How do you round up bison? Candy, of course
Even a shaggy old 2,000-pound bison loves candy. He might even amble a mile or more over a hill and across gullies to line up for it.
If a big ol’ bull finds himself at the back of the line, he might even run. And if he decides he wants to butt his way to the front, he typically gets his way.
This week is the beginning of the annual roundup that has roughly 2,600 bison moved up to the corral area at the Joseph H. Williams Tallgrass Prairie Preserve north of Pawhuska. Each animal will be processed over the course of the next two weeks. They get shots for their health, have blood drawn and sampled, calves get their birth-year brands and ear tags, and a select number are cut out to be sent to market.
But before all that happens, all those bison have to be rounded up off the largest protected remnant of tallgrass prairie left on earth; that’s 2,600 massive animals on a vast 39,650 acres.
That effort began back on Oct. 10 and it wrapped up on Monday.
Two cowboys, two trucks, and about 7,000 or 8,000 pounds of hard cattle-feed pellets the size of a large man’s index finger completed a final stage early Sunday.
The grain-based pellets contain all the nutrients a growing bison needs, plus cane molasses and a little salt. It’s “candy” that the bison love.
“We’ve done this three days in a row here, so they should come in good today, hopefully,” Kevin Chouteau said from the seat of his Nature Conservancy flatbed with a 2,500-pound grain bin mounted on the back.
Candy is a good incentive, but it’s not foolproof.
“You just never know for sure, and you always have your stragglers,” he said. “There have been times we’ve been out here pretty late trying to get them to come in.”
Chouteau has worked the preserve for 26 years and was part of the early roundups that were attempted on fourwheelers.
“You’ve got a lot of tall grass out there and big rocks. It didn’t work out real well a lot of the time,” he said.
Turns out, it's easier to get a bison to come to you than to try to push it away, especially when it’s in a wide-open prairie with about 2,000 close friends.
At 7:30 a.m. Sunday, a peach glow hinted at a sunrise yet to come as Chouteau and Joe Bob Briggs, another veteran preserve cowboy of 20-plus years, parked their pickups side-byside on a hill looking into that sunrise. They broke the morning’s silence with a feed-siren serenade — which sounds an awful lot like a pair of police car sirens.
Soon after, small bumps appeared atop the crest of a hill almost a mile away, other darkbrown dots multiplied in a valley to the south.
More appeared, and more as the cowboys alternately blasted the sirens mounted on the front bumpers of the pickups.
With the sun above the horizon 45 minutes later, those first “bumps” materialized as a range of shaggy beasts — cows, this spring’s calves and giant bulls — that walked around and past the pickups. Long lines and groups of walking and running bison still drained off the prairie and funneled toward the trucks all the way back to that tall hill and that valley to the south.
“We wait until we’re not seeing many more coming in and then we drive side-by-side and put out the feed on this hillside here,” Chouteau said.
Over the course of a few days, the bison learn to follow the trucks to snag the pellets as they spill from the feed bin.
“That’s what we did the past few days out here,” Chouteau said. “Today, we’ll drive over to the trap and put out the food.”
The Sunday morning position was a hillside in the “Mary L.” pasture — named years ago for Mary Barnard Lawrence, a member of the family that owned the ranch sold to create the preserve.
The “pasture” is 1,312 acres surrounded by a tall fence. Since Oct. 10, Nature Conservancy workers had been luring the bison into smaller fenced-in areas until they reached this point.
The goal Sunday was to get as many out of the Mary L. and into the first “trap” pasture of about 80 acres. Through the week, as bison are processed, they will be moved into 50-acre and smaller traps.
“They go into smaller areas until they go through the corrals, then they’re turned back out here and they have the whole prairie to go out into again,” Chouteau said.
The bison showed they have good memories; many of the older bulls and cows walked into the trap well before the trucks were done waiting on the stragglers.
“Oh, don’t think for a minute they don’t know where those gates are,” Chouteau said. “They walk right to ’em.”
Once inside the trap, it’s a race. The trucks lay down the food in a long line, bison running alongside. When they’re out of food they turn and drive back to the gates before other bison decide to run back out.
Most seem to gather happily around the feed pellets, but not all. The pickups put on a second load of feed pellets Sunday to lure another 150 or 200 late arrivals into the trap.
“We’ll probably have to go around (Monday) and persuade the rest of ‘em, on four-wheelers or the side-by-side,” Briggs said. “You usually have a little handful left that doesn’t want to participate.”
Without a treat waiting for the stragglers, the trick is trying to harass the animals toward the pens.
“You try to make them think they’re getting away in the right direction,” Briggs said.