Revisiting Season One and the Bison at Fort Peck

In light of our recent Bison Dispatch, we thought we’d share a memory from Amy’s visit to the Fort Peck Reservation with Robbie Magnan, who was a driving force in organizing the Bison Conservation Transfer Program to divert bison from slaughter in Yellowstone and put them back onto tribal lands around the country. 

Amy says: “This video just brings back so many good memories. We had driven up to the part of the reservation where the bison herd was congregating. This prairie, this land that these bison are on, has never been plowed. There’s no sewer lines underneath there. There's no power lines. It's just native prairie. And that is so hard to find in the entire world. 

It’s just precious, precious land. Land that would have been like what bison were on before white settlement. I remember sitting next to Robbie in his big truck—I was trying to point my audio gear toward Robbie while I was looking out the window the other direction, holding my phone, hoping I didn't drop it off onto the ground.

Watching this big bull wallow, in addition to just being cute, it's also really important ecologically, because they make these little depressions over time, and this is a very dry landscape. So when rains come in, those wallows will serve as a little temporary bowl that will hold the water. And then birds will come and take little baths there. There will be a whole little microhabitats that build up over time. And if you were to zoom out above the prairie 500 years ago, especially the Northern Great Plains, there would have been all these wallows patchworked across the land. 

And then it was also cool watching that guy try to get up out of a resting position, they're so huge and heavy. It’s like if you've ever been really tired after a big hike, and you need to get yourself up off of a bed or off of a chair, and you try and then feel your muscles like, ‘Uh uh. Too hard!’”