Bison Tour at Crown B

It's calving season at Crown B Bison, with eight little "red dogs" born just in the last couple weeks! I've been itching to see the cinnamon-colored babies, and a friend of ours was looking to give her international visitors a unique Kansas experience, so we went up to Holton yesterday for the tour. We got to see the animals up close (from the safety of an open trailer) and feed them treats that they gobbled up—the nursing moms in particular! 

I grew up knowing about the importance of bison to the Native Americans on the plains but didn't realize bison are hugely important to the ecosystem as a whole. Bison are considered a keystone species, meaning they have a disproportionately large impact on the environment relative to their population size and help maintain the structure and health of their ecosystem. One reason for the outsized impact: bison wallows. These are depressions in the land that formed when bison would roll around and bathe in the dust. The compacted soil, mixed with bison hair, formed a layer that was more difficult for water to penetrate. When the depressions filled with rainwater, they would provide drinking water for wildlife, attract insects, and support plants that liked the moist conditions. The disturbed soil in these areas could also be conducive to pioneer plant species. While there's less biodiversity within each wallow than in the prairie overall, each wallow is different. So a prairie covered in bison wallows is a prairie that's more diverse.

To my surprise, I learned that wallows are still around—though there aren't nearly as many as there used to be. According to the National Park Service, there may have been five or more wallows per acre at one time. Over the entire Great Plains, that's 1.5 billion bison wallows! Today, you can recognize wallows by the different plant life growing there in comparison to the surrounding land. 

A couple other facts from the tour that are completely unrelated but very interesting:

1. Extinct forms of bison existed in the Late Pleistocene—the era of saber-tooth tigers and woolly mammoths. Like these creatures, they too were gigantic—up to 8 feet tall. Imagine a bison as tall as the ceiling! 
2. Of course, modern bison are still huge. A bison's head alone weighs over 200 lbs.! But despite this size, they can run up to 45 miles per hour and jump a 6-foot fence from a standing position. So you really don't want to make these things mad (or make them think you're a predator)! 

If you'd like to learn more fun bison facts, plus hand-feed bison and see their grazing land, contact Crown B Bison to book a tour. The adorable cinnamon-colored babies lose their red-orange coat in 2-3 months, so I'd highly recommend a visit sometime this summer! And finally, if you like bison and you eat meat, consider eating bison. It's very high in iron and protein and relatively low in fat. Supporting bison ranches like this one helps keep bison populations strong!

-Justine