Bear Grease - Ep. 331: Backwoods University - Bison East of The Mississippi

Episode Date: June 9, 2025

Most commonly when folks hear the word “bison” they think of the American West. It is rarely, if ever, recognized that there was once a population of bison in the East. In this episode of Understand The Wild we will take a deep dive into the history of bison East of the Mississippi River. We will learn about them as species, we will gain an understanding of their deep impacts on the country’s landscape, and ultimately, we will find out what led to their demise. Connect with Lake Pickle and MeatEater Lake Pickle on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and YouTube Clips MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife, wild places, and the people who dedicate their lives to conserving both. I'm your host, Lake Pickle. Today, I want to talk to you about one of the most iconic species in all of North America, bison, or buffalo. But we're going to explore their history in a place that is often forgotten, the eastern United States. It's mid-April, and the sound that you're hearing is me and my friend. and Jeremy French from the southeastern Grasslands Institute, hiking down a hill towards a large flowing creek. It's slightly overcast, but besides that, it's a beautiful spring day, and the vegetation that we're walking through is showing it. Wildflowers starting to bloom, trees along the creek

beginning to leaf out. We even heard two turkeys gobble on our journey down here. As we make it down close enough to hear the fast-flowing water of the creek that will eventually dump into the red river, we see what we came for. Man, what a cool place. See this cut through? Yeah. That's your bison trail. Really? That's entirely open, not because anybody maintains it, not because anybody's doing anything, but because it's a bison trail. As we get further down, you'll see where it gets war in. Now, I know what you may be thinking. Bison Trail, okay, he's in Yellowstone, he's in one of the Dakotas, or he's out, west somewhere and to that I say not so fast because I'm in North Tennessee and now I'm

standing in a historic bison trail that has been here for a long long time told you you're gonna see and think that someone busted a bulldozer through it yeah so that they just straight up bison trail straight up bison trail now how do they know like how how how did somebody determine that this was a bison trail so we were looking at this a hundred years ago, right? It would look different than it does today. Because we've had more time of rain and less time of bison on the landscape, it looks more eroded and washed out. But back in the day, these shoulders here would have been much higher and more prominent. And then they mapped them all. You know, they mapped all the bison trails of like the Cumberland settlements.

Gotcha. And, you know, just by the surviving of those documents, we have an understanding. But also, if we look with like LIDAR and stuff, we'd be able to see much more like, topographical changes that we're not seeing now because of our naked eye. But this, no equipment, you nothing, it almost looks like a boat wreck. And when the water is shallower, so the water's pretty high right now, you can see these rocks that are just submerged where the bison would have walked across and then fjorded the river. But they picked this spot in the river for a reason, you know, you've got food resources on both sides, they get funneled in by this, you'd

giant cliff. You know, they've got nowhere else to go. They're probably going north or south, you know, between Nashville and the giant big barons. And they used it enough that we can see it on LIDAR. We can see it as we're standing here today. Yeah. And then also it's in those historical Cumberland settlement books. And you can just see like the gentle slope. But this would have been much more prominent, you know, probably like your typical four feet knee deep. The challenging thing is we're in a time of soil aggregation and soil degradation. So as the water comes, it's pulling dirt off, it's redepositing dirt elsewhere. But no one put this here.

That is crazy, man. As I stand here, my feet physically placed in the middle of this bison trail, I can't help but get the feeling that I'm standing somewhere ancient. The fact that a group of animals that were around hundreds of years ago left such an impact that a trail of theirs can stand. be picked up on the bare ground today is nothing short of wild to me. And in some ways, that sentiment alone is a perfect illustration of what I'm after in the first place. American Buffalo, unarguably one of the most iconic wildlife species in our country's history.

And while so much is known about them, I feel like there's still much unknown, especially when you hone in on the topic of bison in the east. These days, if you bring up buffalo in most settings, people automatically, think of the western United States, which is not inaccurate, but it doesn't tell the whole story. Bison were here, right where I'm standing in Tennessee, and all throughout the eastern region, and I think they left a bigger impact than most of us are even aware of. And that's what I'm here to learn about. We'll return to the flowing creek and bison trail later, but for now, I really want to dig into the topic of bison in the eastern United States, where all they were,

what type of impacts they made on the landscape and early settlers, why we lost them, and what the future of bison in the east is, if there even is one. To help us get to the bottom of this, I tracked down two sure enough subject experts. The first is Jeremy French, who y'all have already met down along the creek. Jeremy is the director of ecological restoration and stewardship for the Southeastern Grasslands Institute. He's also a botanist and has spent ample time studying bison and their effects on the landscape. The second is Chris Widga. Chris is a distinguished paleontologist, ecologist, and archaeologist known for his extensive research on bison.

To start us off, I want to ask Chris what the actual historic range of bison is. That's a fun question. And then the follow-up of what's the range based on the fossils themselves. But to start with the historical range, you know, we've got bison everywhere from northern Florida to, you know, eastern Washington and Oregon, northern California. So east-west, their continental scale, their continental range, some of the earliest settlers or earliest Euro-Americans that were getting into Virginia, they noted these forest cattle. So, you know, we don't know that they're bison. We can't say that they weren't cattle. But there weren't a lot of cattle around at that time, and there's very few other things that they could be.

So we've got, you know, pretty good historic ranges east to west, coast to coast. And then from north to south, probably talking northern Mexico to Alaska and those places. So, you know, we're North America writ large. There's some kind of ecological barriers when you get into the northeast and into eastern Canada. but they're everywhere almost. Okay, so we now know that the American bison covered virtually the entire continent. But now, I want to kick it back to Jeremy

to focus in on the eastern United States. When you think about bison, I don't think people think about New York. I don't think people think about the Carolinas. I don't think people think about Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and not just those specific states, but I want to learn about those bison,

what those populations were like, where they were, what they were, what they lived on, how they traveled, how we lost them. I know I'm covering a lot there. Yeah. So we've got records or evidence of bison spanning anywhere from New York through the Carolinas to the Panhandle, Florida, Georgia, westward essentially. And then we have evidence of a lot deeper history or longer-term histories of not just bison,

but multiple species and long time of bison operating throughout the east. Now that we know we have multiple records and evidence of bison in the east, I want to dig into that further. What exactly is this evidence that we have? And what do we know about timelines? Understanding that the timeline and some of the evidence for this is complex, right? In that we can look at cultural history or we can look at, you know, true scientific fact that we have like something to touch, right? And if we go by like something to touch, it would be about a thousand years ago at the, the mouth of what is Dunbar Cave within Clarksville, Tennessee, somehow a bison bones got

deposited there. And then we were able to discover those bison bones and then date back to roughly when that would have been. So those bison bones dated back a thousand years. That would have been still our modern bison. There's tons of evidence in Tennessee and what we'd call like the upper mid-south for long kind of habitation of bison. We've got extensive networks of historic bison trails that were mapped as pioneers came west. There's plenty of evidence of Spanish and French market hunters slaughtering bison in the Nashville basin where they discovered these essentially these licks or what they would refer to as stamps. And they even talk about, you know, there being so many bison in some of these like one refers to like Bledso or Manskers lick that they would

shoot these bison and they couldn't get off their horse because they were so packed in shoulder their shoulder and if they got off their horse it would have gotten trampled so they have to like spend hours figuring out how they're going to get this bison that they shot without getting off their horse or even like this is one of my favorite factoid what is now present-day Nashville Nashville is a relatively new name for it what it was called was French's Lick and it was discovered by the French this guy named D'amambrian and it was a giant stamp what they called bison lake where these bison and elk and deer would come to get minerals Yeah.

They saw tons of bison there. They saw evidence of bison. They saw real animals. And then from that site, they had this spoken wheel kind of structure to the trails where out from Nashville, you have all these bison trails. And those bison trails would have gone north to Clarksville where we're sitting today. They would have gone south. They would have gone to Manskers Lick and these different areas with grazing opportunities.

And those exact trails became, you know, wagon trails and then eventually became roads. Yep, you heard that one correctly. Some of the bison trails coming out of the Nashville basin eventually became roads. Roads that are still in use today. How crazy is that? Particularly, roads that became part of the Natchez's trace, but there's others. And here's another twist. This isn't an isolated incident.

There's other states in the east with roads that can be traced back to bison trails as well. I want to kick it back to Jeremy to hear more about bison evidence and timelines. Many people hypothesize the idea that bison were only here for a short period of time. And if we focus south of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi, we have these gaps in data. We've got what we had from Dunbar Cave from roughly 1,000 years ago. If we go further back for the east, about 7,000 years ago, we have documentation essentially from a dig site in South Carolina where they unearthed spear points and they use this technique. called crossover immunoelectrophoresis, which can identify essentially proteins. And then you can use those proteins to identify what family they came from.

And the family that came from these proteins and spear points from 7,000 years ago were bovid. The only native bovid we have to North America that would have been here 7,000 years ago is our friend bison, bison or the buffalo. So there's a lot of hypotheses on the fluctuation of bison. needs, right? But if we start looking at other evidence or other information or what kind of interests me the most, when early settlers settled the Nashville Basin, right, there were many records of this plant species called Running Buffalo Clover or Trifolum, right? This clover, they called the Tile White Clover, was both present in French's lick and other licks in the area.

And this area would be named Clover Bottoms, right? So, a literal place name being named after this plant species. If you understand the life cycle, this plant species, they're very short. They require grazing lawns. They require really unique habitats within grasslands that the bison were created. As we push bison out of the Nashville basin, poof, that species pretty much blinks out, right? Gone. There's a few small population of different trifoleums, but not where we're talking about all over the place, right?

And it was very common. And this is a clover? Yeah, this is a clover species. And there's multiple clover species that the similar things happen to. So like trifoleum calcarecum, trifoleum Kentuckyensis, and some of these clover species are extinct in the wild. Right. So like we had a bunch of them when we had the bison here, the bison leave, boom, they're gone. There's even more evidence and interest in the long-term kind of habitation of bison in the east, especially within the Nashville basin.

in this other group of plants called Pasonias or bladder pods. So these bladder pods, again, very short, short species. They need very short grasslands. The seeds of many of these require that overwinter the seed is getting sunlight. So they need soil disturbance and they need to be right on top of the soil and they need grazing lawns. If they don't get those things, they won't even germinate. If you drive up and down the Nashville pikes or the traces from Nashville, to other places, the places that we can still see these species exist are generally in mowed

road sites. Well, 2,000 years ago, no one was out there on their John Deere, right? How can you be sure? So you start questioning like, okay, how did this plant species that evolved and takes a long time for a plant species to evolve, evolve to occupy this niche here, east of the Mississippi Nashville basin? and you start, you know, kind of plugging things together, connecting things together, and you say, well, we must have large grazers. Well, what large grazers did we have in North America?

It's pretty much bison, right? After the pleisicine, it's pretty much bison. Yeah. And that then creates this deeper understanding of the ecology of not only systems within Nashville, but systems in the east that would have been grazing, had grazing and browsing interactions. And we think about early pioneer accounts, right? And one of the issues here is that there's like a timeline mismatchup. The Spanish come into Florida, about the 1500s. And that's when DeSoto takes this whole trip through Florida, Georgia,

and to, you know, Alabama, Mississippi, and then eventually dies. The DeSoto expedition never sees a live bison. But they're in Georgia and they're in the Panhandle and they're in these different parts interacting with tribes. and the tribes are feeding them what they refer to as LaBeef, or Leboof, which is, you know, the beef, or they often refer to as the beef. And they're seeing, you know, like DeSoto writes that in Georgia, in one of the communities, these tribal communities, he sees basically a European mount of a bison school.

You know, this white bison within these areas, or they talk about sitting on bison robes when they're meeting with chiefs. But as these kind of explorers and these pioneers are pushing, Westward, there's a lot of interlaying interactions in history, which makes some of these things challenging. Keeps me open to this idea that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just because we don't have a bone that's dated 3,000 years ago doesn't mean they weren't there. On blood trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker.

I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bag and there was a pool of blood. Oh my God, he doesn't have a hit. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors. Where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper. From cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwoods. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in dark.

because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. That's an interesting. line of thinking, Jeremy. Jeremy is using a combination of bison bone records, historical records, and response from native plant communities to hypothesize a timeline of bison on the eastern landscape. But I want to be sure to give the paleontologists a chance to wait in on this subject as well, because, to my surprise, Jeremy's and Chris's views on this did not exactly line up.

I mean, the fact that we had bison around, when some of the first European people, and explorers were moving out and writing down notes that really tie into that Bison record. And I think it gives the impression that they are well understood. However, that comes with the caveat that that is the last 200, 250 years, 300 years, last few centuries. As we go further back in time, you get some really interesting patterns in the Bison record. When you start zooming out to kind of the 1,000-year time scale or the 10,000-year time scale, That's where I've been very interested in Bison. And one of the things I found really early on, I mean, this was back when I was in graduate

school, I was approaching the archaeological record of Bison in archaeological sites. And I was approaching it because we had these very good historic records. And I was thinking, I kind of know how Bison behave and that sort of thing. But then we started getting into some methods and starting to get, you know, whether it's ancient DNA or looking at the chemistry of their bones and teeth as kind of proxies. for behavior. And all of a sudden, bison were mysterious again because they were doing things that you just didn't expect them to do based on that historic record. And they were in places that you didn't expect to see them. If I have a bison bone in a site, I know there was a bison there.

There's some other, you know, angles that we're starting to get into, whether it's, you know, DNA in sediments or proteins in blood residue on stone tools or something like that. There's some other angles that you can get. And one of the really interesting things that will pan out in the next couple of years is that they don't all tell us the same thing. And that we see that we see this kind of situation in science, not just with bison. We see it. That's also one of the things that's going on with like the end of the Pleistocene extinctions. You know, if you look at data at one scale or in one place, it tells you something completely different than in someplace else. And the fun part, the challenge is to figure out how to make all of those stories right because they are, you know.

And that, you know, helps us limit the number of possibilities a little bit too. So, you know, a historic expansion of bison into the eastern U.S. might have just been a flash in the pan. You know, they might have just gotten out to Virginia and South Carolina and in North Carolina just in time to kind of get pushed back to get hunted back. You know, we might just be talking about a decade or two. really flashy. Well, my mind goes to, and I don't know if this is even an answerable question,

I keep going back to that bison trail in Clarksville, like how long and how many bison have to go through that trail for it to be, for it to remain that long? I don't think very many, to be honest. Yeah, I mean, they're such disruptive animals. And they're herding animals. And it may not have even been like a big herd. That's one of the other kind of things about the eastern bison that we see is they don't seem to be

present in the giant herds that you see out west. It might be a dozen. It might be two dozen. Even in the historic record, that's the general tendency is to kind of have a smaller herd. But it wouldn't take them too long, especially if they're hanging out in a more constrained area, too. So, you know, they're going up and down between the river and the upland, the river and the upland. They're a grazing animal, an herbivore, that kind of more. moves where it makes sense to move. So if there's a swale, you know, or a less steep, you know,

entry in and out of a valley or something like that, they're going to prefer that. There's some landscape learning, you know, that goes on in a bison herd too. So, you know, the older females are going to do what they learned. Younger calves are going to learn it through the years. And so, so there's, there's some of those things going on, too. The, the trail that you used to, you saw probably is just a few hundred years old. But it's one of those things that, you know, if it's abandoned for very long, it goes back to grass pretty quickly, at least on a, on a paleontological time scale. But Western Tennessee is also really interesting because we get a fair amount of bison out there in the fossil record. You know, it's not unusual to see them

in the, in the creeks in the streams and that sort of thing. And we don't have a good handle on, you know, the timeline of them. So we haven't done a lot of radiocarbon dating on those bones. And to be honest, not very many of them make it into museums. This would be a call for more people to donate material to museums because that's really the record. That's the record that those of us that are thinking about these things, we go to a museum.

Otherwise, we have to go to like 100 different people. And 90 of them are dead. So the only reason that we can begin to answer some of these questions at the scale that we can is because we're going into museum collections and dealing with basically 100 or 200 years of people donating things for the public good. So it's been really exciting to me as an archaeologist and a paleontologist to kind of chase down what those differences are. How are they different from that iconic bull at the top of the hill that's that, you know, watching the sun going down? And in some places, they are very different. And the eastern U.S. is one of them.

So, we have two proposed ideas here. Number one, bison were only in the eastern U.S. for a short time, a flash in the pan, if you will, maybe a decade or two. Idea number two, bison were in the eastern United States for thousands of years longer than that. Which one is correct? I'll leave that up for you to decide. What both Jeremy and Chris did align on is that bison were 100% present in the eastern United States. And I'm interested in learning what kind of effects they have. One of my favorite things that is often talked about by early settlers and pioneers coming, you know, through the Cumberland Gap and further east, they talk about these impenetrable cane bricks.

Yeah. Just like so bad that they'd have to, you know, have their horse and wagon in the middle of the creek to get through them. Well, if you think about the ecology of these cane breaks, there's some interesting early observation from like Bledso's lick where they come and they have bison there. and it's this lush meadow, and then they pretty much shoot the bison out very quickly, and then after they shoot the bison up, it explodes into this impenetrable cane breaks. So there's evidence of that throughout the south, and I'm not here saying that, like, there were no cane breaks throughout the south, but bison would have been a maintaining factor to those cane breaks

and making them manageable and have interplay with beavers and meadows in those wet kind of riparian habitats, that as soon as we remove them, They blew up. We see similar things with, you know, we talk about Savannah Restoration or Grassland Restoration, where a lot of our Eastern systems would have had some level of grazing, browsing interactions that when we remove those bison from those system and we take the disturbance of wallowing or hoof marks or these other interactions, it changes the system.

So the evidence on the landscape is kind of all around us at times. if you were to draw the east, how much of the landscape today would even be inhabitable by bison? Inhabitable by bison, somewhere between 50%, you know, and habitable is a debatable turn. You know, you can see bison in forested settings at times, but like the true grazing lands that would have been utilized by bison, somewhere between 30 and 50% in the east would have been some type of open, grassy ecosystem. So like I often hear, you know, bison experts talk about bison in the east and they say, like, well, why would they be here? They're not going to be grazing in the forest. And they're coming at the bison in the east from a bison standpoint. I come at bison in the east from a different standpoint.

I come from it from like a botanical standpoint. I know, you know, those systems and my team knows those systems and you say, okay, well, here where they are. And it's like, well, that's not a forested system. That would have been open woodland or savanna that would have had Elemiss McGregory and all these grasses in the understory and it would have been great habitat for bison essentially or these giant prairies in the south. So a lot of the south could have, you know, absolutely had enough, you know, grass and open grassy systems to support bison.

Yeah. And it's, again, the story, I feel like to do the story of bison here in the East Justice, it's perturricular. that you understand how different the landscape looked. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, and I think it's interesting because myself as grassland ecologists, I come from it from looking at those grassland interactions and the historic habitat, historic ecosystems of the East.

And one thing is very evident to me. We had millions of acres of prairies, just prairies in the East. We had millions of acres of savannahs and woodlands. We have multiple, multiple different types of grasslands beyond that to, like, grassland balds, which would have been maintained open by Pleistocene megafauna. Surely those balds also at some point were grazed by bison, and these are on the top of the mountains in Appalachia. We've got, you know, glades and barons and fens. And we have this huge, you know, grouping of open grassy ecosystems, including meadows that surely would have had bison over time at different

rates and periods and understanding that animal populations, especially, bison, they tend to ebb and flow, right? They pulse like a heart. So they would have expanded and contracted and contracted and contracted. But when you look at the evolution of the plant species here, it kind of lends to this idea that I would encourage the listeners to really examine for themselves and really think about that plant species don't evolve overnight to occupy niches. And when we removed bison very quickly from the east, we saw many plant species just disappear. One thing, that quickly became evident to me while speaking to both Jeremy and Chris is that bison both have tangible and obvious effects on a landscape. I heard bison referred to as disruptive and ecological

engineers, and that became more and more obvious listening to jeremy described the landscape change when bison were no longer present. In fact, his exact words were removed bison very quickly. And that's what I want to learn about next. We know they were here. We know they were impactful, both historically and ecologically. So how did we go about losing them? How did we have an animal that was so impactful that was in abundance? How did we manage to pretty much push it all the way out and forget about it? Yeah, so I would say that bison are functionally extinct in the east.

That's something that, you know, I hope SGI can somewhat remediate someday and we've got some exciting projects around that. But we think about the early, you know, explorers to this region. This is many, many times before statehood for a lot of areas. Or so if we talk about Georgia, you know, really early on in their statehood, they enacted a law. And it might have actually been shortly before their statehood that killing bison became illegal. The reason I bring that up is because these early, like, market fur hunters, essentially, market hunters, came through and they just slaughtered.

I mean, it's similar to the story we've seen in the West where they were just killed by the hundreds and thousands. They were very quickly killed wherever they were in the East. So much so that we often talk about like Daniel Boone referencing bison in different places and his travels. By the time Daniel Boone got there, the French and the Spanish and these other English had killed the vast majority of the bison.

And like we're talking about we're killing thousands, you know, left and right. So that to see one by that point became really rare. And as we kind of came across the Kremlin gap, I think it's earliest 1750 in Roanoke, Virginia, modern-day Roanoke, Virginia, this area was called Big Lick. By 1750, we'd killed all the bison out of there. And then we kept pushing, killing, kept pushing, killing. And I don't try and paint the wrong picture, right? Because, like, this was the wilderness, but we absolutely killed out and pushed the bison further west and further west and further west and further west.

Mostly before, you know, a lot of these places fully got settled out, you know. So people are coming. And there's kind of multiple lines of evidence for, like, bison presence on the landscape. So we've got maps, right? That's kind of a common thing where the French, you know, explorers and trappers would map areas and they'd be called like Western Kentucky. They called like the place where the tribes go to hunt the beef, essentially, referring to bison. So that's really common.

But the most common evidence that we have a bison in the east are the most common like historical documentation with people killing them. Right. And like I was rereading Ted Blue's book recently just to like, I'm super excited to talk. talk about bison again. And part of the, in there, they have like a record from, from the Spanish where it's like, we killed six bison today, and the next day we killed two, and the next day we killed five, and the next day we killed six. And they're going through and they're killing these animals. It doesn't take long if you're killing that many a day to really negatively impact a population. And eventually, you know, what originally becomes like the maps and then,

becomes killing them references, we start seeing more references of dead bison or bison bones or more references talking about their trails and stuff like that because we've already extirpated bison from the east by, you know, the mid-1800s, early 1800s. Most of the time, like if you're having a species of animal that's having a rough time today, right? Like a, like a population of an animal, a game animal, whatever, it's under some sort of duress. it's normally tied to some habitat degradation, habitat loss. Sometimes you'll have like a,

I don't know, like in white tails, you'll have like an EHD outbreak or something for a localized population. You don't hear a lot anymore for it to be like, why did we lose them? Well, we killed them. Yeah, what's always interesting to me is that like if you ask me the poster child

for us killing species out, the majority of the public or the conservation public, they're instantly going to think about the passenger pension. But bison are right there. Like we really, there is some like habitat changes

that would have happened with, with settlers, you know, changing areas. But really the big thing is we just killed them. And we killed them in the east sometimes, you know, for food and for fur.

And then when we push them further west, we kind of just killed them to kill them at times. And, you know, there was always kind of this idea that, like, bison are migratory. and the lack of understanding of the ecology of that time, you can't really fault people, but they thought like the next herd would come down from, you know,

the north or something like that, even in the east. So there was like a fundamental misunderstanding of the ecology of this bison that they were thought to be migratory, and they're not. They are rovers, right? So they may have a home range of 50 miles or 60 miles, and they might roam from grassland of grassland, but they're not truly migratory, like, let's say a duck, like a mallard that may migrate from Texas to Alaska,

you know, Canada. Yeah. So you see these fundamental misunderstandings of the ecology, which maybe contribute to them thinking like, oh, we can just kill everything that's here because the next migration is going to come. We're going to be good. Yeah, it'll be fine.

How many issues in wildlife or habitat or any of that stuff comes from a lack of understanding something? All of it. All of it. How many wildlife conflicts or issues with habitat loss can you think of that can be simplified down to just a lack of understanding? My guess would be quite a few. But I have zero intentions of ending this episode on such a sad note. If you called it earlier, Jeremy mentioned some exciting projects around someday remediating the loss of bison in the east.

I want to hear Chris Wittga's thoughts on modern bison conservation. I remember when I turned in my dissertation, the first draft of my dissertation was all about bison in Minnesota. Minnesota and Iowa and South Dakota. This was 2006. And the first draft, you know, your professors basically mark it up and write it up and everything. And I had a conclusion chapter. And I had another chapter. And it was basically, you know, taking what we know about, you know,

some of these new ideas that we're playing with, that we're exploring with bison in deep time. What does that mean for modern bison conservation? What does that mean for modern advice and management? I had an entire chapter. I thought hard about this. And I had a whole chapter on it. And my professors basically exed out and they said, don't get into this.

Don't get into modern conservation. I don't go there. And the nice thing is now we are going there. You know, it's been 10, 15, 20 years. And so now I'm getting people coming up to me or emailing me and saying, you know, we're starting. a bison herd in this place, do you know what's going on with bison here historically or prehistoric? You know, are we talking about big herds that are 100 animals? Are we talking about small

cowcalf herds or something like that? What are they eating? Do we need to think about, you know, reseeding a prairie in certain species? Do we need to worry about lots of woody growth? You know, so some of these really kind of on the ground landscape level questions, you know, we can kind of at least add, have some suggestions and say, this is at least in at the centennial to millennial scale, the scale of hundreds to thousands of years. You know, this is kind of the story that you have in your backyard. And so if somebody wanted to, you know, talk about Florida, you know, reintroduce Bison to a natural setting in Florida, you know, we probably have some data that we can throw at that. They are very adaptable animals and they're very happy doing things

what they do. They just want to do what they do wherever they are. And so I think that that's kind of the next place is to kind of bring it all together. See, that's where you're talking about bringing those two worlds together. That's where my head's at. As a hunting and conservation community, we've taken several species that were on the brink of being wiped out and managed to bring them back. I don't know how alone or a minority I am in this, but I'm like just saying, Bison, yeah, they're gone. Like, I'm not good with stopping right there. Like if there's a way to restore some of that, like I'm in.

So is there a future for Bison in the eastern United States? I would say it's possible. It's definitely not a closed door. I want to thank all of you for listening to Backwoods University. And I want to give a big shout out to Onex Hunt for making this podcast possible. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to come back for the next one coming out on June 23rd, because believe me, we're just getting started. But for now, let's close this episode out as promised by going back to the bison trail down by the creek. I'm just trying to picture it in my head. Man, that's cool. I feel like I'm standing somewhere ancient.

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