Beth Taylor: Yellowstone's full of wildlife.
In addition to being able to see
geysers and some of the amazing geology
here, people do truly come for the wildlife.
It's hard to see a bear.
You're pretty fortunate to see a wolf.
But you're fairly guaranteed to see a bison.
It would be a rare visit to Yellowstone
to come and spend a day
in the park and not see a bison.
You can not only see what a bison looks
like, you can watch it move
on the landscape.
You can listen to it bellow.
You can see how it interacts
with other bison.
Rick Wallen: At Yellowstone, we've
preserved the most important wild bison
population in the whole United States
partly because so few locations have
bison without fences.
There are huge, huge plains here
in Yellowstone, and Lamar Valley
is one of them that's, you know,
5 or 6 miles long and a mile wide.
There can be days where there's 2,000
or 3,000 animals in the valley bottom.
And in a matter of 4 or 5 hours,
they can all disappear.
Taylor: They walk wherever they want.
There are no fences.
There's not even a fence around
the exterior of the park to keep them in.
They're always on the move, just eating
and walking, eating and walking.
The males aren't always
with the large herds.
And there's usually an older female that
might be kind of the leader of the herd.
They are amazing in their ability to survive
and adapt to such a harsh climate here.
We get a lot of snow in Yellowstone.
But they have a large hump
on their back, and there's bone and muscle
in that hump that allows them to stick
their head, their huge head, down into
the snow completely and just snowplow
the snow out of the way to get to the grass.
[ music]
Wallen: They begin to break up
into smaller groups.
They'll be distributed around
the hot spring basins, and they use
those areas with limited amount
of snow for access to food.
[music]
During the springtime, there's a time of
renewal, and we have visitors
just flock to the park to watch
the bison during the camping season.
Nearly all of the females get pregnant
each summer.
So there's an extremely high
percentage of females having
calves during April and May.
Taylor: I was fortunate enough to see
a bison give birth to a calf
on Mother's Day one year.
It was amazing to watch, not just the birth
but to watch the calf after the birth.
Within about 40 minutes, it was
standing and walking.
Compare that to a human child.
It takes us about a year to learn to walk.
It's pretty amazing.
But they need to be able to get up and run
with the herds and move around.
Into the summer when things are
green and lush, it's kind of
the prime time for bison.
They're moving around
and eating, and a lot of visitors get to see
vast herds of them, thousands of them.
We're fortunate to be able to
support such a large healthy herd.
Wallen: I think that bison are
very emblematic of the wilderness.
There was nothing but wilderness when
the Native American tribes were spread out
across North America, and bison were
a dominant feature of that landscape.
Taylor: The animal was so important
to many, many Plains tribes.
This particular animal provided
so much of what they needed.
The meat, obviously.
The fur and the hide they used for clothing
and blankets and teepee coverings.
Everything was useful.
It was kind of like a storehouse or
a department store right in the one animal.
Wallen: From a time period when there
were 30 million animals on the landscape,
the United States was pioneering
into the western frontier.
So the military strategy was to take away
the food, which was the bison,
and conquer the Indian nations.
They harvested bison by the hundreds
of thousands.
Then an industry grew up around that.
The bone was ground up to make fertilizer
for the farmers occupying the Great Plains.
Taylor: And so to see their numbers
dwindle so low, it was a direct reflection
and an intentional act to try to eradicate
both the bison and the people.
So, many were killed.
And we believe only about 23 or 24 animals
were left in Yellowstone.
24 is not very many when you consider
the vast herds that were before that.
As humans, I think we played a role
in that, certainly in their almost-extinction,
but also in kind of turning that around.
It truly is a conservation
success story that we were able
to keep them from going extinct.
And I think we're lucky to be able to watch
them on the landscape today.
[music]
Wallen: You know, if we'd lost wild bison
on the landscape, we would have lost
a very stoic and emblematic symbol
of the great western states.
[music]
Taylor: Because we were able to save them
from extinction, they're a symbol of
how far we've come as humans--
our own ability to share the landscape
with another species and to see that not
everything has to serve our own purposes.
There aren't as many places anymore
where you can have bears or wolves
or herds of bison.
[music]
[Bison grunting]