Though your intrepid blogger has not yet had the pleasure of tasting bison, I understand it’s pretty good, and doesn’t taste like chicken, so the efforts of these ranchers might be on to something, in addition to the enjoyment of gazing upon a big herd of large shaggy buffalo roaming the plains and our national parks.
September 2007
Volume 25 | Number 3
Bisonomics
By Brian Yablonski
It’s mid-morning in Tallahassee, and I am sitting in a booth at Ted’s Montana Grill restaurant with Beau Turner, splitting a plate of bison sliders. At 39, Beau is the youngest son of Ted Turner. He is also the fish and wildlife manager for Turner Enterprises, Inc., which includes oversight of biodiversity projects and ranching for the nearly 2 million acres of land owned by the Turners.
There is irony here. The restaurant is decorated with dark wood, bison heads, and classic oil paintings of the West, yet Beau is here to talk about the Turners’ efforts to aid recovery of the bison—the very species on which we are deliciously feeding at the moment.
He explains that raising bison began as a hobby on their property in South Carolina nearly 30 years ago. Today it is a booming enterprise encompassing seven western states. Bison restoration, initially, had its own learning curve. “We made a lot of mistakes early on,” says Beau. When the Turners first began raising bison at the Flying D Ranch in Montana, calving rates dropped. So Beau learned about the importance of rotating the herd, grasses, rainfall, and the critical role of people in the restoration process. Today, their herd sustains an 80 to 90 percent calving rate.
The near extirpation of the American bison in the 19th century was one of the great environmental catastrophes in our nation’s history. Resilient by nature, bison have spent the last 100 years making a miraculous comeback. The credit goes to private ranchers, charities, and public agencies employing market-based approaches. Today, restoration of the bison is an environmental success story in its own right, with additional eco-benefits extending to our personal health, the Great Plains, and our publicly managed parks.
Remarkable For Its Fury
In the early 1800s, it was believed as many as 30 million bison roamed the Great Plains. Their natural predators were few, primarily wolves and Native Americans. That changed with manifest destiny. As bison came to be valued for their hides and leather, the slaughter of the great herds began.
Environmental historian Stephen Krech described the extermination as “remarkable for its fury.” In just three years, the entire southern herd was wiped out by buffalo hunters, only to be followed by the evisceration of the northern herd by 1884. Indeed, the bison were very close to extinction; it is likely there were less than a thousand left at the turn of the century.
Western orthodoxy suggests the white man’s irresistible drive for wealth led to the bison genocide. Reality, however, proved more complicated. Their near extinction was due to a host of factors ranging from adverse climate issues, introduction of the transcontinental railroad, emergence of a horse culture on the plains bringing more efficient hunting, the advent of the Sharp’s rifle known for its deadly accuracy and distance, as well as government policy that promoted the end of the bison as a means of calming hostilities with the Native Americans.
One underlying factor, however, may have contributed more than any other. The tragedy of the bison was one of the starkest examples of the tragedy of the commons. No one owned the bison. Those who were not the first to capture the economic benefits of a bison lost those benefits to someone else. This created a race to the finish—a bison derby. Recreation magazine captured the essence of the situation in 1901: “A wild buffalo is looked on as a small fortune walking around without an owner.”
