WEBIOCOSM ZOO
Last Updated December 07, 2006
Bison bison
American Buffalo
These are American Buffalos, Bison bison
(click the pic to enlarge). I photographed them last week while
returning from my trip to see the
tree in the silo. Most people know at least a little about
these large animals and their history in America. But I photographed,
and posted these animals because I haven't seen any on farms around here
before.
As usual,
Wikipedia provides a good source of information. Here is an
interesting paragraph on the interactions between the Native Americans,
which provides a perspective that I had not considered before.
Bison were central to the lifestyle of Native
Americans of the Great Plains. But there is now some controversy over
their interaction. "Hernando De Soto's expedition staggered through the
Southeast for four years in the early sixteenth century and saw hordes
of people but apparently didn't see a single bison," Charles C. Mann
writes in to 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Mann
discusses the evidence that North American Indians not only created (by
selective use of fire) the large grasslands that provided the bison's
ideal habitat, but also kept the bison population regulated. In this
theory, it was only when the Indian population was decimated by wave
after wave of epidemic (from diseases of Europeans) that the bison herds
propagated wildly.
To get a visual image of how just how much buffalo killing went on back
then, take a look at this picture of the
massive pile of buffalo skulls which can also be seen on the right
side of the above mentioned article.
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