment emphasized that understanding the potential for future changes in the frequency and severity of weather events and their impacts will, ultimately, determine the sustainability of economies, cultures, ecosystems, health, and life in the region.

A 2020 study found a link between the effects of climate change, the productivity of grasslands, and the proliferation of bison in Yellowstone National Park. Bison restoration has been correlated with the resurgence of local flora and fauna in the regions in which large mammals are found, including native grasses and rare insects.

• Bison can heighten the ability of the soil to hold even more carbon dioxide, acting as a natural carbon storage facility.
• As bison feed, they mow the fresh green grass.
• Their hoofs thrust seeds downward and aerate the soil, inspiring growth of nutritious new plant shoots.
• Small birds fly around bison ankles because their heavy footfall disturbs insects.
• Other birds ride on their backs and suck parasites off their skin.
• Even bison’s dung — which contains high levels of nitrogen, a vital nutrient for plant growth — fertilizes the soil as they graze. In fact, bison digestion recruits an entire microbial community to digest plant matter. The National Park Services calls bison pies “elixirs of nutrients for the prairie,” spreading seeds, fertilizing the soil, and attracting insects such as the dung beetle to the region. As many as 300 species of insects will live in one bison patty.

“Buffalo is the original climate regulator,” explains Troy Heinert, a member of the Sicangu Lakota (Rosebud Sioux) tribe and executive director of the InterTribal Buffalo Council, a coalition working to restore the animal on tribal lands. “Just by how they use the grass, how they graze, how their hoofs are designed, the way they move.” As them roamed originally in their native habitat, bison triggered climate equilibrium, “when we allowed them to be buffalo.”

Tribes are advocating for more bison restoration, Heinert told the Washington Post, so other parts of the prairie ecosystem will also return and “help fight this changing climate.”

The InterTribal Buffalo Council (ITBC) has a membership of 69 Tribes in 19 states with a collective herd of over 20,000 buffalo. Their members manage more than 32 million acres of Tribal lands and have restored buffalo to nearly 1 million of those acres. ITBC is committed to reestablishing buffalo herds on Indian lands in a manner that promotes cultural enhancement, spiritual revitalization, ecological restoration, and economic development. The Indian Buffalo Management Act, which seeks to assist Tribal governments in the management of buffalo and buffalo habitat and the further reestablishment of bison on Indian land, passed the House in October, 2021. Stuck in the Senate, the Act has about a 3% chance of passage right now.

Bison restoration on Tribal lands is a victory not only for the sake of biodiversity but for the entire ecosystem in which they live. As a keystone species, the bison sustain their environment from the top down.

Bison are wildlife, not livestock, so they require lots of land to maintain ecological balance and not to overgraze. The return of the bison through Tribes’ holistic grazing methods that mimic nature are most likely to heal the environment so grasslands can sequester enough atmospheric carbon dioxide to reverse climate change. Herd managers negotiate with ranchers to convince them that there’s enough land for cattle and bison alike.

Check out this bison cam located near a natural spring along Grasslands National Park’s Ecotour road in the west block near Val Marie, Saskatchewan. Watch there as bison and other animals visit the hole for a refreshing drink or dip. Or you can peek in on a small herd of bison that roam in Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie in northeast Illinois; that herd was introduced as a 20-year experiment in restoring the landscape.