Creature Feature: The Return of the Buffalo

PNG begins the new year showing this award-winning video from NETNebraska, a tribute to the official mammal of the United States, the American plains bison (Bison bison bison). It is not only a symbol of the American spirit, but a symbol of what conservation can do to save a species from extermination by man's greed. When Lewis & Clark saw the great herds in 1804, buffalo numbered in the millions, estimated at more than 30 million. By the end of the nineteenth century buffalo had been reduced to a mere 1000. The plains were literally blanketed in bones when William Hornaday of the Smithsonian Institute journeyed to Great Plains in 1886 to collect specimens, a horrendous testament to the ghastly slaughter that had taken place. Without the intervention of prescient native Americans, and support from national politicians like Theodore Roosevelt the buffalo would be only history today.

There are 500,000 buffalo that live in eight protected herds, but the goal is to reintroduce the buffalo to their rightful place on the "American Serengeti". We, as a great nation, must undo the great wrong done to this keystone species. A million buffalo living freely in the wild as their ancestors once did is not too much to ask.