Columbus Monthly / September 2011 / Home on the range

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Home on the range

After nearly 40 years in the making, Battelle Darby Creek is now home to six bison.

 

It was a frigid February day when Jack McDowell saw handlers coax six half-ton female bison, including Big Mama, out of horse trailers and into the prairies at Battelle Darby Creek Metro Park. It was the very same grassy and flower-filled space that McDowell created—seed-by-seed—starting back in 1973.

McDowell, 78, was so enthused he began to sing, “Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam, where the deer and the antelope play.”

 “I had this dream of bison roaming on the prairie here and it was so exciting to see it come true,” says McDowell, who now is retired from Metro Parks, about the day the bison arrived.

It’s been several months since the bison arrived, and they continue to roam this range—and draw a steady stream of curious spectators to the park. They come to see the bison graze, swat flies with their tails, wallow in the mud and, if they’re lucky, rumble across the prairie, the dust billowing and the earth literally shaking under their hooves. If they’re unlucky, the bison are a distant and unmoving speck lying among the tall grass and ashy sunflowers.

“I like to watch the reaction of people, especially the kids, and hear all the ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs,’ ” says Tim Taylor, the naturalist at Battelle Darby Creek. He says the normal February attendance is about 4,000 people, but it leaped to 20,000 this year due to the bison.

The plan is eventually to add a bull, which will lead to calves and a herd of perhaps 20 bison—and a lot more oohs and aahs.

          

When bison dominated the Great Plains of the United States, they could be found as far east as Ohio, West Virginia and the western regions of Pennsylvania and New York. “They were never here in great numbers, but they were here,” Taylor says of the area west of Columbus called the Darby Plains.

There were 30 million or more bison when the first European settlers arrived on the shores of this country, according to the National Bison Association. French explorers called them les boeufs, which is how they also described cows, bulls and oxen. Over time, the name morphed into buffalo, although bison—or American bison, to be more precise—is the correct term.

Those new inhabitants began hunting bison relentlessly; the number of bison dwindled to fewer than 1,000 by the early 1900s, when the creation of the U.S. National Parks Service saved them from extinction. “The last year bison were seen in Ohio was 1803,” says Taylor, adding the prairies were plowed under and planted over by the farmers who settled here.

In recent years, bison have made a comeback, with the help of farmers who raise them to sell their meat. They also serve as tourist attractions at various parks, including Battelle Darby Creek. The Wilds in eastern Ohio, where the six bison at the park came from, has a herd of about 60.

There are currently 220,000 bison in this country, according to the National Bison Association. The largest herd—about 3,500—can be found in Yellowstone National Park in Montana.

 

The long process that brought bison back to Central Ohio began a few years after McDowell became manager of Battelle Darby Creek in 1965. “I got interested in prairies,” says McDowell, who also taught and coached football at West Jefferson High School during his early years with the park. (Although retired, he still serves as a part-time land management coordinator at Battelle Darby Creek.)

He became fascinated, perhaps a bit obsessed, with locating the tall grasses and colorful forbs (a flowering plant) that had blanketed this area. McDowell, his wife and their three daughters walked more miles than they can count—along old railroad tracks, in gullies and on local farms—in search of the scarce flora abundant so long ago.

McDowell sowed the seeds he collected in Battelle Darby Creek, slowly increasing the size of his prairie project. “Once we got the prairie started, we wanted to make it a complete ecosystem,” he says. “Not just the plants, but the animals associated with it.”

Such as bison.

Bison are an integral part of the prairie ecosystem. Minus these grazing machines with four stomachs, the tall grasses (big blue stem, little blue stem and Indian) would swallow the forbs. “We call them charismatic mega-fauna,” Taylor says of the bison. The long-gone elks also were important in controlling the growth of the local grasses, as well as the still-present deer to a lesser extent.

The forbs, such as prairie dock and purple coneflower, now are prevalent at Battelle Darby Creek and create a sea of color throughout the park. “I’d say my favorite forb is the royal catchfly,” says McDowell, adding the park has the only salmon-colored royal catchfly in the Darby Plains, which is found between the Big and Little Darby creeks. (The more common color is red.) Another of his favorites is the ashy sunflower. “Everyone thought it was extinct in this state,” he says. “But I found a little plot with a few and got the seeds and got it started on the prairie.”

Soon after, the farmer who owned the Clark County property where McDowell had found the ashy sunflowers “sprayed the area and killed them off,” he says.

 

‘We realized prairies are more interesting when there are bison out there,” says John O’Meara, executive director of Metro Parks, who began to plan for them in early 2010. Electrified fences were built around the 49 acres of prairies, well water was piped to a solar-powered trough (to keep the water from freezing in the winter) and Metro Parks staffers met with their counterparts at the Wilds to learn about the animals.

“They’re almost maintenance free,” says Stephanie Shaffer, assistant manager at Battelle Darby Creek. The staff does a daily inspection of the bison and quickly learned a trick or two about how to approach the big beasts. They’re not aggressive, but are surprisingly fast animals who can do a lot of damage on purpose or by accident.

“We use treats,” Shaffer says of the thumb-sized, compressed alfalfa pellets the bison really seem to fancy. “We shake the bucket whenever we approach, so they will associate the sound with the treat and we can get in and leave without too much disruption.”

There’s a definite herd mentality among the six bison, who have numbers instead of names: 29, 34, 39, 40, 91 and 103. The oldest and largest (about 1,200 pounds) is 103, nicknamed Big Mama by the park’s staff.

“She is the dominant one,” says Shaffer, adding that when another bison annoys Big Mama or gets too close, she “gives them a shove. . . . Ninety-one is almost as big and is kind of vying for leadership. They don’t fight, but she’s always there, around 103, who pushes her away and then 91 pushes the others away.”

Number 29 is Big Mama’s offspring, so she’s allowed to get closer than the others, while 40 and 34—who are smaller—“tend to stay together and away from the rest of the herd, but close and follow them everywhere,” Shaffer says. “They know their place.” As does 39, too.

Kevin Kasnyik, manager of Battelle Darby Creek, has enjoyed watching the bison during the four seasons. “In the winter, they have their thick winter coats and you can see them scratching around in the snow, finding their food,” he says. “They’re actually more active, their energy levels seem high and they like to go on runs, especially the younger ones.” In the spring, the bison begin to shed. “I didn’t realize they lost almost all of their hair, right down to the skin,” Kasnyik says.

The summer means lots of annoying insects and high heat. “They like to lay down in the tall grass to get away from the bugs,” he says. The bison carve out trails through the grass and also create bare spots in the mud so they can roll around and wallow to get a little relief from those incessant insects. When bison wallow, because of their hump, they can’t roll from one side to the other; instead, they stand and then go back down on the other side.

Each bison eats 11 to 13 pounds of grass and forbs a day, Shaffer says, and requires about two acres of prairie.

There are plans to introduce a bull into the herd. “We’re not sure when,” Taylor says, “but we know we won’t introduce two males because they would start fighting immediately.”

          

McDowell still wanders the prairies he created at Battelle Darby Creek, drawn to the royal catchfly, ashy sunflowers and, most of all, the bison. “Yes, I think so,” McDowell says when asked during a phone interview if this prairie and these bison are his legacy. “And it’s a nice legacy. . . . Right now, I’m sitting here, in my house, looking at a picture I have on the wall of a bison in the prairie. I love it.” 

Steve Wartenberg is a freelance writer.