March 12, 2012
The Isle Where Buffalo Roam
The bison may never leave Catalina Island. Photo courtesy of Catalina Island Conservancy
In 1924, a film crew descended on California’s Catalina Island to shoot a silent Western called The Vanishing American. When the filming was finished, the crew members packed up and left. Legend has it, however, that they abandoned several of their extras. The castoffs—14 American bison—took up residence in the arid hills of this rocky island.
In the decades that followed, the bison did what bison do: The animals grazed and bred. Each spring a new batch of calves was born. By the late 1980s, some records suggest the herd had swelled to more than 500 animals (pdf). On this small island where no bison had ever lived before, these unlikely ungulates thrived.
The buffalo’s success, however, came at the expense of Catalina’s vegetation. The island, covering just 75 square miles, is home to more than 400 native plants, several of which are found nowhere else in the world. The free-roaming bison’s voracious appetite, sharp hooves, and penchant for scuffing out wallows—dusty depressions where the animals roll—took a toll on the grasslands. The bison and their shaggy coats also helped spread the seeds of non-native plants.
The Catalina Island Conservancy, a land trust charged with managing most of the island and its wildlife, took charge of the bison in the 1970s. To shrink the herd and prevent overcrowding, the agency began shipping bison to the mainland to sell at auction. Some were eventually slaughtered.
In 2003, the Conservancy found another way to thin the herd. The organization shipped more than 100 animals back to their ancestral home, the Great Plains. The bison, some weighing more than half a ton, first had to be ferried to the mainland and then trucked to South Dakota, where they now live on the Cheyenne River and Standing Rock Lakota Indian reservations. More bison made a similar journey in 2004.
But trucking bison cross-country has its downsides. It’s expensive, and it’s stressful for the animals. In 2009, the Conservancy tried another tactic: birth control. The females receive a yearly injection of a wildlife contraceptive called PZP, short for porcine zona pellucida. The vaccine consists of protein from the membrane surrounding unfertilized pig eggs. When injected into a bison, this protein triggers the production of antibodies, which then bind to the membrane surrounding the buffalo’s own unfertilized eggs and prevent sperm from fertilizing the egg.
The birth control project seems to be working. The number of newborn calves fell from 29 in 2010 to just five last spring. “The bison do what they enjoy. They just don’t have babies,” says Bob Rhein, a spokesperson for the Catalina Island Conservancy. And it’s far cheaper than trucking the bison back to the Great Plains.
Of course, there is another, perhaps simpler solution to the bison problem. The Conservancy could ship them off the island permanently. That option may make sense from a conservation perspective, but it has little support among Catalina’s residents. The herd is a part of the island, says Patricia Maxwell, marketing director at the Catalina Island Conservancy. “The bison are beloved.”
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Just curious. The article throws in “The bison and their shaggy coats also helped spread the seeds of non-native plants.”
I am presuming that the bison born on the island got any non-native seeds the same way the island got them, carried on the winds. So why stick the bison with this additional crime?
Tuesday morning links…
The Dingo as the Default Dog? How to Tap the Missus Seek and you shall find’: Secret message that led to ‘lost’ Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece hidden behind wall for 400 yearsThe Isle Where Buffalo Roam Topography of religion in the US The Grad-Schoo…
Hi Robert,
The bison aren’t the sole reason for the spread of non-native plants on Catalina, of course. But they can pick up non-native seeds in their coats when they brush against non-native plants. The bison move freely around the island, dropping clumps of seed-laden hair wherever they go. Pretty effective dispersal mechanism! See this article: http://www.mendeley.com/research/dispersal-nonnative-plants-introduced-bison-island-ecosystem/
This approach was tried with donkeys that were brought to Ossabaw Island, GA. The only problem with the “sterlization was that there was one donkey that was already pregnant which, after all the sterilizing was done, gave birth to a fertile Myrtle who managed to keep the procreation of roaming donkeys going.
Nature has a way of propagating life.
The bison or buffalo now on Catalina Island have experienced nearly the same result as the race of humans portrayed in the movie they were meant to act as extra’s in, ” The Vanishing American”, back in 1924. Fortunately, for the American Indian and the science community,the Smithsonian preserved our ancestors cadavers in cardboard boxes in a storage building in Battery Park, New York, or we would have totally disappeared from existence, but that is another tragic story. Another recent relevant story , highlights a hunting lodge in Texas that charges $ 14,000 to “hunt” white buffalo on a ranch for the mere trophy value. That is the reality of today. Fast forward back to Catalina Island, and the purported effort by the Catalina Island Conservancy to preserve these magnificent beings. I am an enrolled member of an American Indian tribe of the Plains, and back in 2004, 80 years after they arrived, I was responsible ( with the financial help of the Morongo Band of Mission Indians ) for repatriating 100 of these beings, back to the plains where they originated from. The Morongo people understood what it meant to repatriate them, I understood what it meant, but I have always doubted that the (CIC) Catalina Island Conservancy ever understood the significance of it. These beings originated in the Southern plains and would migrate north kind of in a circle, depending on how the grasses re-generated. They became part of the sustenance of our people for thousands of years, and we depended on them for our existence. We gave thanks to the Creator for them and had ceremonies and directed prayer of thanks to their spirit for providing for us. Along came the occupation of our lands, and in order for the occupiers to steal our lands, they indiscriminately killed the buffalo, in order to deprive us of food, and consequently acquiesce. Again, fast forwarding to the present, I am appalled at the effort to curtail their procreation by experimenting on them with a contraceptive.
We ( the American Indian ) have offered to place them on our reservations, but to no avail. Unfortunately, the Catalina Conservancy, under the guise of a caring “conservancy”, refuses to let go of the ideology that they are doing a service to these beings, when in truth, they are not only damaging the natural life cycle of the species, and now, are reverting to experimenting and changing their DNA and natural existence, through the use of contraceptives. The other reason they hold them in captivity, is because the local population is enamored with them and use them as a tourist attraction for monetary and economic purposes. The Conservancy, dishes out the boiler plate answer, in order to justify their existence, that , again they are “conservators”, and that they have the best interest of the beings at the forefront. They may be able to ” buffalo ” some people most of the time, but not all the time. If they ( the Conservancy ) really were true to the meaning of what it is to be a conservator, then they would quit using these beings for monetary purposes and repatriate them to their original stewards, the American Indian Nations. Granted, today they would not be free to roam the plains as they once did, through no fault of our own, as the occupiers brought barbed wire and erected fences, but they would be in their natural habitat, feed on as much natural grasses as are left on our reservations, and again, roam the prairies that their ancestors did, and that we have managed to hold on to. Look in any historical manual of the old west, and you will undoubtedly find a picture that speaks a thousand words. That picture shows a stack, thirty feet high, of thousands of bleached skulls of our brother , the buffalo, they were for sale. Buffalo Bill, killed them for sport and money also, just like this present entrepreneur, mentioned in the beginning of this commentary. Today, this tax write-off creation of the Wrigley family, calling itself a “conservancy”, has the audacity to want to act as the Creator, and experiment with the natural procreation of this magnificent being. When is enough , enough ? If you cannot sustain them, let the original stewards have them back, but do not use your ego and premise of conservatorship to change or limit what the Creator placed on this Earth.