By Chelsea DeWeese
Battling Bison
You peer out the van window as crisp cloudbursts with low-hanging mist cool off the hot, mid-summer air. It smells refreshing and revitalizing. Magenta fireweed, ivory cow parsnip, and yellow arrowleaf balsamroot dash past your vision, coloring the surrounding evergreen forest.
Suddenly, the viewscape opens widely. There—in the open expanse of Yellowstone National Park’s Lamar Valley—a lone, large-humped bison deliberately crosses the landscape in an uninterrupted descent upon a massive herd of other animals. As it gets closer, other male bison in the herd wave their heads steadily back and forth, emitting a noise halfway between a snore and a belch. The encroaching bison lowers its head, tears into a sagebrush with its horns, paws the ground with its hoof, urinates, and then promptly lays down onto the ground and begins to roll in it.
Standing up and shaking off in a cloud of dust, the bull proceeds to lift its upper lip into the air, testing for pheromones from female bison in the herd, and then sticks out a blue-gray tongue and emits a long, drawn-out bellow. The sound is instantly echoed from other bull bison scattered throughout the valley tending to females in the herd.
It’s the bison rut, otherwise known as the mating season, and it’s possibly one of our favorite times of year here at the park’s North Entrance. Thousands of bison—large, grass-eating animals that once roamed the West in the millions—currently inhabit greater Yellowstone and they pop into action this time of year. Bulls, which other months exist solo or with a select group of other male bison, identify eligible females and stand next to them closely, sniffing their bottoms while bellowing and warding off any other potential suitors.
If another bull gets too close the bellowing intensifies. Sometimes the posturing escalates and the bulls get into a battle. And a battle it is! Imagine two, 2,000-pound animals going head-to-head and horn-to-horn in a clash of strength, determination, and dominance.
For this, and for many other reasons, it’s important to give these animals a wide berth any time of year but especially during the rut in July and August. Thankfully, due to the layout of the roadway in the park’s Northern Range, visitors can safely witness the action from inside or just outside of our touring vehicles.
A Significant History
To look out across the bison rut in Lamar Valley is to glimpse what North America may have looked like before our modern history. The vast number of animals spread out across hills and dales leads one to believe the bison have occupied this space since time immemorial– but that wasn’t necessarily a given.
Here, in the heart of some of the last and best intact wildlife habitat remaining on the planet, the American Plains Bison was brought back from the brink of extinction at the Lamar Buffalo Ranch, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982 due to its significance in the progression of American wildlife preservation. Today, in large part because of that effort at the turn of the 20th century, Yellowstone remains the only place in the country bison have roamed continually since prehistoric times. And we feel fortunate that we and our guests are able to bear witness.
To learn more about these majestic animals and other wildlife join us on tour! We would love to share with you the history and happenings of Yellowstone and the creatures that call this ecosystem home. You can find out more about the types of tours we offer here.
Chelsea DeWeese writes from her hometown of Gardiner, Montana, at the North Entrance to Yellowstone National Park.
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