Wranglers, researchers conduct annual Bison Range roundup

"Prairie music," Bill West said.

The bison snorted, grunted and groaned a few feet away, unnerved by the arrival of the wranglers.

By SHERRY DEVLIN of the Missoulian

Calves crowded close to their mothers. The biggest, oldest bulls turned to face the riders. The cowboys smiled.

"These are the best days of the year," said West, assistant manager of the National Bison Range and a cowboy for the range’s annual roundup.

By last light Wednesday, all 480 bison in the herd will have been chased, cajoled and otherwise persuaded to abandon their grazing and stampede into a series of corrals where they are weighed, checked for various diseases and branded if they are babies.

Eighty-nine of the shaggy-headed beasts have been sold, so will not return to the range. Most are destined for restaurants and grocery shelves.

The idea, West said Tuesday, is to keep the herd size in sync with the available habitat – one of the last Palouse prairie grasslands in the nation.

Nowhere will you find a healthier or better-managed herd of buffaloes, said Rick Coleman, chief of refuges for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Rocky Mountain-Prairie Region.

Most of these bison will die of old age, having lived their whole lives – which for the cows can be 20-plus years – grazing the foothills of the Mission Mountains.

The bulls die earlier, usually in their late teens, West said. The yearly competition for cows takes its toll, and the least able of the bulls go into the winter in rough shape.

Nearly all of the females produce a calf every year, West said. Nearly all of the calves survive; none are sold, as range managers want them to have the advantage of at least a full year learning how to be a buffalo from their mothers.

The early October roundup is the managers’ first chance to get a good look at – and accurate count of – the babies.

Chased into the corrals by the wranglers, the calves snort like pigs, bunching up in the holding pens and calling for their mothers.

Each is branded with a number that tells when they were born; this year, all got a "3" on their left hip. (Bison with a "3" on their right hip were born in 1993.)

Every bison also wears a microchip planted behind its ear and identifying it by number. Range managers "read" the chip by waving a handheld "wand" close to a bison’s head.

Researchers also do much of their work with the bison during the roundup. This year, all the 5-year-old females are being separated out and given physicals.

The same will happen next year, only to the 6-year-old females, so scientists can track an entire age group of cows.

The herd is also helping brucellosis researchers this week by feeding on vanilla- and molasses-flavored feed – to see if they would take the bait if it were laced with a similarly flavored brucellosis vaccine.

The Bison Range herd is brucellosis-free.

Of course, all of the research opportunities are lost on the bison, which tried their darndest Tuesday to resist the wranglers’ attempts to cut a dozen or so animals from the herd at a time.

"Your adrenaline gets going," West said after a dozen bison turned back on the cowboys in mid-stampede, intent on running back up the draw, not down into the chutes.

"You sure don’t want the other animals seeing that," West said later. "You don’t want them knowing there’s a way out."

Twenty-five Fish and Wildlife Service employees work the roundup, along with 25 volunteers from the Mission Valley and parts farther afield.

It’s fun, West said, but also dangerous.

Although they are herded from pasture to pasture over the course of the year, the bison remain wild and unpredictable.

Range managers do not interfere with the herd’s dynamics, he said. In fact, only once have outside animals been added to the herd – two bulls and eight cows a number of years ago, as an attempt to strengthen the herd’s genetics.

All the other bison are descended from 40 animals that were the range’s original herd nearly a century ago.

A dozen years ago, the range’s excess bison were in high demand, Ted Turner having created a buying frenzy with his herds in Montana and New Mexico.

Turner now owns 30,000 of North America’s 300,000 bison.

The buffaloes culled from the herd during roundup are fetching lower prices these days, but more bidders – 65 this year, of which 35 were successful.

But the roundup is as popular as ever. Hundreds of schoolchildren from throughout western Montana watched the roundup, weighing and branding Tuesday, oohing and aahing as the biggest bulls fought back.

"This is the high point of the year," West said. "There’s a lot of camaraderie. No one goes home at 4:30 because no one wants to leave."

Even the bison seem happy by day’s end, he said, having discovered the wealth of grasses in their new, post-roundup pastures.

"They’ll be grunting and snorting again in no time," West said, "singing their prairie music."

Reporter Sherry Devlin can be reached at 523-5268 or at [email protected]

http://missoulian.com/articles/2003/10/08/news/mtregional/news06.txt