Trudging through the deep snow toward me, he looked like a prehistoric creature.  Fortunately, I was able to collect myself long enough to take this short video of my first incredible encounter with a bison in the wild.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It was the winter of 2005 and I was on a National Wildlife Federation Expedition to Yellowstone National Park. On this same trip, my group was fortunate enough to also witness a herd of beautiful pronghorn antelope, numerous elk and a lone wolf howling in the distance — so haunting! Throughout the trip, I was constantly surprised by the emotions I felt as I observed these animals up close. It’s an experience I will not soon forget.

Needless to say, my trip to Yellowstone deepened my appreciation for our nation’s wildlife.And, it gives me great pride that National Wildlife Federation has been actively protecting Yellowstone wildlife for many years, thanks to our loyal supporters.

When the first explorers came to the Great Plains, it is estimated that 20 million bison roamed the land. By 1900, a little over 1,000 bison could be found with only a handful of wild bison left in Yellowstone National Park.

I have been a strong supporter myself of NWF’s Adopt-a-Wildlife-Acre program that helps protect bison, wolves and other wildlife that wander outside Yellowstone’s protected borders. Under grazing agreements, federal agents are obligated to kill the wandering wildlife to protect livestock. Through our program, NWF pays ranchers for their grazing privileges on acreage where wildlife conflicts exist. Then, we work with the U.S. Forest Service to permanently close the acreage to grazing. Ranchers are compensated, livestock thrives and wildlife survives. It’s win-win-win!

Introducing: Choose Your Cause

Because of my personal encounter with Yellowstone wildlife, I know first-hand what a profound effect my donations to this program can have.  And, it’s why I choose to continue to support this program through our newly launched Choose Your Cause online portal.

I know that not everyone can visit Yellowstone National Park or Bristol Bay in Alaska, or the many other wild places NWF is helping to protect. So, through our new Choose Your Cause site, we are bringing these national gems to you. Just click on the cause you care about most and enjoy inspiring stories and photos from folks on-the-ground who are working tirelessly to protect the wildlife and wild places we all love.

"Just another Buffalo" attracting some attention in Yellowstone this summer.

“Oh, It’s just another Buffalo,” Anthony said when we finally discovered what was causing the excitement in the cars stopped up ahead.

Really?  It only took 36 hours for Yellowstone to ruin my 9-year-old kid?

I had to laugh, but it brought into focus one incredible wildlife success story, and how grateful I am to my colleagues at the National Wildlife Federation for playing such an important part in bringing this amazing species from the brink of extinction to a relatively common sight during our recent visit to Yellowstone.

Giving Bison Room to Roam

In the early 1800s, an estimated 65 million bison roamed throughout the continent of North America. However, hunting and poaching had a devastating effect on the bison population; and by 1890, fewer than 1,000 remained.

Due to federal protections, there were approximately 1,500 bison in Yellowstone National Park by 1954. By 1997, there were approximately 3,500 bison in Yellowstone National Park.

However conflicts with cattle grazing interests have been a long-standing threat to bison and access to their historic grazing lands.  Federal officials used slaughter and hazing to confine herds to park property and limit their natural migration for food, killing more than 3,800 bison to prevent conflicts with ranching and cattle interests.

Now, thanks to the work of groups like National Wildlife Federation and a new agreement between federal agencies, several American Indian tribes and five states, the bison of Yellowstone National Park will have more room to roam.

According to the recent agreement, bison will no longer be shot or hazed upon leaving Yellowstone Park. Instead they will be allowed to migrate into Gardiner Basin, a 75,000 acre area that lies immediately north of Yellowstone and encompasses the upper Yellowstone River valley.

“The establishment of the Gardiner Basin Bison Conservation Area ends an era where bison were killed or quarantined simply for walking across boundary in search of winter feed,” said NWF’s Tom France. “It is a huge step forward for wildlife conservation in the northern Rockies.”

Paying Ranchers to Turn Land Used for Grazing into Bison Habitat

National Wildlife Federation has successfully fought for decades to change bison management through our Adopt-a-Wildlife-Acre program, which compensates ranchers for retiring their grazing allotments and relocating their livestock.  NWF has successfully phased out livestock grazing in key areas around Yellowstone National Park and raised more than $1 million to provide additional habitat.

The work to create a safe haven for bison is not over. In addition for continued work in the Greater Yellowstone, National Wildlife Federation has created a campaign to restore a wild, free-ranging bison herd in and around the 1.1 million-acre Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge in north-central Montana.

It’s a lot of work and a difficult task – much like convincing a 9-year-old looking at a herd of hundreds of free-roaming bison that there was once a question of their very existence.  Yet sometimes it’s nice to take a moment to silently enjoy a hard-fought policy victory by realizing the power behind simply giving a kid the opportunity to say “just another Buffalo.”

Find out more about National Wildlife Federation’s work to restore bison to Montana’s Northern Great Plains >>

Adopt a Wildlife Acre – Help retire grazing allotments near Yellowstone National Park to provide room for bison to roam >>

Bulls establish rank in Yellowstone National Park, the home of the last wild U.S. bison.

The bison, or American buffalo, roamed the plains and woodlands of North America tens of thousands of years ago. It was a contemporary of saber-toothed cats, woolly mammoths and woolly rhinos but was a better survivor: the bison is the largest land animal in North America today, and once numbered in the millions (the exact figure is disputed, but likely approached 40 million animals on western grasslands).

Neither its size nor its numbers protected it.

Once guns arrived in North America, and a market opened for wild meat and hides, only decades elapsed before the bison all but vanished from its native range in the United States and Canada.

The woodland bison of eastern U.S. forests vanished by the early 19th century, and the plains bison was all but wiped out by 1884—in less than 20 years of intensive hunting.

Saving Bison

Some people, most notably hunters, wanted to save the bison. Outstanding among them was National Wildlife Federation Conservation Hall of Fame member Theodore Roosevelt, who as a young man joined with leading naturalist (and Conservation Hall of Fame inductee) George Bird Grinnell in an effort to save the last bison.

The year was 1887, and in the U.S. wild bison were restricted to fewer than 100 animals in Yellowstone National Park. Saving the iconic species was a huge challenge. No Endangered Species Act existed to protect the animals, and even the 1872 law that created the park failed to authorize protections for park resources. People still entered Yellowstone quasi-legally to cut firewood and to kill game for markets. Elk and bison were still being shot.

Under pressure from Roosevelt, Grinnell and their allies, Congress finally in 1894 enacted a law protecting the natural resources within Yellowstone National Park.

Protection alone did not suffice to recover the bison: decades passed before the herd began to recover. Nevertheless, today the Yellowstone animals remain perhaps the only genetically pure U.S. bison still alive, the last truly wild bison in the United States.

The years that went into making the park safe for wildlife has paid off for the American buffalo—its number there sometimes reaches as high as 4,000.

The Fight Goes On

National Wildlife Federation is involved in what might be called the next phase in restoring U.S. bison. The Federation is partnering with Indian tribes across the nation, with promising developments occurring right now for reintroduction of bison from Yellowstone in the Fort Belknap and Fort Peck reservations in Montana.

NWF  is also initiating a long-term plan to restore bison to the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge (CMR to aficionados) south of the reservations. The refuge may offer the last grassland large enough to allow the nomadic species to follow a normal pattern of life, moving in herds across a vast prairie.

The story of the bison reinforces at least three critical lessons in wildlife conservation:

1. Without legal protections, a rare or imperiled species is unlikely to survive
2. Despite tremendous efforts, recovering a depleted wildlife population may be the work of years and even decades—the destruction of a species moves with speed, but the biological pace of recovery in species that breed slowly cannot be hastened.
3. Suitable habitat is the key to species protection—without Yellowstone National Park the bison as a wild creature would almost certainly be extinct today.

Habitat at the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge and the two Indian reservations offers promise for the future of the American buffalo. Anyone who helps to restore this species is picking up the work that Theodore Roosevelt and his colleagues started more than 100 years ago and is marching in step with the generations of conservationists, hunters, wildlife enthusiasts and just plain bison fans who helped ensure that today we can see bison in native habit and not only in museums—an inheritance we too will want to leave to future generations.

Help bring bison back to their native prairie habitat. Give today and your donation will be matched dollar-for-dollar!

The photo associated with this blog was donated by a competitor in the annual National Wildlife Photo Contest. If you are a nature photographer, you may want to participate this year in the 41st annual National Wildlife Photo Contest. In addition to cash awards, winning photos will appear in National Wildlife magazine and on the NWF website.