Books, Naturally
American Bison: A Natural History
Dale F. Lott. 2002. University
of California Press, Berkeley. 230 pp., clothbound. $29.95
Dale Lott loves bison and this book is a love song.
No one has studied the behavior of these quintessential North American animals as long or as thoroughly as Lott. He actually lived the first six years of his life on the National Bison Range in Montana and then resided just a few miles away until going to college. After earning his Ph.D. studying rats, he took up the scientific study of bison in 1965 as a 30-year-old assistant professor at the University of California, Davis, and never stopped.
American Bison thus represents the culmination of more than 35 years of research and a lifetime of living alongside a North American icon with people who helped shape the fate of bison in the 20th century—for starters, both his father and his father-in-law worked at National Bison Range.
The book is divided into six parts. The first, “Relationships, Relationships,” covers the social life of bison, which live in large herds where males compete for females, females compete over grass to eat, and mothers and calves have first affectionate, then antagonistic, interactions. Pretty standard stuff in behavioral ecology, but Lott imbues the material with such a deep understanding of these complex social dynamics that I felt as if the bison were telling me their own story in grunts and bellows I could comprehend.
Lott employs an opera analogy to describe his own gradually acquired knowledge. When he first began to study bison, he writes, “… I experienced bison social interactions primarily as a grand but largely incomprehensible spectacle, like an opera sung in Italian …. [Later] it became like watching an Italian opera with translated lyrics projected as supertitles above the stage …. [Now] I’ve tried to convey some of the drama of bison social behavior in a few scenes without projecting text above them. But the behavioral ecologist’s job, and my passion, is to go beyond rhapsodic appreciation by translating the lyrics so that the story line can emerge. Bison social behavior is too marvelous a tale to go untold.”
Two parts on “The Machinery of a Bison’s Life” and “Whence They Came Forth, and How Much They Multiplied” have the same compelling immediacy, so that details on digestion or how grass grows, subjects so easy to make mind-numbing, become fascinating. Lott is too good a scientist to have to resort to jargon to describe scientific subjects or fear charges of anthropomorphism. He concedes that bison—Bison bison—is the proper name of his beast, but prefers the more evocative buffalo. Lott is plain-spoken and the prose throughout is refreshingly clear and sometimes very funny.
Plant material is digested by bacteria in a bison’s rumen. The process is called fermentation, the same process that is used to produce wine and other alcoholic beverages. Writes Lott, “Like all living things, these fermentation bacteria have waste products, which include alcohol. It’s a sobering fact that 12 or 13 percent of a bottle of Dom Perignon Champagne is bacteria pee.” Talking about how bison must lose body heat during the heat of summer, he says, “If they couldn’t get rid of the heat … they would soon be walking pot roasts.”
Part five offers capsule accounts of “The Bison’s Neighbors,” including wolves, pronghorns, and grizzlies, as well as ticks, anthrax, and a single bird species he calls the buffalo bird. It is a testament to the bison’s rarity—and the supremacy of domestic cattle—that most of us call this species the cowbird.
The final part of the book, “Human and Buffalo” tells the sad history of the bison’s near demise in the years following European settlement of North America, and its modest recovery in the last century. The story is familiar but told with clarity and compassion. Lott doesn’t divide the world into good guys and bad guys, just guys with different needs and different values. He makes the point several times that wildlife management is the public manifestation of private attitudes, with politics deciding whose values prevail. Expressed more bluntly, “In America today, all wild things and wilderness always hang by the slender thread of individuals giving a damn.”
Lott concludes with a plea for a Great Plains Park in the United States linked to Canada’s Grasslands National Park. This expansive protected area could lead to a restoration of the glories of the American plains, which once rivaled those of Africa’s savannas. With people like Dale Lott giving a damn, this dream seems achievable—and the slender thread of concern feels like a thick rope on which the bison’s future can be secured.
In American Bison, Lott reveals himself as a man I’d like to know, to sit and savor a glass of wine with and listen to his stories as the sun goes down over the Rockies. Reading his book is the next best thing. Try it, with or without the wine. You’ll love it.
—Susan Lumpkin
ZooGoer 31(6) 2002. Copyright 2002 Friends of the
National Zoo. All rights reserved.
