March 28, 2024

Where the buffalo roam

Bison Day teaches refuge visitors animals’ role on prairie

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By Mike Mendenhall

Daily News Staff Writer

PRAIRIE CITY — In the courtyard of the Prairie Learning Center at the Neal Smith Wildlife Refuge Saturday, facility manager Lance Koch pulled a long willow tree branch out of an old U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service pickup bed and stripped the limb of foliage with a pocket knife. Nearby, Wildlife Refuge Specialist Richard Hager shaped the branches into a recreation of a Native American Wigwam. He draped a buffalo hide over the shelter’s frame — a material which encloses the traditional prairie dwelling.

Saturday was Koch’s third day on the job as the refuge’s new manager, transferring from an 11,000 acre marshland refuge in Florida. The Neal Smith facility is his first posting on the prairie, and this weekend was Koch’s first experience at the refuge’s annual Bison Day.

Hager said the refuge Bison herd is an important tool in bringing plant diversity to the prairie restoration site. Prairie fires and Bison, he said, work interchangeably to purge the landscape of dead and invasive plants allowing the native flora to return.

“Bison Day helps people understand the role Bison have in the prairie. They are an integral part in keeping it viable by causing disturbance and generate renewal,” Hager said. “They gave new species a chance to start over again by grazing the park lands, allowing new things can come up. It’s all about renewal.”

The annual event began in the early 2000s as a way to increase the refuge profile and highlight the facility’s 67 Bison. Bison Day volunteers through Friends of the Neal Smith Wildlife Refuge doubled since last year, and Refuge Assistant Manger Cheryl Groom said more than 100 visitors had walked through the door by noon. Saturday’s demonstrations such as the Wigwam, hide cutting and Bison burgers inform visitors of many traditional uses for Bison resources.

Under a tent outside the learning center, rope maker Milton Vos, of Peoria, stretched three strands of sisalana twine on a 1901 crank system. The demonstration allowed young refuge visitors the opportunity to make their own rope by turning the crank and twisting the twine together. His second year at Bison Day, Vos said the activity highlights the Native American’s uses for rope on the prairie.

According to Koch, it’s estimated that 20 to 30 million Bison once roamed the prairie and great plains of the western United States.

But due to habitat loss, unregulated shooting and attempts to deprive Native Americans of a primary food source, the Bison population was reduced to 1,091 animals by 1889. Today, herds have rebounded to nearly 500,000 but most have been cross bread with domestic cattle. Roughly 30,000 U.S. Bison are classified as genetically wild, and the refuge manager said most exist on conservation grounds including the herd at Neal Smith.

Currently, the refuge is home to 67 Bison which roam the 700-acre prairie enclosure. But refuge staff plan to eventually expand the herd. But Koch said the refuge will need to work with area land-owners and acquire more in-holdings before there is enough space to support a larger herd.

“The limiting factor on that is the Bison-proof fence is really expensive. A Bison would walk right through a traditional barb-wire fence that livestock raisers use,” Koch said. “We want to be good neighbors, and the last thing we want is for a Bison to get loose and run over someone’s crops.”

Sitting in front of the Learning Center’s stuffed Bison, Council Bluffs-area creative non-fiction author John Price hosted a reading Saturday of works inspired by the refuge. He witnessed the original release of the Bison herd on to the prairie at Neal Smith. Price wrote of the beauty he sees in the refuge in his 2004 book “Not Just any Land.” Seeing the native species reintroduced to a natural habitat, he said, became an inspiration for his writing and changed him as a person and as an Iowan.

“To be here at the dawn and see those powerful creatures come back, it was life-changing,” Price said. “It was a celebration of Iowa’s natural heritage that I had never experienced before. I understood other reasons why you would love Iowa, but the prairie — the natural environment — that was something new for me. And I think that’s true for a lot of Midwesterners.”