Home (again) on the range: Purebred bison return to Larimer County

LARIMER COUNTY —The sun finally breaks through a line of spent morning rain clouds, sending steamy wisps rising off shaggy bison manes as Jennifer Barfield counts heads. “… six … seven … eight … nine … 10 — everybody’s here,” she pronounces, eyeing the nine female bison and lone bull calf, charter members of a small, genetically pure herd that traces its bloodline to Yellowstone National Park.

Barfield, a researcher at Colorado State University’s Animal Reproduction and Biotechnology Laboratory, has navigated the muddy road to this holding pen on the prairie 25 miles north of Fort Collins to ready the animals for a historic debut.

On expansive grassland that nestles up to the Rocky Mountains near the Wyoming border, a partnership of scientists, conservationists and local officials on Sunday afternoon will throw open the gates — literally — for the Laramie Foothills Bison Conservation Herd.

The iconic species will meander onto 1,000 fenced acres straddling both the Soapstone Prairie Natural Area and the Red Mountain Open Space, marking a return to plains habitat that their ancestors once roamed.

The reintroduction owes its success to science, broad collaboration and a raw fascination with the rugged beasts that inspired the nation’s early animal conservation efforts.

“In the first years we’ll be managing their reproduction,” says Barfield, the project’s scientific lead. “But our goal is to build the herd up to have a large enough number, but also the right amount of genetic diversity, where they can begin to take over that breeding on their own.”

From an estimated 60 million in the early 1800s, the American bison population fell victim to unregulated hunting until, by the early 1890s, it had shrunk to just a few hundred.

But preservation efforts championed by Teddy Roosevelt and others around the turn of the century triggered introduction of diverse genetics to the dwindling wild bison to rebuild the Yellowstone herd. Now, it fluctuates between 3,000-5,000. Smaller purebred herds exist in pockets around the country, but most bison herds now contain some trace of cattle genes.

“In the Yellowstone herd, almost miraculously, using the tools we have today they have not found that,” says Jack Rhyan, a wildlife pathologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and research partner in the project. “That makes them very desirable for people wanting to start a foundation herd and for Native American tribes that want pure bison.”

The Laramie Foothills conservation herd could grow to as many as 50 bison, as fundraising for an eventual second phase of the project opens another 1,000 acres of fenced grassland to the north of the current spread — the same area where endangered black-footed ferrets were released last year.

Subsequent breeding could allow the researchers to send some of the bison to tribal herds and other conservation projects.

Joining the herd

The project cost about $90,000 to install the bison on the grassland. Annual expenses will run at least $80,000 to maintain the herd, with the funding coming from grants, sponsorships and other fundraising efforts, Barfield says.

Limited spectator space for Sunday’s release — it also happens to be National Bison Day — already has been filled. But visitors to the area will have an opportunity to see the bison from Monday until the two areas close on Dec. 1.

The herd will roam fenced grassland adjacent to Soapstone’s Rawhide Flats Road, and — depending on how shy they are on any given day — could be viewed with binoculars.

The park reopens to the public in March. There is no fee for entry.

“We’ll have outreach and education around the bison, something people can go see and have that pride of participation and ownership,” says Daylan Figgs, program manager for land and water management with the city.

Fort Collins officials and county authorities have made a concerted effort to overlook borders and management boundaries when it came to reintroducing the conservation herd, says Meegan Flenniken, resource program manager for the Larimer County Department of Natural Resources .

“When I think about bison, or any wildlife, they don’t care who owns what,” she says. “To me, that’s a nice completing piece of this puzzle that we’ve had all along.”

The concept of returning bison to these grasslands has been percolating for several years. Figgs and Flenniken met intermittently with the USDA’s Rhyan about the possibility of developing a conservation herd, but circumstances never quite gelled.

When Barfield arrived at CSU eight years ago, she aimed to explore reproduction in domestic species, primarily cattle. But one day, while driving down Interstate 25 in Wyoming, she passed the sprawling Terry Bison Ranch and was struck by two questions: Could reproductive technology have meaningful applications in bison? Has anyone tried?

Her curiosity — and expertise — provided the catalyst for the conservation herd and the solution to a longstanding issue. Efforts to preserve and expand the Yellowstone genetics have been hampered by brucellosis, a bacterial disease that can cause abortion or premature calving.

The key lies in replicating the genetics while leaving the brucellosis behind.

Bison with the desired bloodlines lived right across the street from Barfield’s office on CSU’s Foothills Campus. In 1997, the USDA took in animals that migrated off the national park property and kept them for research in Idaho until 2004, when they were moved to Colorado.

“After meeting Jack and his team and realizing what a valuable resource we had, I realized that a lot of the technologies developed primarily for cattle were potentially a way to get around the disease aspect for the Yellowstone bison,” Barfield says.

She applied reproductive techniques like artificial insemination, in vitro embryo production and embryo transfer to the bison, with encouraging results.

In the first year of the project, Barfield collected embryos from female bison that were bred naturally and, using embryo transfer, generated a pregnancy. That pregnant female was donated to the Bronx Zoo, where she gave birth to a disease-free bull calf.

“That got us very excited,” Barfield says. “We wanted to see what other techniques we could use in bison to preserve the genetics.”

By washing the semen of bulls that had tested positive for brucellosis, or cleansing embryos by eroding an outer protective layer that may contain the bacteria, Barfield was able to generate three more healthy calves — two through artificial insemination and one via embryo transfer.

Those three are among the 10 in the Laramie Foothills herd.

The assisted reproductive techniques also have broader implications. Part of the bison project involves visiting Montana in the winter months, when some of the Yellowstone herd has migrated out of the park and been legally slaughtered for meat.

Barfield collects eggs from females during processing and ships them overnight back to Colorado. In the lab just down the hall from her office, those eggs are fertilized to create more embryos in a “warm room” where the temperature never dips below 80 degrees.

After seven days, they’re frozen until breeding season. A tank cooled by liquid nitrogen currently contains 130 embryos from slaughtered bison from the Yellowstone herd — genetic material that otherwise would have been lost forever.

“We’re not geneticists,” says Barfield, “but we’re using assisted reproduction to manage genetics.”

A bison’s place in culture

Perhaps inevitably, the science segued into something more personal. Not only did Barfield grow attached to the animals whose faces and personalities she came to recognize, but she also awakened to the animals’ broader cultural context — particularly among Native American tribes.

“It’s incredibly special when you’re interacting with the people who hold these animals in such a special place in their culture,” she says.

Historically, “buffalo culture” was an all-encompassing relationship, says Jim Stone of the InterTribal Buffalo Council, which represents 60 tribes in 19 states where more than 15,000 bison come under tribal management.

The animal’s influence was pervasive, from diet and housing and trade to incorporation into spiritual activities and tribal social structure.

“There are a lot of tribes’ creation stories that involve tribal people existing below the surface of the earth, and being led up to where we’re at now by the buffalo,” Stone explains. “With what I see as covenants between man and buffalo, the buffalo would provide everything.”

He sees the Colorado conservation herd as something that will trigger some tribal interest in accessing the genetic line of the Yellowstone herd — for both economic and cultural reasons.

“At the cultural level, you have an animal that existed on this continent for tens of thousands of years, that has learned and passed on that institutional historic knowledge to its offspring,” Stone says. “Tribes are getting more scientifically and technically advanced in wildlife management. Some things that may have seemed counter-culture in the past are seen as the pathway to the future.”

The bison project, which elicited unusually close cooperation among researchers and agencies, also has incorporated the Native American community into the rollout.

Members of the Crow Nation and Northern Cheyenne Tribe will participate in the official release of the animals Sunday afternoon. On Monday, CSU’s Native American Cultural Center has scheduled a presentation by Solomon Little Owl, a member of the Crow Nation, on the cultural impact of the bison’s return to the area.

The project also reached out to bison ranchers, who are sensitive to the perception that a so-called genetically pure herd might cast their product as inferior. Barfield notes that those animals simply have a different genetic lineage.

Coming full circle

Although some ranchers experimented with bison-cattle hybrids in the late 1800s, the practice was so beset by problems that it was discontinued, says Dave Carter, executive director of the Westminster-based National Bison Association.

Cattle genes now generally account for less than 2 percent of the ranch animal’s genetic makeup, he adds.

“Private ranchers and public herds and tribal producers all come at bison from a little bit different perspectives,” Carter says. “But there’s a lot of learning that can come out of the herd that CSU is doing. We want to collaborate as much as possible. We’re all in this together.”

At Soapstone, where the conservation herd awaits its public introduction, Barfield hauls six bales of hay into the holding pen, despite the fact that plenty of native grass covers the ground. These bison, raised in captivity, are used to being fed. The herd’s overseers will continue supplying them with food and water as they adapt to grazing.

“We’ll let them live out their lives as they were meant to — on the range,” she says.

Some of the cows already are pregnant after mating with a disease-free bull, and come spring, the herd should have some new additions as the project partners help it gain a foothold on some ancient stomping grounds.

“It’s neat to come full circle and say we preserved bison way back when,” says the USDA’s Rhyan, recalling century-old efforts to stem the species’ destruction. “And now we’re back to trying to get these genetics out on the landscape and sort of finish the story of bison conservation.”

Kevin Simpson: 303-954-1739, ksimpson@denverpost.com or @ksimpsondp