I called that first bison post in 2018 "Bison Bison" after the animals' genus and species and to emphasize that they are NOT buffalo. I added another "Bison" with my second post. I can't in all good conscience just add another "Bison" to the name of this blog post so I'm changing things up and going with "Tatanka", which is the Lakota (or Sioux, if they are an enemy to you) word for these animals. Here goes blog post number three about bison. This has to be the last one, if for no other reason than I don't know where exactly I'd go that I haven't already seen these creatures.
Although I guess there might be some in Nebraska.
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| Bison on the move in Badlands National Park. |
I have documented the almost extinction of the bison on my two past posts on this same topic but a refresher is probably in order: when European settlers first arrived in North America and had an opportunity to see just how many bison there were out there in what is now the United States of America, they used estimates of 30 to 60 million of these animals. In 1889, the number was down to 1,091. North of 30 million to about a thousand in about 100 years or so. It was a staggering slaughter driven by greed, cruelty and a desire to cut off one of the essential natural resources available to Native American tribes. Kill the bison, kill the people who relied on them, or so went the thinking.
If we had visited South Dakota 200 years ago, we likely would have found vast herds of bison, thousands upon thousands of these animals with enough mass to make the Earth tremble when they started running. We would have also found a thriving Lakota culture whose very spiritual and literal existence would have revolved around the animals. Food, clothing, housing and tools would have all been missing without the bison.
Fifty or so years later, there would be no bison in South Dakota. Extinct in the 1870s.
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| Wind Cave National Park, Black Hills. |
So considering their total extinction in the state in the nineteenth century, we knew our bison-watching experience in South Dakota was likely to be way different than in a place like Yellowstone National Park, which is one of the very few places on Earth where there is a herd descended from animals that roamed in the same spot hundreds of years ago. Not that we really care about lineage of bison or anything like that. We don't need purebred bison to enjoy watching these magnificent creatures. But the ones we hoped to find in South Dakota would have been deliberately placed there. They also would be roaming a far smaller parcel of land than Yellowstone National Park, which is larger than the state of Rhode Island.
For that last reason, we thought we'd stand the best chance of finding a significant number of bison by searching in a few places. Like a couple of National Parks and a State Park.
And yes, you read that last part correct, there is a State Park (Custer State Park, site of a memorable 2020 de-pantsing incident for a tourist who ignored the "don't approach bison" warning) in South Dakota with a herd of bison. This is not the first time we'd been in a such a place. There's one in Utah also (Antelope Island State Park) but Custer has a significantly larger bison presence, or at least it did when we visited. And they are not in pens or cages or anything like that. They are roaming free (although the whole place is fenced with cattle guards where roads cross the fence line). I'm completely jealous. I can't remember the last time I went to a Virginia State Park, probably because there are none nearby (or anywhere for that matter) that have their own herd of bison. I'd be there all the time if I lived in southwest South Dakota.
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| Custer State Park. The horns on the first bison are particularly impressive. |
So what were we up against, here? Well, Wind Cave National Park has between 250 and 400 bison; Badlands National Park has about 1,200 or so; and Custer State Park boasts 1,000 to 1,600 at any one time. All of the Parks (not just Custer State Park) are fenced to keep the animals in a relatively small location. At Custer, the herd is managed to right-size it to its location. There are no predators large enough to take down a bison in the Park so to prevent over-grazing, some members of the herd are auctioned off every year. You might think fencing and herd-managing equates to a zoo. I can see you thinking that way; we didn't. These are still free-roaming wild animals who survive out on their own. It may not have quite been Yellowstone, but this counted for us.
And as we found out, just showing up and paying admission didn't guarantee a bison sighting. We worked for the photos that I'm posting on here. We also didn't want to find ones and twos of bison like we found four years ago in Theodore Roosevelt National Park. We really wanted to find a sizeable herd with some baby bison, considering our visit coincided pretty well with the mid-point of calving season. Who doesn't love baby bison?
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| Close-up. Wind Cave National Park. |
We started our bison hunt last month in Wind Cave National Park and Custer State Park. The two Parks share a common boundary so driving from one to the next was extremely convenient. Both Parks are located in the Black Hills, a coniferous forest with intermittent meadows and open landscapes which in theory would make bison-spotting much more difficult than somewhere with a more open landscape. The Hills are also sacred to the Lakota and several other Native American tribes, but that's another story for another time.
Perhaps it's obvious from the pictures posted so far here but we did succeed in seeing bison at both Wind Cave and Custer. At Wind Cave, we covered the main Park drive down Highway 87 both north to south and south to north along with traveling on the gravel / dirt road called Highland Ridge Road or Route 5. That latter road is not super easy in a Toyota Camry and considering we got a good look at about three bison on the entire road (although that did include the close-up above), we probably could have skipped it and not missed out on anything. Although we had no way of knowing that ahead of time.
Highway 87 is a gorgeous winding road that takes you from prairie to forest and back to prairie with some incredible one way bridges. But the only place we saw bison on that road was at the north end on outside of the forest. And there were not that many bison along that road either. More than the gravel / dirt road but not a spectacular number. Wind Cave had the fewest bison of the three parks so perhaps that's not surprising.
Our time in Custer State Park was remarkably similar to Wind Cave. Custer has a larger herd and a brand new (...like literally brand new as of May 2022) Bison Center in the Park but we saw no more bison on our drive along the Wildlife Loop Road than we did in Wind Cave. One of the first things I do when I get back from any trip is to organize my photos and flag my favorites. Of all the bison pictures we took in South Dakota, only one Custer photo made the cut. That's not to say our experience was worse at Custer State Park than Wind Cave, but we certainly emerged with fewer keeper pictures there than we did earlier in the day.
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| Last two pictures from Wind Cave. |
I'm also not saying our day searching for bison in the Black Hills wasn't worth it. It totally was. I'd definitely put it ahead of our experience in North Dakota four years ago, but we also definitely didn't get what we hoped to find. And yes, I've been on enough wildlife trips to know not to have high expectations. Our hopes for the herd and the baby bison were now pinned squarely on Badlands National Park.
2022 was not my first time at Badlands National Park. I stopped there for maybe 30 or 45 minutes on my way from Kansas City to Deadwood in 2011. We drove maybe a third of the Badlands Loop Road (the main road connecting the two primary entrances to the Park) on that visit and saw the amazing landscape characteristic of the Dakota badlands, but certainly nothing resembling any sort of sizeable wildlife. Or any wildlife at all, really. I would not have placed high hopes of Badlands salvaging my bison experience 11 years later based on that trip in 2011. This seemed risky.
It wasn't. Badlands National Park was the best thing we did in our four days in South Dakota. Hands down. We had some amazing experiences on other days. In fact, pretty much everything we did in the four days we were out doing things in South Dakota was really memorable, which is a little shocking to write. But Badlands was the best.
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| Two bison pictures from Badlands National Park. |
We planned Badlands. We charted out a route that had us entering in the middle of the Park fairly early in the day; hoping for some bighorn sheep at Pinnacles Overlook; heading east down Badlands Loop Road; circling back through Wall (and Wall Drug!); re-entering in the middle of the Park; and finally heading west along the gravel Sage Creek Rim Road where, according to the Park's website, we were most likely to see bison.
In what turned out to be a really good omen, we found three bachelor bison before we even entered the Park. We got lucky with the bighorns shortly after that. 14 total, including one lamb, set against the gorgeous eroded landscape of the badlands that looks like some giant had taken a giant plow to the Earth and then just left the ground that way and walked away, leaving it cut and scarred as a series of valleys between sand and orange-ish colored mounds. The Badlands Loop Road winds on top of, between and around these mounds, and we hoped for a sighting of a bison or the whole herd every time we saw around the next one. We got none.
I don't know quite what it was about Badlands. Certainly the bison and the bighorn sheep sightings helped but I think more than anything else it was the landscape and the weather. The place is so different between the badlands (small b) areas and the prairies. There's such a contrast between those two but it IS just those two. It's not like Yellowstone with their five or six or seven or eight or more different environments. Just badlands and prairie. I think it helped that it was sunny and windy to keep us warm and cool. I've been in windier places for sure in my life but I don't think I've ever seen birds fly into the wind and go exactly nowhere or seen fields of grass rippled to make them like impressionist painting backgrounds the way we saw at Badlands. All of that contributed to my love of that Park the second time around.
And yes, we DID see the herd of bison we hoped to find. We found them on Sage Creek Rim Road, just like the website suggested we would. We actually saw multiple groups of bison along that road, in bachelor groups of twos and threes and a larger herd of what also looked like an all-male herd of 20 or 25 or so. We saw more bachelor bison in Badlands than in Wind Cave and Custer combined.
The herd was the best. 50, 60, maybe 70 bison. Too many to count quickly, or even at all if we had tried because they tend not to stand still. I get that this herd we came across is tiny compared to the sizes of the groups that used to roam the prairies and the hills and the forests and badlands of what is now South Dakota. Those days are gone. For now, the herds in Badlands and places like that are the best we have. Maybe one day they'll get bigger but they'll never get back to the numbers they used to have. There's not enough contiguous open space. Humans won't allow it.
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| Bison as far as the eye can see. And a baby up close. Badlands National Park. |
There were plenty of future bison adults in the herd too. Juvenile males who will one day compete with their brothers and cousins for the right to the herd for themselves along with newly born calfs who couldn't have been more than a few months old, pale brown and not yet the darker color of their mothers or the brood born the prior year. It's encouraging seeing species survive and it's great that all three parks we visited have this circle of life continuing, even if it will never be what it was.
I don't think I'll be writing about bison again on this blog. These creatures have been such a source of joy as they have taken us to new states as we've come closer and closer to all fifty. I'd love to re-visit Yellowstone again someday. That place was definitely the number one bison Park I've ever been to and there's so many other things to see there. But Wind Cave and Custer measured up admirably based on their herd sizes and Badlands will go down as a signature National Park experience. I'm glad I went back. It was sort of a throw-in, too obvious to pass up. It definitely turned out to be so much more than that.
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| Pretty satisfied with Badlands National Park. |
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