American Bison: A natural history by Dale F. Lott, University of California Press, $29.95/拢19.95, ISBN 0520233387 Reviewed by Jonathan Beard
WHEN Europeans invaded North America, some 30 million buffalo roamed its Great Plains from Canada to Texas, dominating this vast sea of grass. The settlers did their best to convert the beasts into food, robes and fertiliser, and turn their grass into corn fields. Despite this, the bison remains the continental totem.
Dale Lott was born on the National Bison Range in western Montana where his father worked for Dale鈥檚 future father-in-law, the range superintendent. Lott went on to become a behavioural ecologist, and spent much of his career studying bison, their home and their predators. American Bison is his delightful portrait of these animals, both on their own and in their often tragic relationships with people.
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First, he covers the basics of bison life: reproduction, family life and nutrition. Buffalo sex, Lott tells us, takes five seconds. He knows because: 鈥淚 timed it from movies.鈥� He deftly explains the most important aspect of male-male interactions, submission, which prevents unnecessary fights. When he moves on to dinner, he goes beyond ruminant digestion and the importance of the resulting buffalo dung or 鈥渃hip鈥� to the plains, and explains how the herds once controlled the immense short-grass and tall-grass prairies.
Much of American Bison concerns, as it must, the sad encounters of buffalo with people, from Native American hunters to the hide-hunters who drove them to near-extinction, and the ranchers and environmentalists wrangling over their future today. Because the combination of cattle raising and corn and wheat farming is increasingly unsustainable in the semi-arid plains, Lott believes we may be forced to turn to bison to exploit this land.
Lott envisions a return of the buffalo, millions of them, to a future Great Plains Park extending south from Canada. Even so, he laments, this won鈥檛 recreate the past. Ranchers will demand domesticated bison, their wildness bred out of them. American Bison is funny at times, beautifully written and always honest.