Bringing bison back to restore the American prairie

The stuff you learn on this show. I could hardly believe it when I heard it. But there’s a genetic link between an almost extinct piece of the Illinois prairie and the Bronx. And that connection plays a big role in TechKnow’s latest show on restoring that tall grass prairie.

Our story took us to Franklin Grove, Illinois to the Nachusa Grasslands Preserve; 90 miles due west of Chicago and 15 minutes from Ronald Reagan’s boyhood home in Dixon (a house sorely in need of a paint job). The Nature Conservancy (TNC) has spent the last 30 years trying to roll back time -- some 200 years -- to when the area was covered in its native tall grass prairie. And I’m talking TALL grass – 8 -10 feet high. It’s an environment that has all but disappeared. Right now just one-tenth of 1% of the prairie that once covered Illinois survives. Where’d it go? It went to farmland and urban sprawl.

Why should you care? Next to the rainforest, North American prairie is one of the most complex and worthy eco-systems in the world. There’s even a climate change component to the story. The forbs (prairie flowers) that grow on the tall grass prairie, suck in carbon dioxide. The roots are so thickly tangled and deep in the soil that the CO2 gets trapped down there and disappears into plant growth. So losing the prairie means we’ve lost another natural mechanism to pull the greenhouse gases out of our atmosphere.

So when a little piece of survivor prairie went up for sale 30 years ago, TNC beat out a developer. Just a speck of 100 acres, it was one of the last pieces of remnant prairie – land that hadn’t been touched by man in 10,000 years, from when the glaciers finally receded. From that started a never-ending restoration project. It’s now up to 3500 acres. Most of it has been land that’s been so well reclaimed that it’s hard to tell it from the original plot.

It’s been an enormous undertaking with staff and an army of volunteers armed with scissors, shovels, clippers, weed whackers, fire starters and hoses. And I’m guessing a fair amount of Icy/Hot. It’s backbreaking work.

Since most of the reclaimed land was cornfield, first they cut down the corn, then they burn the fields (called a prescribed burn), then they pull out the invasives (non-native plants) by hand and plant native prairie plants. When those are done blooming, they start snipping the seeds for planting for next year and store them I the coolest room I’ve ever seen, filled with thousands of seeds. Although it’s called the tall grass prairie, there are hundreds of other types of plants that make up the landscape that are just as important as the grass. My favorites, sneeze weed and nodding wild onion. They’ve planted millions and millions of seeds and pulled millions and millions of invasive plants. And it’s been working. The tall grass prairie is bouncing back. Actually a little too well. 

But the Nachusa’s tall grass was muscling out everything else.  What was needed was some massive mower to tame the grass, but ONLY the grass. As my boss pointed out, they didn’t need a Dyson, they needed bison. 

Bison were always what kept the prairie grasses in balance. Why bison? They’re picky eaters, like your sister who obsessively picks out the mushrooms from that veggie pizza before you even grab a slice. The largest land mammals in North America, they eat only the grasses. They were sorely needed. But where to get them from? The last bison in Illinois was seen in 1830.

While bison may be an iconic symbol of the American West, they’d all but disappeared from the U.S. by the end of the 1800s. They were slaughtered for food and skins. And in a sad part of our history, the US government also killed the bison to deprive Native Americas an important food source an effort to starve them off their land. So, from 30 to 60 million bison, we went down to a few hundred.  

The Nachusa folks always thought they’d need bison as the final piece of the restoration effort. However, it took 30 years to restore enough of the prairie to sustain a few dozen. Finally in October of 2014, at the Broken Kettle Preserve in Sioux City Iowa about 30 bison of a variety of ages were rounded up and sent to Nachusa. A three hour drive that took eight hours.

Why from Broken Kettle? Because that’s where the closest pure bison roamed. (And by the way, don’t call them buffalo, they’re bison. People started calling the bison “buffalo” because they looked like water buffalo. But if you want to see buffalo, you gotta go to Asia or Africa.) The Nature Conservancy wanted genetically pure bison for the restoration. Most of the bison in the United States (about 400,000) are a mix of bison and cattle and raised for eating. There are a handful of Preserves, both non-profit and government run, where the bison are just…bison.

One of those places is Broken Kettle.  Broken Kettle got their primo bison from Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota. Those Wind Cave bison are pure breeds because of Teddy Roosevelt. Yes, that rough riding former President and committed conservationist. He saw the demise of the bison and he knew they had to be saved. So he had a dozen pure bison trucked to Wind Cave in 1913. And where did they come from? A prairie in Wyoming? A ranch in Montana? Nope, a dozen pure bred bison made their way from the Bronx Zoo. The Bronx, yes, thonx. And so as a gal born in the Bronx, I respectfully give a big Bronx cheer to my brother and sister bisons in Nachusa. Welcome back, bison.