Plains song: bison and life on the "American serengeti"

Natural History, Oct, 2002 by Dale F. Lott

The Neighborhood

Ah, family! With all its idealized connotations of safety, nurturing, tenderness, altruism, loyalty, and love, the very word warms us and so warms our feelings toward the wolf. Wild dogs, especially the big wild dogs, are famously family oriented, and wolves are no exception. Hunting parties are made up of families collaborating in the hunt, sharing in the kill, and, if the pack has pups at home, carrying food to them in their stomachs. Family is valuable and so is valued. Among dogs, the family that preys together stays together. Still, wolf social life little resembles the American dream family. Idealized American family life is about happiness. Wolf family life is about survival and reproduction. In most circumstances, each family stakes out and defends dozens of square miles to hunt in. Trespassing wolves will be challenged, pursued, perhaps killed.

There are affectionate greetings and nudging and grooming among pack members; they even share food. But life within the pack is intensely, even relentlessly, structured, and all attempts to deviate from the established order are punished severely. Relationships are adjusted through physical, sometimes deadly, force. It puzzles me a bit that we nature-loving Americans, who for the most part treasure political equality, have such affection for an animal whose social organization is basically a cruel despotism. There's no equality among wolves. One member of each dyad will be the tyrant, and the other will be the tyrannized.

No human has ever seen a ferret at work in a burrow that a prairie dog dug. What we can see only in our imaginations must also take place in the prairie dog's nightmares. Is the dog awakened in its pitch-black burrow by a presence--sound? smell?--and if so, is it ready to resist or escape? Or is it taken in its sleep? In either case, the unseen presence finds the prairie dog's throat and opens it. The dog's body, denied breath and blood, quickly becomes a meal, to be eaten on the spot. Or perhaps it is dragged out under the prairie night sky to a nearby ferret burrow, where two or three young nightmares wait to be fed.

The Four Elements

On the Great Plains, they say, trees lean east and people lean west. Wind tilts every aspect of Great Plains weather. Spinning winds become tornadoes. Vertical winds pile up thunderheads. These negatively charged clouds may connect to earth via fire-starting lightning and may release either hail or refreshing rain. Winter winds blow snowflakes sideways for miles, making the world ten feet away invisible at high noon in a blizzard. Cattle, descended from wild stock native to warmer, calmer climes, turn their backs on this onslaught and drift until a fence or another barrier stops them. There they remain imprisoned until either they or the winds die.

An individual buffalo is affected little by these kinds of winds. Yet to bison as a species, winds made a big difference. Warm chinook winds from over the mountains to the west created the first open pastures as winter waned. But the most important wind for bison was one they never felt: the polar jet stream. This jet stream marks the northern limit to warm, moist air pushed north from the Gulf of Mexico by Bermuda highs, and it sometimes creates low-pressure, storm-inducing areas.